A blog about Bloomsbury Academic's 33 1/3 series, our other books about music, and the world of sound in general.

Wednesday, August 03, 2011

Distilled Christgau

I once had a professor who tried to explain the frustration around translating Russian curses (or was it Hungarian? Or Czech?) into English, saying that for a native speaker on a real tear, each curse added to the string multiplies the previous curse exponentially and lays a foundation for the next, so in effect you have an insanely intricate and interconnected castle of curses being constructed around the speaker.

Courtesy of the WFMU blog, here is the music criticism equivalent to slavic cursing:
The Consumed Guide is a text composed from thousands of negative words and phrases assembled from 13, 090 reviews by Robert Christgau and turned into a single review.
Brilliant.

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