Christgau's Consumer Guide: Albums of the '90s

Christgau's Consumer Guide: Albums of the '90s is a music reference book by American music journalist and essayist Robert Christgau. It was published in October 2000 by St. Martin's Press's Griffin imprint and collects approximately 3,800 capsule album reviews, originally written by Christgau during the 1990s for his "Consumer Guide" column in The Village Voice. Text from his other writings for the Voice, Rolling Stone, Spin, and Playboy from this period is also featured. The book is the third in a series of influential "Consumer Guide" collections, following Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies (1981) and Christgau's Record Guide: The '80s (1990).

Covering a variety of genres within and beyond the conventional pop/rock axis of most music press, the reviews are composed in a concentrated, fragmented prose style characterized by layered clauses, caustic wit, one-liner jokes, political digressions, and allusions ranging from common knowledge to the esoteric. Adhering to Christgau's mainstream tastes and some personal eccentricities, the guide favors music on standards of catchiness, rhythmic vitality, and practical significance, while generally penalizing qualities like sexist content and hour-plus album lengths. It also introduces a new grading system Christgau developed in response to the proliferation in music production over the 1990s, an event he cites as a reason why this project was the most difficult of the three "Consumer Guide" collections.

Critical response to the guide was divided, with praise given to the quality of writing and breadth of coverage but disapproval of the novel rating schema and aspects of Christgau's judgements. The collection has since been referenced by both academic and journalistic works, with commentary noting its anticipation of increased fragmentation in popular music. Along with Christgau's other writings, its contents are freely available on his website – robertchristgau.com – created with fellow critic and web designer Tom Hull, who also adopted the book's grading system for his own review website.

Christgau's Consumer Guide: Albums of the 90s is the third in a series of works collecting and editing Robert Christgau's album reviews, most of which were written for and published in his monthly "Consumer Guide" column in The Village Voice. The first two books in the series, Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies (1981) and Christgau's Record Guide: The '80s (1990), had influenced young music critics after their publication. He has said that the 1990s guide, collecting reviews written between 1990 and 2000, was "in many ways" the hardest to develop because of the decade's proliferation in music production and the growth of the record industry's market – he estimated approximately 35,000 albums were released each year worldwide.

As the music industry and record production expanded through the end of the 1980s, Christgau found himself overwhelmed by records to listen to and review for his "Consumer Guide" column. In September 1990, he abandoned his original letter-grading scheme on a scale of A-plus to E-minus, as B-plus records had become the most commonly reviewed works while albums rarely received grades lower than C-minus in the column. Instead, he decided to focus on writing reviews for albums he deemed worthy of A-minus to A-plus grades, with A-minus becoming the most common due in part to his sense of grade inflation, while works that would have ranged from B-minus to C-plus were largely ignored. This change was made because, as Christgau later said, "most of my readers – not critics and bizzers, but real-life consumers – used my primary critical outlet for its putative purpose. They wanted to know what to buy."

In this new format, records that Christgau deemed B-pluses were only reviewed occasionally and most were filed under an "Honorable Mention" section, featuring one short phrasal statement for each album alongside its recommended tracks. Records he considered poor were relegated to a list of ungraded "Duds" or featured in a special Thanksgiving Day column dedicated to negative reviews (titled "Turkey Shoot"), with the highest possible grade a B-minus. Under the new format, Christgau was also able to dedicate longer prose to graded reviews in the "Consumer Guide".

Christgau refined his new format further as the 1990s progressed, anticipating the decade's rapid increase in music recording and the diversification of the CD into archival releases and longer album lengths – from the traditional 40-minute average to upwards of 60 minutes. In 1992, he started a "Neither" (or "neither here nor there") category denoting albums unworthy of an "honorable mention" but better than "duds". The following year, an argument with fellow critic Eric Weisbard persuaded Christgau to review in each column a "Dud of the Month", which, in comparison to "Turkey Shoot", highlighted "a fair number of dull, disappointing, or overhyped B's".

Christgau's Consumer Guide: Albums of the '90s collects approximately 3,800 album reviews. In preparing the original reviews for publication in book form, Christgau revisited many albums and made some grade changes, later citing the tendency of cultural items to "fade". For certain album entries, he also incorporated text from his other 1990s writings for the Voice, Rolling Stone, Spin, and Playboy.