CHRISTGAU CONSUMER GUIDE

CHRISTGAU CONSUMER GUIDE

Robert Christgau

TONI BASIL: "Word Of Mouth” (Chrysalis):: The only woman ever to offer to take it up the ass on top 40 radio (close your eyes and concentrate on the Words if you don’t believe me) tops that trick by making four words out of “Don’t want no body” and then playing the double negative both ways. If like me you think it’s kind of neat for a bizzer who’s pushing 40 (helped out on The TAMI Show in 1965) to come on as a dirty teen dream, you’ll enjoy the cunning of her modestly futuristic El Lay pop-rock. But if like me you’ve never fathomed the appeal of (David Essex’s) “Rock On” and treasure other versions of “Be Stiff’ and “Little Red Book,” you won’t mistake her for Blondie or Nick Lowe. B +

CHIC: "Tongue In Chic” (Atlantic):: Following their song album, their guitar album, their compilation album, and their made-it-all-possible album, this is their groove album. Maybe their throwaway album as well, yet I enjoy it fine, because I get from Chic what devotees of Memphis soul used to get from Booker T. & the M.G.’s. Which group you prefer is partly a matter of which rhythms feel like life to you, of course, so I’ll add that like New York these are pretty swift. I’ll also add that their in-concert theme song makes me wonder what the live album might be like.

A-

GEORGE CLINTON: “Computer Games” (Capitol):: Nothing on this mature work of art will tear the roof off any mothersucker—Dr. Funkenstein’s earthshaking jams are past. But that’s hardly to suggest that he’s lost his sense of rhythm or hermeneutics. In other words, if your ears say you’ve heard some of these grooves before, don’t tell your ass about it and your mind’ll never be the wiser. Clinton has deepened in the wake of his failure to turn the planet upside down, and this is his most flawless album, paced and orchestrated without a dead spot and thought through like a mothersucker. Even the earth-shaking jams of the past are accounted for, and in two or three different ways. Man’s best friend spelled backwards is? And why would anyone want to spell it backwards? A

WILLIAM “BOOTSY” COLLINS: "The One Giveth, The Count Taketh Away” (Warner Bros.):: Not the one to give, but who’s counting? In theory (i.e. in the count), me; ini fact (i.e. on the one), you. Get it? If you do, you’ll know what to do. B +

JOHN COUGAR: "American Fool” (Riva):: The breakthrough fluke of the year has it all over his predecessors in REO Speedwagon—Bob Seger, Cougar’s current role model, has been dreaming of riffs with this much melodic crunch ever since Night Moves, and when I don’t think about whys and wherefores they satisfy my mainstream cravings. But the guy is a phony on the face of it, and not in a fun way—anybody with the gall to tell teen America that once you pass 16 “the thrill of living is gone” has been slogging toward stardom for so long he never noticed what happened to Shaun Cassidy. B

CULTURE CLUB: "Kissing To Be Clever” (Epic/Virgin):: A lot of new English bands I Wish were even worse than they are—every time Haircut 100 or Depeche Mode finds a riff or a groove it means they may last longer than the 15 months allotted by the march of fashion. This new English band I wish*were better, because for all their fashionability I think their hearts cure in the right place—they look so weird because that’s the way they feel. They do come up with catchy tunes, too. But their bland Caribbean rhythms move no muscles, their confrontations with racial issues are rarely more than a phrase deep, and Boy George really doesn’t sound like Smokey Robinson—not the way Frankie Miller sounds like Otis Redding, not even the way John Cougar sounds like Bruce Springsteen. B

DEFUNKT: "Thermonuclear Sweat” (Hannibal):: At 27, Joseph Bowie comes on as spoiled and stunted as the most solipsistic hardcore teen, so it says worlds for the power of his rhythm section and the imagination of his guitarists that he can’t ruinnis own music. More Ornette than Contortions this time, he even shows off his good breeding by funkifying a Charlie Parker tune. On the other hand, his “For The Love Of Money” sounds like slumming, especially from a guy who couldn’t outsing Kenny Gamble in the shower. B THE DREAM SYNDICATE: "The Days Of Wine And Roses” (Ruby):: Punctuated as well as buoyed by drummer Dennis Duck, Karl Precoda shapes a guitar master’s trick bag of basic chords and ungodly electric accidents into drones that won’t quit, so abrasively tuneful I get off on this album strictly as a groove—the way I get off on perfectly mindless funk like, say, the Gap Band singles. But Lou Reed soundalike Steve Wynn’s take on the usual world-weary table topics is gratifying matter-of-fact and no more, and music like this—music where the fun is in the no-funfeels incomplete when it stops there. B + MERLE HAGGARD: "Going Where The Lonely Go” (Epic):: Country legend or no, Haggard has no more business doing an album about broken relationships than Public Image Ltd.—he’s never written good love songs himself, and the soft spots ih his voice always go soggy when it comes to romance. As a result, material that might be touching from a more austere singer is barely credible, and the three songs that open side two—one by Merle and Jimmy Dickens, one by Merle’s off-and-on wife Leona Williams, and one by the austere Willie Nelson—ooze with the kind of moist self-pity ordinarily encountered only in leaders of the men’s liberation movement. C +

MERLE HAGGARD AND GEORGE JONES: "A Taste Of Yesterday's Wine” (Epic):: What might have been a historic get-together overplays both the good-old-boy camaraderie and the cry-inyour-beer sentimentality of country’s malebonding does. Willie Nelson’s keynote tune becomes completely bathetic, and that the nostalgia and mutual self-congratulation it presages are even bearable is one more proof of Jones’s genius. BMICHAEL JACKSON: “Thriller” (Epic):: This is virtually a hits-plus-filler job, but at such a high level it’s almost classic anyway, with the three Michael-composed songs on top. “Beat It,” in which Eddie Van Halen wends his might in the service of antimacho, is the triumph and the thriller. But while I’m for anything that will get interracial love on the radio, playing buddies with Paul McCartney is Michael’s worst idea since “Ben,” and I expect to hear more of “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” and “Thriller” on the dancefloor than in my living room. A-

DAVID LASLEY: "Missin’ Twenty Grand” (EMI America):: Great falsettos like Smokey Robinson and Clyde McPhatter flow uphill, 'while lesser ones like Maurice Gibb and Russell Thompkins settle for the formal panache and expressive limitation of acknowledged artifice. Lasley certainly doesn’t flow, but he doesn’t settle, either—-his struggle toward full emotional range sounds forced at first, but' then willed, which is different. Playing head voice for homosexual angst rather than love-man tenderness or androgynous affect, he sets his colloquial confessions to pristine studio soul backup completely appropriate in a concept album about* a white guy in love with black music. But at times it does seem forced. B +

“LILIPUT” (Rough Trade import):: Although only the lead cuts pack the goofy punch of such singles as “Ain’t You,” “You,” “U,” and “Eisiger Wind,” formerly Kleenex has kept the faith. Where the Slits aspire to Mango and the Raincoats to ECM and the AuPairs to Grunt, these Swiss women clearly belong with the rest of Rouch Trade’s amateur anarchohumanists. In another context I might disapprove of the clumsy white funk toward which their instrumental atmosphere has evolved, or fret about just what their references to ichor, stilts, and kicking heels might signify. But this music combines the spirit of a kindergarten rhythm band with the sophistication of an art school* just like the real Cabaret Voltaire. B +

MEN AT WORK: "Business As Usual” (Columbia):: Video sure didn’t kill these radio stars, and I wish I could give them the air, but at some level they seem to try, they really so. Though the music is obviously auxiliary Police—more players, fewer dynamics—the words aspire to a compassion so bland and rootless I can only describe it as Australian. Sorry Olivia, sorry Rupert, sorry AC/DC, but one’s sense of distance does leave one feeling a little Out of it down there, now doesn’t it? And from the perspective of up here, one is. B*

MISSING PERSONS: "Spring Session M” (Capitol):: By combining mefirst ideology with kewpie-doll vocals, spokesperson Dale Bozzio makes it sound as if she caught on to the autonomy fad kind of late. By combining cold studio gloss-and-kick with surefire electronics hooks, musicmeister Terry Bozzio makes it sound as if he caught on to the new wave kind of late. Another perfect marriage. BPRINCE: “1999” (Warner Bros.):: Like every black pop auteur, Prince commands his own personal groove, and by stretching his flat funk forcebeat onto two discs worth of deeply useful dance tracks he makes his most convincing political statement to date—about race, the one subject where his instincts always serve him reliably. I mean, you don’t hang on his every word re sex or the end of the world, now do you?

A-

"LIONEL RICHIE” (Motown):: At least Jeffrey Osbourne wants to sing like Peabo Bryson or somebody; no sooner does Richie split off from his unnecessarily successful funk group and he starts making •like Andy Williams (or, I know, Kenny Rogers). Not that this comes as a surprise to those who kept one ear on the funk group. But there are better ways to integrate this great nation of ours, (see above). C

RICKY SKAGGS: "Highways And Heartaches” (Epic):: If Skaggs has come up with the best country album of the year, as he probably has, it’s because despite his abandonment of bluegrass purism he’s still a bluegrass purist at heart. Which means his commitment is more above all his success is proof positive of the pusillanimity of the competition. B +

ALFONIA TIMS AND THE FLYING TIGERS: “Future Funk/Uncut!” (ROIR cassette):: Tims’s guitar, uncommonly lyrical in a style where chop-andslash has become a convention, make his funk-here ska-there modality-somewhereelse excursions seem comfortable enough. But not only can’t he sing, he can barely chant, and the dull sound that plagues ROIR tapes deadens any compensatory bass-and-drums thrust. B-

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: "Blue Rider” (Olivia):: Proving that lesbians are normal folks with normal hopes, normal regrets, even normal string arrangements—just like you, me, and Nicolette Larson. Next question. * C 1#