Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies/archive1

Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies

 * Nominator(s): Dan56 (talk) 13:43, 31 January 2019 (UTC)

This article is about a 1981 music reference book by pioneering rock critic Robert Christgau, collecting his capsule album reviews from his "Consumer Guide" column in The Village Voice during the 1970s. It was influential as a source for popular music studies at a time when academia largely ignored the field and as a guide among fellow critics, record dealers, and consumers during the rock-era. It is the first in a three-volume series of "Consumer Guide" collections by Christgau and has been appraised in retrospect as a top work in popular music literature. This article's good article assessment found it to be "virtually FA quality"; I have added some content offering insight into the book's creation and paraphrased some quotes in one section to improve it since then. Dan56 (talk) 13:43, 31 January 2019 (UTC)

Image review

 * File:Christgau's Record Guide (1981).jpg - agree that PD-Text is the most appropriate tag for it. I think maybe source should be cdrummbks on Flickr and author should be the artist if that exists, otherwise unknown. Do you agree?
 * File:Village Voice 36 Cooper Square.jpg - everything seems fine
 * File:Pop Conference 2010 - Music in the '00s panel 03.jpg - license etc is good

Let me know on the one point above. Thanks.  Kees08  (Talk)   06:03, 1 February 2019 (UTC)
 * Yes, agree. I have changed the description. Dan56 (talk) 06:15, 1 February 2019 (UTC)
 * Thanks, image review is complete and the article has passed it (I never know how to phrase this...).  Kees08  (Talk)   07:01, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

Support from BLZ

 * ... Support. This is an impressive, comprehensively researched, well-written article. It not only meets all the FA criteria but, from my perspective—following a lot of deep, hands-on reviewing and assessment of source material at both the GA level and here—I believe it is now presented in virtually the best form it could take. An article like this, covering a critically important book of music criticism, provides invaluable yet easily overlooked insight into popular music history and the development of modern music journalism, the latter of which is especially easy to overlook or take for granted. As such, Wikipedia's very lucky to have such a fine article on this topic. Kudos, Dan56. —BLZ · talk 22:01, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
 * Christgau's retrospective comparison of his guide to Rolling Stone's was added yesterday to the third paragraph of the legacy section. Thank you lots for the support! Dan56 (talk) 22:22, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
 * Ah, I somehow missed that when looking over your latest edits. Funny because I was actually going to recommend placement there, too—either place makes sense and you've integrated it well there. —BLZ · talk 22:26, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

Source review
I looked over the sources during the GA review and gave them a second look now. All sources and citations are up to code. The offline/print sources are almost all verifiable through Google Books Preview or Snippet View. All quoted material is present in the source material and attributed correctly. I have a Rock's Backpages subscription and can verify the accuracy of the citations that are linked behind its paywall. No reliability concerns for any of the sources. Formatting is consistent and error-free. I made a few alterations to the bibliography yesterday, mostly minor MOS adjustments.

One small detail that may need to be attended to: the link to Dylan Hicks's "A minus review from Robert Christgau" post has persistently appeared to be down for the past two days whenever I've tried to access it. His homepage at dylanhicks.com also seems down. Switching to a different browser doesn't help. Yet when I've checked downforeveryoneorjustme.com, it tells me "It's just you. www.dylanhicks.com is up." Dan56's citation already has an archive URL, so it's still possible to verify the information from that source. The only question is whether this is a real outage at his site, and whether it is a temporary outage or something more persistent, which I can't really determine. If others can access the site, it may genuinely just be my computer acting up for whatever reason. If not, at some point there may need to be a judgment call to say his post is down and set deadurl=yes.

In conclusion, ✅ the sourcing and source formatting looks FA-level to me. —BLZ · talk 23:50, 2 February 2019 (UTC)

Support by Kees08
I skimmed a bit of it, overall the article seems very complete and well-written. I will give it another read-through soon to see if I find anything.  Kees08  (Talk)   07:09, 3 February 2019 (UTC)
 * Would it be worthwhile to include background information on the author? Have they written these types of books in the past, have they written any books or just newspaper columns, etc.
 * His first book, an essay collection, is mentioned in the background section. Dan56 (talk) 11:09, 3 February 2019 (UTC)


 * Any update? Dan56 (talk) 16:00, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

I just have another section to go. Looks good so far.  Kees08  (Talk)   01:01, 22 February 2019 (UTC)
 * Would sabbatical be a better word? I don't have the source, so only change if it does not change the meaning of the sentence. he took a vacation from The Village Voice
 * page 333: "this working vacation"
 * Ah, well vacation and working vacation are pretty different! Might want to add that it was a working vacation somehow. I was wondering how he was able to leave to write a book.  Kees08  (Talk)  
 * The "working" part of the vacation was working on the book, which is made clear in the article by "to work on the book"; adding "working vacation" to the same sentence would be redundant. The "vacation" aspect was taking time off from the newspaper to use this free time as he pleased: Christgau and his wife also went to the movies, as described further in the pdf. Dan56 (talk) 22:46, 23 February 2019 (UTC)
 * Hyphen in mid-September? finished the guide in mid September
 * Yes. Done.
 * Consider using submitting the manuscript in place of submitting its manuscript
 * Done.
 * Are there any reviews of the reprint that estimate how much has changed? Wondering if it was an edit for copyright purposes, where just enough is revised to get another copyright date, or if it was pretty expansive. If sources do not exist to say, then no worries. In the reprint's introduction, Christgau said he had revised some of the content.
 * Sources do not exist, to my knowledge. The Smith source verifies there were only "some revisions".
 * I searched through the Westlaw news database, which has access to numerous offline print newspaper articles not available elsewhere online, and didn't find any reviews of the revised edition. It's not uncommon for a second edition of a book to get few or no new reviews. —BLZ · talk 04:55, 22 February 2019 (UTC)
 * I figured as much; thanks for checking.
 * Would be interesting to know if it was free or not The contents of all three "Consumer Guide" collections were made available on Christgau's website when it went online in 2001.
 * I thought the "free" availability was suggested in the sentence, but I will make it more explicit: "...were made freely available..." Dan56 (talk) 04:43, 22 February 2019 (UTC)
 * Thanks. Since it did not say freely, I interpreted it to mean he digitized it and it cost money to access. I think it is fine that in the introduction it does not say freely available, and later on it says freely available, for the record.  Kees08  (Talk)  


 * Every paragraph in Legacy and influence begins with Christgau; is there any way to mix that up? Just something that stuck out to me, not a big deal.
 * I've replaced the book title with "the guide" in the second paragraph. Dan56 (talk) 22:32, 23 February 2019 (UTC)

I know it does not really count as another review, but my girlfriend read through the article and said it was well-written and only had the last comment that I wrote above.  Kees08  (Talk)   19:40, 23 February 2019 (UTC)
 * Cheers Dan56 (talk) 22:32, 23 February 2019 (UTC)
 * If this is the conclusion to your review, can it be considered a support, ? Dan56 (talk) 06:35, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
 * Of course, I missed your last response until just now. Support.  Kees08  (Talk)   07:04, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

One last comment (does not affect my vote): should the title be Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the 70s? I just realized our 80s and 90s article titles are stylized that way, and that the title of the book uses 70s and not Seventies.  Kees08  (Talk)   17:28, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
 * The copyright page of the book credits it as "Seventies", as does Christgau's website, worldcat, googlebooks... I imagine the spine does as well and that this is the official title. Dan56 (talk) 00:56, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Is File:Christgau's Record Guide (1981).jpg the cover the only thing that says 70s then?  Kees08  (Talk)   02:43, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
 * I don't have a copy of the first edition, so I don't know. But safe to say the official title is "Seventies", and I assume the cover only has the numeric rendering to fit or look nicer with the other text. According to Goodreads' entry on the reprint, the original title (of the first edition) is "Seventies" (click "more details"). Same for the site's entry for the first edition. Most other online book catalogues and sellers of the original edition appear to also use "Seventies". If you Google-search "Rock Albums of the 70s" instead, you get more hits for the reprint; search for "Rock Albums of the Seventies," however, and you get more hits for the original. Dan56 (talk) 04:54, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Sounds good, just wanted to bring it up and document it. Thanks for the explanation!  Kees08  (Talk)   06:17, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Review by Jayron32
Full disclosure: Dan56 asked me to look it over and give my opinions. Overall, I can't find anything to hang up over. I give this my full Support for FA. -- Jayron 32 13:14, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
 * Writing quality: Spelling and grammar is fine, writing is compelling, flows well, and is well organized. Paragraphs have a logical organization.
 * Comprehensiveness: Writing is very comprehensive. Background details on the process of writing and compiling the book, and of the strain it placed on his personal life, are great for the reader and provide historical and personal context that I think makes the article quite compelling.  The "Past present and future" are all covered well.
 * Sourcing: References seem highly reliable and from a broad spectrum of sources, which is nice.

Other comments
I was told to review this article and I'm kind of stumped. Robert Christgau himself never had a featured article, but this one book of his is nominated? I suppose I can support it anyway, but I'd sooner be in favorite of nomination of his own article rather than his book's. Mrmoustache14 (talk) 18:11, 23 February 2019 (UTC)
 * Since editors are volunteers, we are kinda bound by what interests them rather than what others might consider to be more 'important'. As long as an article meets notability criteria, it can in theory be brought to FA standard. Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 07:47, 9 March 2019 (UTC)

Ian Rose (talk) 07:48, 9 March 2019 (UTC)