A.Over the years, some readers have complained that the density of Christgau’s “Guide” entries has left them feeling dense. It follows a collection that Christgau published last year, ““Even among rock critics, who ought to know better, fun doesn’t have much of a rep,” Christgau wrote, back in 1972, in a Christgau didn’t set out to become a rock critic for the simple reason that, when he began his career, a rock critic was not something one could become. If you have any questions, please review our privacy policy or email us at Copyright © 2020 HarperCollins Publishers All rights reserved. Feb 20, 2019 - Everything with the topic 'Expert Witness With Robert Christgau' on Noisey. Im just gonna say how much I respect Rob. Robert Christgau has covered popular music for Esquire, Newsday, Creem, Playboy, Rolling Stone, Blender, MSN Music, and The Village Voice, where he was a senior editor and chief music critic for thirty-two years.He is currently a columnist for Noisey.com, a contributing critic at NPR’s All Things Considered, and a Visiting Arts Professor at New York University. You might well call this impulse democratic, particularly given the eclecticism that Christgau has never let abate: even in the omnivorous era of pop-culture criticism that he helped bring into being, Christgau has conspicuously big ears.
: Fifty Years of Rock Criticism, 1967–2017, also published by Duke University Press, and Going into the City: Portrait of a Critic as a Young Man. One Of Our Great Essayists And Journalists--the Dean Of American Rock Critics, Robert Christgau--takes Us On A Heady Tour Through His Life And Times In This Vividly Atmospheric And Visceral Memoir That Is Both A Love Letter To A New York Long Past And A Tribute To The Transformative Power Of Art.
The interest in ranking and rating is also evident in a critics poll that he founded, and for many years ran, at the A less widely known but still key Christgau contribution is all the work he’s done that didn’t come with his byline. Robert Christgau has covered popular music for Sign up now for Robert Christgau alerts, including news and special offers.
Since there’s so damn much of it, and a lot of that is terrible, it rewards connoisseurship. By Christgau, Robert (author.) And, taken as a body of work, his essays come as near as he ever has to developing that philosophy—or, rather, the “theory of pop,” which Christgau has insisted, in his memoir and elsewhere, that he wanted to write but, thanks to the time demands of his “Consumer Guide” project, never managed to.A key text for that theory is “Pops as Pop,” a bravura bit of writing, from 2010, in which Christgau positions Louis Armstrong not only as one of American pop’s foundational figures but as a masterly singer whose best recordings include late-career vocal work that is often dismissed as corny by snobs who maintain stark divisions between art and entertainment, high culture and low. The prevalence, in our critical culture, of capsule reviews that are geared toward an in-crowd and trade in letter grades or star ratings, accompanied on occasion by snark and condescension, can at least partly be traced to misapprehensions about what Christgau has been up to.
Yielding a message complex enough to offer hope that the lyrics—more bemused than enraged, more depressive than despairing—will catch up. Freed from the constraints of writing a hundred words plus a punchline, Christgau’s long-form pieces are genuinely capacious—both big-hearted and precise, rather than only evocative—and they seem written not only for veteran music nerds but for pop newcomers who appreciate some context and history (maybe even the occasional explanation or two) with their judgments, thank you very much.
Robert Christgau wrote for and edited at The Village Voice from 1969 to 2006 and currently contributes a weekly record column at Noisey. One thinks of the seventeen thousand or so “Consumer Guide” reviews and Christgau’s insistence on keeping them coming. One thing about Christgau (and actually a credible criticism at least), is that he can come down really quite hard on what he sees as depressing or negative lyrical content.