Toilet Reading for Record Nerds: Lou Waxman on Christgau’s Record Guide

May 21, 2026

Lou has been thinking of Norman Mailer recently and Lou has been thinking that Mailer is a macho Truman Capote. Both are complete buffoons. Neither was a great novelist. For Capote this should be obvious, maybe less so for Mailer. There is The Naked and the Dead, which is dreadful. Deer Park is an embarrassment. An American Dream is only of interest to Mailer’s psychiatrist and his parole officer. If Lou had to pick one Mailer novel, he would select Why Are We in Vietnam? This novel is less about Vietnam in anyway, unlike The Naked and The Dead was about WWII, than Mailer wrestling with The Bear. William Faulkner’s novella The Bear that is. Ever since The Naked and the Dead, Mailer was championed as the one true hope for writing The Great American Novel. He never came close. Faulkner did. If you want to be at the top of the heap in American Literature, you must deal with Faulkner. Faulkner’s run from 1929 to 1936 is probably the finest heat check in American Literature. The Sound and the Fury. As I Lay Dying. Sanctuary. Light in August. Absalom, Absalom! Hemingway and Fitzgerald? Forget about it. Nobody comes close. To Lou’s mind, Faulkner in that stretch was on the level of Shakespeare from 1598 to 1606. Much Ado About Nothing. As You Like It. Hamlet. Othello. Measure for Measure. All’s Well That Ends Well. King Lear. Macbeth. Plus more. Insane. Call Lou crazy. In Why Are We In Vietnam?, Mailer takes on Faulkner and falls short.

Not surprising really, as Mailer, like Capote, was at his best as a non-fiction writer. The Armies of the Night took the literary world by storm in 1968, like Capote’s In Cold Blood did in 1966. Mailer was a master of the essay. “The White Negro”was one of the defining essays of the 1950s and “Superman Comes to the Supermarket” defined the 1960s before they even happened. What really gets Lou jazzed about Mailer’s non-fiction is how it was published. In many cases, Mailer published in mainstream magazines like Esquire and Harper’s and totally pushed the limits of those venues. His essay on the March on the Pentagon (“The Steps of the Pentagon”), that became The Armies of the Night, ran in its entirety in Harper’s. All 90,000+ words of it. The essay took up the entire issue of Harper’s, and the font size had to be shrunk to fit it in. At the time it was the longest essay to appear in a mainstream magazine. More than the writing itself, what really interests Lou about Mailer is thenature of his bibliography. The same could be said of William Burroughs.

So, Mailer was on Lou’s mind and so he went to the library and got a copy of Mailer and Buckley: The Difficult Friendship That Shaped the Sixties. It was a fascinating read. They would seem to be polar opposites as they come from opposing ends of the political spectrum, but they admired each other and enjoyed each other’s company. In the book, both men come across as completely horrible people, particularly Buckley, who is quite simply an elitist asshole. The book makes the argument that Buckley was the driving force in the creation of the conservative movement that rules the roost in the present day. Buckley’s heyday, like Mailer’s, was the 1960s, but Buckley remained a celebrity if not a vital figure until the day he died. When Lou was headed to college at a liberal hotspot, one of his neighbors sent Lou a subscription to Buckley’s National Review his freshman year to prevent communist infection. No wonder Lou was so unpopular in college.

Like Buckley, Mailer was a founder of a major publication: The Village Voice. The Voice stood for everything the National Review opposed. After reading the Buckley/Mailer book, Lou got a copy of the oral history of The Village Voice: The Freaks Come Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, The Radical Paper that Changed American Culture. Lou has mixed feelings about oral histories. He feels they are lazy and a copout and shortcut to actually synthesizing and distilling your interviews and research into a fleshed-out narrative. That said there have been some great oral histories. Edie, Please Kill Me, The Other Hollywood. There are a few on hair metal. There is one on MTV. In short, there are a ton of them. Lou would much prefer a proper history, and he feels such a history is almost always more informative and perceptive than a collection of quotes, but it seems that oral histories are becoming increasinglyprevalent. Websites like ESPN and The Ringer go the oral history route quite often. It seems that nobody really wants to do the work anymore.

This is all a long build up to the subject of this blog: Christgau’s Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies. Robert Christgau is prominently featured in the Village Voice book as he was an editor and rock critic there for decades. His consumer guide was one of the most influential reviews forums in the world of music. In the introduction to this guide, Christgau calls the book toilet reading. Like Lou’s blogs. Lou eats up books like this with a spoon. The Record Guide took Lou back to his youth when he voraciously read books of facts, like The Book of Listsor The People’s Almanac. Lou could not get enough dates and proper nouns. As a result, Lou early got quite a head for trivia. Once as a youngster, he was allowed to play in a grown-up game of Trivial Pursuit, and he proceeded to run the board. Lou’s aunt stepped away and pulled his stepmother aside, “That fucker has memorized the questions.” Indeed, Lou did. Lou would sit on the toilet and read Trivial Pursuit cards for hours. He read encyclopedias. The Baseball Abstract. Any book of trivia. In college, as a freshman, Lou participated in a college-wide trivia contest with his suite mates. The contest was sponsor by the Greek system as some type of proof that frat dudes and sorority girls were serious students. Lou’s team made it to the finals against a team from one of the frats. Lou was on fire. At one point, there was a question, “In 1935 in Oklahoma City . . . . And Lou buzzed in with “Parking Meters.” The correct answer. The entire room was shocked. Then the fix was in. There were all types of shenanigans with the time clock and the buzzers and all types of bullshit. We lost. It was Revenge of the Nerds type shit.

Christgau’s Record Guides are in the Book of Lists category. Christgau is often compared with Pauline Kael in terms of power over a medium. In Kael’s case, film. Interestingly, the battle between Kael and Andrew Sarris got a chapter in the Voice book. Lou has read everything Pauline Kael has written, Lou knows Pauline Kael, and Christgau is no Pauline Kael. Lou has also read Christgau’s collection of essays published by Duke University: Is It Still Good to Ya? Fifty Year of Rock Criticism 1967-2017. Kael is one of the great non-fiction writers of the 20th Century. She is a true stylist. Christgau is merely diligent. He just pissed all over everything that came out. Day in day out, Christgau listened to just about all the musical product and his put his mark on it. Christgau was a grinder. No more no less. Sure, Christgau has taste and that taste comes through in his writing, but his writing is not tasty like Kael’s. Lou was prepared to shit all over the Record Guide, but you never outgrow who you were as a boy. It was right up Lou’s alley and a great read. For Lou that is. As Christgau makes clear in his introduction, he does not expect people to actually read the Guide from cover to cover. It is to be dipped into and consulted for an artist or an album. Lou disagrees. It is only by reading the book from front to back that you get to know Christgau intimately. It is like hanging in a bar with him and talking about music for hours. Kael published a book just like this: 5001 Nights at the Movies. Lou would much rather drink with Kael than Christgau. Just saying.