Going Into the City (2015)

From the reviews, long-time Village Voice rock critic Robert Christgau's memoir sounded like it might be some sort of sexual tell-all, but it's actually more sedate than that. Though a vague tone of lasciviousness hangs like a miasma over certain paragraphs and sentences, and now and then it is explicitly about sex, that aspect of it was way overstated. Christgau himself has claimed more than once, inside and outside of the book, that much of the project is about reclaiming the validity, nay the very utility, of monogamy, even as it explores what a memoir is at all. Those aspects—monogamy, and the memoir as artifact—are more the reasons for this book's existence than anything about a) the Village Voice, b) celebrity gossip, c) rock criticism theory, or d) specific rock critics (with a few exceptions, notably Ellen Willis). It is packed full of opinions, which is only natural, but those opinions range far afield of the rock scene as such. Indeed, the great pleasure I got out of this—beyond Christgau's typically etched language, as he remains as always a pleasure to read—was in his ruminations on literature and film. Crime and Punishment, Jules and Jim, Sister Carrie, and Marquee Moon, among a good many others, get equally thoughtful treatment here. Many of the usual problems of memoirs occur, however, such as obvious gaps and elisions. If I'm going to second-guess Christgau, like all the other reviewers, I wish he would have stayed closer to the Joycean spirit of the subtitle ("Portrait of a Critic as a Young Man") and ended the story in his mid-20s, say with the publication of "Beth Ann and Macrobioticism" in 1965. There could have been more about his college career and intellectual awakening, which is where it started to get a little more sketchy and I thought I was missing things. But maybe Christgau needed to go beyond that for the sake of a book proposal or because he thought it made a better book. It's his book, so it's his choice. But in this story, once Christgau is established as a writer, the gaps only become more and more obvious. He deliberately lands on isolated points in his life and leaves out others. It's not as if the anecdotes he offers aren't compulsively readable—how he got his calling card as the "Dean" of American rock critics, along with scenes from his work at the Voice, his life in New York, his ridiculously happy marriage to Carola Dibbell, his parenting and his daughter. No doubt they are main attraction for many who wanted to read a Christgau memoir. So fair enough. I also appreciate that he consciously studied the literary form of the memoir so closely as part of undertaking this. For fans mainly.

In case it's not at the library.

Grown Up All Wrong (1998)

Rather than his own joking self-appellation, the "Dean of American Rock Critics," I tend to think of Robert Christgau more as the Pete Rose of American rock critics. That's for his capsule album reviews, which now number well over 12,000 and counting. And even though I'd bet Rose makes it into his hall of fame before Christgau makes it into his, no one else has accomplished anything like it. Still, I think I get more of everything I like about Christgau these days in his longer pieces, as found in this oversize encyclopedia volume collection from the turn of the century, which feels like a summary statement. It's as thoroughgoing an exercise as one could hope for from the man with perhaps the most catholic tastes in all rock, pop, and beyond. He brings a useful perspective to Elvis Presley, casting him as a literary hero. He has one of the best single paragraphs I've ever encountered on the Beatles (short form, he can't quit you). And there is nothing at all specifically about Bob Dylan. Certain points of his taste are blind spots for me I already know about: the New York Dolls, Loudon Wainwright III, and some others. More often I appreciate the insights. His piece on James Brown, when I first read it years ago, opened the whole world of Brown to me, or somehow emboldened me to explore deep into Brown's strange and massive catalog. Christgau's Nirvana sendoff isn't any more flinty than it needs to be, and hits a good many notes. And the pieces about African music represent an interesting shift in his voice, more evangelist than anywhere else in his writing, and obviously researched with backstories and context because he knows his readers are unlikely to bring it themselves. As it happens, this fights a little with another instinct of his, which is to be the casual wiseacre smartest guy in the room catcalling from the sidelines, an impulse that runs to some excesses here in spots. That's in his capsule reviews too. He can't help himself. He goes out of his way to insult people by name—academics he doesn't trust, various taste makers, and sundry other figures lodged in his craw. Notwithstanding, it's a great bunch of thoughtful essays, even on artists you might not care that much about. He cares, and he's here to tell you why, and that's just infectious enough. It's a big book but worth going through slowly and carefully—among other things, more opportunities for list making and further shopping / streaming considerations. A consumer guide, you might say even. Christgau thinks so hard and so clearly about what he hears that he has the ability to make me think differently about things I've heard all my life, like James Brown.

In case it's not at the library.

Christgau's Consumer Guide: Albums of the '90s (2000)

If Amazon reviews and general word of mouth over more than a decade are any indication, this is widely agreed to be the least of rock critic dean Robert Christgau's consumer guide books. Everyone complains about the byzantine grading schema, with its confusing array of letter grades, stars, and symbology, among which are numerous overlaps and counterintuitive distinctions (viz., turkey v. bomb). But the main problem is elucidated by Christgau himself, in the introduction: "The factoid I latched onto, a possible fabrication that's tres poetic regardless, was that between 1988 and 1998 the number of recordings released annually increased tenfold, to something like 35,000. Even if the 35,000 included a whole lot of singles, which as near as I could tell it didn't, this would mean that there was more music recorded than there were hours in the year—quite possibly twice as much." Me, I have always pinpointed the early '90s as the time when my tastes began to diverge from Christgau, who until then had been a reliable arbiter, albeit with the usual quirks and oddities that come from such work (he presently has a mysterious problem with David Bowie, for example). Just a few years ago the difficulty was thrown into relief when I made a long-term project of picking up as much of his top 10s as I could from his annual "Dean's List," which has so far continued without interruption since 1974 (plus there's one for 1971). I already had many of the albums until approximately 2002, of course, many of them my own favorites too over the years. This was more about filling in the gaps and getting up to date. The result was a little discouraging—a sense he had become more unreliable for me. I heard a good deal of wonderful African music that was new to me, but on other fronts it felt like a kind of samey-ness had settled in at some point: Fountains of Wayne, the Mountain Goats, Randy Newman, Liz Phair, John Prine, Loudon Wainwright, even my beloved Sonic Youth, became way overrepresented in shuffle play, beyond anything that held up even to passing scrutiny, while others with some or very much merit by my lights (notably in the '90s) were slighted, misread, or entirely missing in action: Beulah, Catherine Wheel, Consolidated, House of Love, Lush, Mudhoney, My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult, Primal Scream, Ride, and the Wedding Present. These are all matters of taste, of course, and as the old saw has it, a critic can't get to everything—especially when the new saw is that there is more music released every year than there are hours in the year. Discrimination sets in out of necessity, making matters of taste even more crucial in this line of work. That ultimately leaves this particular book at some distance from being a useful consumer guide. Christgau's writing is still in fine form when he stretches out and talks to us awhile, as in the introduction. But more often the language itself is compressed to the point of cramping and distortion, held too close to account to the grading system. I couldn't read through and through this as I had with the first two. And there's the matter of taste. My own is that this should be approached and/or used with caution.

In case it's not at the library. (Better yet, his website.)

Christgau's Record Guide: The '80s (1990)

It's possible that Robert Christgau's second volume of his record guide is actually better than the first. Some of the irregularities that weakened the '70s volume were likely as not the result of Christgau feeling his way into his ultimate format of the letter-graded, pellet-sized assessments. The writing is markedly improved and more uniformly focused in the second, it has a better sense of what it can do. But it was never going to feel like the breakthrough of that first one, and it's also arguable that the '80s albums he covered just weren't as good, in the overall aggregate, as the '70s albums (arguable, I say, though I would not necessarily want to be the one to make the argument). What I know for sure is that whereas keeping the '70s volume around only gradually disclosed all it has to offer, with this follow-up, armed with exactly that information, I felt justified in sitting down and reading it like a novel, front to back, Introduction and Gregory Abbott, Shake You Down ('86, B+), to ZZ Top, Afterburner ('85, B), and all the delicious lists in the appendices. Then I put it in one of my more convenient stacks of reference books with the '70s volume. If I say I am very fond of the range of reaction Christgau provokes in me, I really mean that sincerely. He is just a pleasure to read, to browse, and to compulsively poke through. I know he can be annoying, gnomic, and full of himself. And he is the first to note that the sheer mass of industry releases, whose growth has continued unabated throughout his career, finally ran him to ground at some point in the '80s or '90s. But if he can't realize his ambition, which is to have a little something to say about everything within the narrow range of the contemporaneous rock album, he is also as reliable as rain, pointing any number of useful ways in to nearly as voluminous an amount of cultural product by metric ton as only a few others I can think of (and they are all in other areas or more general ones, such as David Thomson's encyclopedia of the cinema, or Montaigne). I am daunted, humbled, and grateful just thinking about all the stuff I know about via Robert Christgau. He is strong in a number of areas where I am weak: folk music, African music, certain select New York City acts (Dolls, Blondie, Chic, Talking Heads, Sonic Youth, Yo La Tengo, Amy Rigby), lots of funk, dance, and hip-hop, and all the boomer icons. Plus Al Green. You could do much worse than to assign a certain portion of your shopping dollars to tracking down his A's. He is the consummate professional in this regard, delivering what he says he's going to deliver, a consumer guide—even if he remains pointedly skeptical of the commercial infrastructure breeding and nurturing the objects of his (and our) adoration. It's that ability of his to work within this tension that might make him so effective. I have no question that he's effective. Oh, and wow, I just now noticed how beat up my old copy of this is.

In case it's not at the library.

Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the '70s (1981)

I guess this may be the most well-used book that I own, its front cover melting away from coffee spills and surprisingly grimy from all the handling, its first 50 or so pages curling from the water damage of those coffee spills. I'm drinking coffee even at this moment, but keeping the cup a safe distance from the book. Lesson learned. The section at the back labeled ROCK AND ROLL. A BASIC RECORD LIBRARY is scored through with lines and markings intended to keep track of what I have and what I want, the better to more quickly construct lists on the way out the door on shopping trips to record stores. At the time, no one seemed close to Robert Christgau at being so completist in keeping up with rock 'n' roll, from the fringes and at the commercial centers, and though he arguably missed some of the landmarks even then (AC/DC dismissed in a section called "Distinctions Not Cost-Effective") and has evidently been swamped by the mountains of output in the decades since, he has still charted a territory and a taste and sensibility that is unmistakably his own and remains one of my most reliable sources—a true consumer guide that works for me in every sense of the term. He's also a lot of fun to browse and read, and worth going back to compare notes on specific albums and artists. (I do that nowadays mostly via his website, which probably contains nearly every word written here.) He can also be infuriatingly cantankerous about the things he misses and/or dismisses, though that is less of a problem in this '70s volume than it would become later, as in the '90s. In fairness, he is some 15 years my senior and has done a vastly better job than me of keeping up over the past decade, although I have no doubt many would dispute his conclusions as much as ever. When he lost his office at the "Village Voice" circa 2006 it was a kind of iconic moment, notably depressing, another one of those soul-crushing developments that came along with such regularity and virulent intensity during that time—"that time" not over yet, I suspect, one we are still well plunged into. (I wonder if it's ever going to get better.) At least, even if it's something as quotidian as snapshot analyses of music industry product, such as it is, there's something that seems to me still very profound with which to connect here. A passion, an acumen, the sense that these things actually matter. Sometimes I lose my way and have to fight to find it back. Robert Christgau doesn't seem to lose his way much, and via his work he's always there to lend a hand, help you get yourself pointed right again, and find music that works as solace, that makes everything seem worthwhile once again, even if fleetingly. A+

In case it's not at the library.