An hour with Robert Christgau, “the dean of American rock critics”
For the last 50 years he’s been writing non-stop, having reviewed around 15000 albums. And as he says “it’s too late to stop now”.
He proclaims himself with no shyness “the dean of american rock critics”. And though it sounds arrogant, he rightfully deserves the title. Robert Christgau along with Lester Bangs and Greil Marcus, starting in the 60s, and they are considered to be “the holy trinity” of rock ctitics ever since. If Lester Bangs achieved that through gonzo temperament and Greil Marcus with an exemplary analytical and detailed writing, Robert Christgau distinguished himself from the rest for his critic libels, his flash album reviews (usually between 20–150 words) that became his trademark. Using a language that combines academic with slang, loads of humor and without going easy with anyone, he also created his own rating system: a scale from A-E with +/-, honorable mentions with stars (*, **, ***) but also…duds, which mean his wish for a blow-up (and extermination) for the specific album that gets it.
This review “brand” as he calls it, was named Consumer Guide and blossomed from 1969 to 2006 in Village Voice (where he was also an editor). He continued his review “shots” in MSN Music and you now can find him in Noisey and his Expert Witness column, and he has also appeared through the years in magazines like Esquire, Playboy, Rolling Stone and Creem.
Robert Christgau has written for about 15000 albums in 50 years, with a writing that has preexisted profitable to day, in a time when statuses and tweets “rule the world” –one of his most notorious reviews counts one word: “Melodic.” (for Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water). But he can also be impressive in longform. In his new book, Is It Still Good To Ya? Fifty Years of Rock Criticism, 1967–2017 (Duke University Press –some more review collections and his memoir Going Into The City have been published before), that gathers many of his longer essays, with an interesting introduction and prologue.
This new publication was the motive for an hour long “video encounter” between Athens and New York, during which Robert Christgau in a good mood and almost adolescent impetus, talked about his writing process, music journalism in the digital era, declaring that he’ll go on undismayed, as long as the most important thing of his life is by his side: his wife…
On the introduction of your book you say that you love collections.
Yes, I do. I’m actually doing a second one that’s gonna be pieces I wrote about books and it’s gonna come out in six months. I’m not advertising because I’m afraid people are waiting to review it. But I read collections almost every year. Like by great baseball writer, Roger Angell and people older than me.
Do you think that collections work with today’s perception of information?
Precisely. Collections are a way to put information in order and a physical form that is organized and says “You may think you have to work on your fingertips but one fuck up can blow it all out”. People who believe that this thing is gonna go on and on and is never gonna be some sort of a major attack and glitch on it, are crazy. It’s going to be killed some day. Not necessarily killed, but damaged, seriously damaged. And some information is going to disappear, it’s gonna be gone. If it’s on paper, it will still be doing.
So, how do you wish Is It Still Good To Ya? to work for the readers?
The idea with a collection is sort of to begin with a kind of bang. In this case there’s both an introduction and a prologue that has to do with when my father died. There’s a lot of mortality in this book. On the end there are old pieces I wrote on Prince, David Bowie and Leonard Cohen. In the case of Prince and David Bowie their deaths were very surprising. And Leonard Cohen’s was also actually unexpected. I have a t-shirt that says “Trump killed Leonard Cohen”. In any case, I do believe that Trump killed Leonard Cohen. I do believe that Leonard Cohen looked at Trump and said “It’s not worthy any more”. In Cohen’s case, this was a man of pessimistic temperament and my guess is not an all together healthy psychochemistry and couldn’t deal with that dark future.
You also say that collections need all the status they can get. I flip the scheme: do collections give to the content a status they need and can get?
Oh, yes. You know, I got this very good organized website. I don’t believe that website is destined to live on perpetuity. I believe that there’ll still be libraries though, well, paper is not the world’s most prominent mean.
You are a very idiosyncratic writer. Did you find yourself, at any point of your career, to get into the hesitation of style over content?
I always thought that the two things were joined. What I did with my students was that I would tell them to read non fiction writing every week. And I would write in the board in big letters “What are you going to write about?”. Subject is very important. If you’re going to write non-fiction the style means nothing or very little. The content justifies the effort you need to put into the writing itself. Of course there are exceptions to this but I was gonna show these kids technical stuff about writing. But I wanted to show was “Students, this is big deal”. If you wanna write non-fiction you have to be interested in the world. Which they didn’t. Nevertheless and moreover, I would also say that a writer’s style is going to serve the content with a certain flavor to accent certain things about it.
Which gives the writer’s point of view…
Exactly. For example, my version of Bob Dylan is very different from most people’s version of Bob Dylan, even though, we talk about the same great artist. But I’m skeptical about him and not an impassionate fan. Most people write about Dylan, for instance, my friend Greil Marcus, my acquaintance Jonathan Lethem, these are people who hang on his every word. My writing is built into a kind of hitting around, joking, snorky irony that sometimes inflect my choices of language. So, my Dylan is not anybody else’s Dylan. And with an artist as complicated as Dylan that’s not weird. This is not a man who sets himself out to be known, he sets himself out to be unknown. And then millions of his followers try to get him anyway. They simply don’t respect what it is that he does.
About the digital era of journalism, nowadays everything tends to be quicker, the texts are smaller and music comes easily in any platform you can listen to it. Except for the initiate readers that will read music journalism anyway, what do you think is really the position and functionality of music criticism today?
I think it’s sadly and tragically dismissed. And that’s partly a function of the technology itself. There’s a lot of studies that indicate that people retain staff they read on paper better than what they read on the screen. There’s a word I made up for what happens with digital journalism, “externality”. I believe that writing on music is experienced inside your head, is not a physically present in the world, it has a different kind of authority and prominence and you absorb it differently. The second thing is the economic. Nobody is getting paid. The internet has greatly reduced the cash that is valued on both recorded music and the written word. One of the thing this means is that the typical music journalist has to produce two or three snippets of info a day. To write them, maybe read it once and publish them.
How you work your texts nowadays?
To this day, I seldom publish anything the same day I write it. In my Expert Witness column at Noisey there’s a thing I stick in there, maybe do other things, and then I will look at it three or four times at least. And I make changes in the language every time. Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. And then when I actually have it ready to publish it, one is, I show it to my wife. Then I print it out and I look at it myself. And when I print it out I almost always change something. Not much, but something. Then my wife, who is a great editor –and my only editor, I’m not edited by my boss in Noisey but by Carola Dibell- she sees things that I miss. And I will change it again. Then the third thing is that, when I look at the writing in the knowledge that is seen by my editor and then whatever my readership is at Noisey, it gives it the “externality” I told about earlier. I understand it differently whan I imagine other people reading it. All that stuff happens in a way it hasn’t happen before. I imagine the readers and I relatively am urgent. All of a sudden my view of what I’ve written changes. I know my editor in Noisey doesn’t have the time to really edit and I’m very critical of, these generalizations at Pitchfork. There is a market, there’s always rush of people waiting to take your place and definitely music writing takes a lot of experience.
And what would be your advice on a young rock and pop critic that starts now?
Resist all this bullshit. That’s my advice. If you have any opportunity to let someone else, someone who you respect, and is good with language –a good editor, not just a good writer- let them look at it, give yourself time, don’t just write and post. Try to look at it when you are in a different state of mind. You are a different person when you wake up in the morning and when you go to bed at night. But I don’t think this is a practical advice because of the economical and practical domain of the way on line journalism is conceived. Another accessible piece of advice is: read. And read me, read older people. Critics who write about things that interest you. If you wanna be a critic, read criticism. Because, inevitably, you’ll learn something, it’s automatic. But you got to take the time to do it. And read books.
As someone can see in Is It Still Good To Ya? you can write very impressively in longform. But you are popular for your brief album reviews.
That’s the reason my Consumer Guide is my brand. It’s a specific process. I don’t write in paragraph form unless I’ve heard a record at least five times. Moreover, the kind of writing I did in the Consumer Guide, was necessarily more compressed. I was writing for a fan base of contemporaries who shared a lot of cultural knowledge with me. At Noisey I can’t make those assumptions. When for example I want to acclaim Amy Rigby –probably the best songwriter in America for ten years — I know that my readers are going to say “what?” “Amy who? What the fuck are you talking about?”. I figured at some point that I had to explain to them who she is and what her story is. When I write of african music I have to explain, where is Botswuana anyway? I can’t assume people know that.
Is there a different way that you work on longform pieces compared to the brief album reviews?
In general, a draft of a consumer guide review, whether it is 75 words or 200 words it’s done in what I call one sitting. But I never expect to do that on an essay. Writing an essay is going to take at least two or three days and because you have more space there is the question that journalist like to call “the lead” and it has two important job to do: first to attract the reader and second, to both state your case and introduce some information. Moreover, a lead really has to grab someone, because you ask someone to spent 50 minutes of their life with you. I generally know where I’m going with an essay, even if it’s really long. For example, the Woodstock ’94 piece –which I think is one of the best thing in this book- took me 5–6 days. But for a long piece of criticism, for example the Eminem piece in this book , it almost took me a month. I was getting well paid for it, the guy was offering me stupid money for an Eminem essay. When I’m paid well for something, I work a little hard. And then, there are times when you get stuck. In the Louis Armstrong piece, there is a paragraph in there in which I talk about popular culture theory, the difference between popular culture and high culture and it took me a day. And it’s about 150 words. You have to find the language, the tone. I’m very happy with this paragraph.
You also mention that Lil’ Wayne’s The Carter II was the hardest critic task you had.
Yeah, that was really hard, that piece. It runs like butter but it was a struggle to write and it looks like it just purred out of me. And that’s the reason it’s a great piece. I said all these emotional things about my father’s death. I knew my father would die and it was this guy talking about killing people.
After 50 years of criticism do you find a hard time writing about some records?
In so far as it is. It has nothing to do with my relationship with music. It happens to everybody but when you are a writer it’s no fun. I would say Google is very useful.
If you had to choose one piece of yours that made you most proud of your work –at least at the time you wrote it- which is the first piece that comes to your mind?
As a matter of fact, I can’t really answer that question. But if I had to, the Lil’ Wayne piece that I use as a prologue here is definitely as far as I’m concern one of the best things I’ve ever written. But that’s probably for personal and emotional reasons . The ability to pull them on and put all that stuff in there .I like the emotion here. People think of me a wise guy who makes a lot of jokes — and I do a lot of jokes, I believe in humor but the fact is I’m pretty emotional. And I like the thing there’s a lot of heart in my writing. One reason I like the piece is that there’s a lot of heart in it –but there’s a lot of heart in a lot of my pieces. I’m slightly dismayed because I wouldn’t be a rock critic if I didn’t think that my subject matter is of political and moral important. I’m quite stubborn about continuing to stick out stuff at people’s faces whether they wanna read it or not. I’m moral and I’m not ashamed of it. If you moralize too much, that’s ineffective, but not moralize at all? That’s worse. And I think more of half of people that write music criticism deliberately don’t moralize because they think it’s iky.
Talking about politics, do you think there is hope?
This is a terrible time, worse time in my life time and certainly in yours. Fascism is on a rebound. It’s triumphant and it is all too powerful.
How you see American musicians dealing with it?
What happens with a lot of young bands in this country is that they came up in Obama. In this country some things are taken for granted. I think that many young musicians haven’t figure out a way to cross this thing. They really got bushwhacked. And I think that renders a lot of the music is trivial, pleasurable music for a calmer and better time. So basically I pay special attention to artists who try to confront this reality. A lot of them are people in their forties. The best political album of the year so far in America is What A Time To Be Alive by Superchunk, a band that in the Clinton 90s basically fantasized its own irresponsibility. But now they grew up.
In the book’s introduction you say that this book feels autobiographical to you. But you have already written your memoir, Going Into The City. How different each of these two autobiographical Christgaus are?
Going Into The City is essentially sort of the pick of my life. It doesn’t really deal with mortality. This feels autobiographical because it very much takes mortality, also going back to older artists.
Are you thinking of writing longer pieces for younger artists?
Yes, that there’s been no chance to write in depth for them. I do write for money. It really is a motivative factor for me. But I don’t have the venue or the economic stimulus to do that. I like for example a lot Parquet Courts and the Coathangers. Parquet Courts are probably the best band in America right now. . And I’m probably never gonna write a piece I guess. Unless a crazy millionaire decides to give me money and a place to publish it. Cause I like to be read to. You write for money but you also write to be read.
You also mention that your job it’s not a way of changing the world, but of living in the world sometimes by getting away. You also said that without some people in your life like your wife your career wouldn’t have been what it is…
Absolutely true. My wife is the most important thing in my life. You know, sometimes I think of myself that I say to people “yeah, get married, it’s great”. But I already got this person in the world. I’ve written about marriage quite a lot all through the years and now that I’m thinking maybe the best piece I’ve written is The Road Taken.
How often real life feeds your work and vice versa?
The answer for any good critic would be “all the fucking time”. Of course, the two things feed into each other. There are of course critics which that’s not true. In any case, it ought to be organic. And I think for most good writers it is organic.
You use a quote of Van Morrison that says “it’s too late to stop now”. If you could turn back time would there be something that you would change in your life and career?
In my professional life, it seems to me that I couldn’t have asked for much better. I would sure find cruel and dismissive things I’ve said to people but truly that’s because I say what pops in my head and I think I’ve been very honest. I’ve never minimize the luck of the timing. As I try to make clear in my memoir, I was very fortunate to go up where I did. I had the chance to do what I wanted. I’m grateful for it. And I never assume that for people in your age, it’s the same way. What can I say, I’m 76 and I still do write. I hope when I’ll be 86 I’ll still write well and I hope my wife, who is now ill, will be with me because otherwise I don’t think I’ll join being alive as much.
Robert Christgau’s book Is It Still Good To Ya?: Fifty Years of Rock Criticism, 1967–2017, is out by Duke University Press. You can find more of Robert Christgau in his website and his Expert Witness column in Noisey every Friday.
This interview was originally published in greek in popaganda.gr.
