FEATURE:
Going Into the City: Lost for Words
PHOTO CREDIT: Jane Bruce
In Recognition of the Brilliant Robert Christgau
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THIS is not tied…
PHOTO CREDIT: Michael Ip/Redux (via The New Yorker)
to any piece of news or a big birthday. Instead, I want to spend some time with Robert Christgau because he considered to be the most prolific music journalist ever. I myself have published thousands of features. I think around five-thousand. Millions of words. I am not sure of the exact amount. Robert Christgau has published many thousands more reviews and articles than me. Known for his incredible capsule album reviews and music criticism, he is one of the most important and prominent music journalists ever. He is eighty-three now and I hope he keeps writing for many more years. He was born in April 1942 and he began his career in the late-1960s. Christgau is notable for his early support of Hip-Hop, Riot Grrrl, and African popular music. He was the the chief music critic and senior editor for The Village Voice for thirty-seven years. We don’t really spend some time considering the huge importance of music journalists. I often feel you can make a film around Robert Christgau. If not him at the centre then someone playing him. Focusing on him in a film maybe set in the 1970s. Following the music of the time and putting a story around him. I do think that musicians are undervalued and underpaid. Music journalists undervalued and under-respected. Many cannot afford to work independently and there are so few opportunities for people to work professionally. It is to be respected that someone like Robert Christgau is about and still producing excellent work. I would love to work for as long as him. Even though I can never catch him in terms of his output and prolificacy, he is someone I aspire to. A critics that should be portrayed on the screen. Robert Christgau has written several books. I will come to a couple of them soon.
I want to start off with an article from Medium. They spent an hour with Robert Christgau in 2018. Someone who has been writing for over five decades and had reviewed, at that point, more than fifteen-thousand albums, he says how it is too late to stop now. It is impossible to give up that lifestyle. If you write non-stop and are committed to music journalism, then what is the alternative? It is such a seductive thing! Let’s hope Christgau never feels that need to slow down as he is inspiring so many music journalists:
“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”.
Going Into the City: Portrait of a Critic as a Young Man was published in 2015. An essential book, you can read more about it here. I am not sure whether I have missed a T.V. or film project that has featured Robert Christgau in some form. However, thinking about his decade-old book, it is time to adapt it in some form. This is what Waterstones said about a tremendous and engrossing read:
“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. Lifelong New Yorker Robert Christgau has been writing about pop culture since he was twelve and getting paid for it since he was twenty-two, covering rock for Esquire in its heyday and personifying the music beat at the Village Voice for over three decades. Christgau listened to Alan Freed howl about rock 'n' roll before Elvis, settled east of Manhattan's Avenue B forty years before it was cool, witnessed Monterey and Woodstock and Chicago '68, and the first abortion speak-out. He's caught Coltrane in the East Village, Muddy Waters in Chicago, Otis Redding at the Apollo, the Dead in the Haight, Janis Joplin at the Fillmore, the Rolling Stones at the Garden, the Clash in Leeds, Grandmaster Flash in Times Square, and every punk band you can think of at CBGB.
Christgau chronicled many of the key cultural shifts of the last half century and revolutionized the cultural status of the music critic in the process. Going Into the City is a look back at the upbringing that grounded him, the history that transformed him, and the music, books, and films that showed him the way. Like Alfred Kazin's A Walker in the City, E. B. White's Here Is New York, Joseph Mitchell's Up in the Old Hotel, and Patti Smith's Just Kids, it is a loving portrait of a lost New York. It's an homage to the city of Christgau's youth from Queens to the Lower East Side-a city that exists mostly in memory today. And it's a love story about the Greenwich Village girl who roamed this realm of possibility with him”.
Before rounding things off, I am going to come to a Vice piece from 2015. Robert Christgau speaking about Going Into the City: Portrait of a Critic as a Young Man and his experiences. A fascinating life. Although I don’t think all of his writing is available online, you can get a real sense of the scope and importance of this journalist:
“No matter the publication, Christgau’s voice is consistent and undeniable; his prose filled with verbose descriptors, far-flung references and the hyperbolic musings of a man who writes to understand himself and the art he consumes. A contemporary of rock critics Greil Marcus, Jon Landau, Dave Marsh, and Lester Bangs, Christgau is the best and most relevant music writer still writing, largely because he stays so in step with what’s happening in modern music without waxing nostalgic about decades gone. Earlier this year, for example, he devoted an entire column to the Bandcamp releases of former Das Racist member Kool A.D.
Though Christgau’s voice is so distinct that a bit of his personality bleeds into everything he types, Going into the City is Christgau’s first work that deliberately puts his own trajectory in the spotlight. He previously published column compilations and record guides for the 70s, 80s and 90s, but where his prior tomes were hand-crafted by Christgau the critic, Going into the City examines Christgau the man. In close to 400 pages, he discusses his early life and first forays into journalism, his horrid and successful romantic relationships (sprinkled with oddly worded tales of sexual encounters, like, “After some expense-account Chateaubriand she took me home and made me come with skillful rapidity”), and his indelible commitment to documenting the music of his times, which through perseverance and a little luck have managed to stretch from the subversive rock of the late 60s to the pop-rap of the present.
Flaws, delusions, and hangups are abound, but aside from one celeb story of a night spent with John and Yoko, The City is a highly personal peek into the origin story and working life of a living legend who’s still an adept enough writer to explain why he’s a legend. The result is a portrait of a highly opinionated, sometimes-mean, oftentimes-horny, and always-thoughtful critic of our culture.
Noisey: Let’s start with your life as a music fan, and how it informed your career as a rock critic.
Robert Chrisgau:
I’m not a musician, I can’t read music, but I came from a family of music fans. Not mad music fans, but people who like music. Both of my parents can play the piano. They were very good dancers, which I am not. And my grandfather loved music a lot and he had a big influence on me. One of the most fun-loving people I met in my life. I was just drawn to music. I was drawn to records, early… The first single I ever bought was “Secret Love” by Doris Day and the second was “Sh-boom” by The Crew Cuts. I still love “Secret Love” by Doris Day, “Sh-boom” a little less.
You mention some work in sports and news writing in your first few years out of college. News writing can be very direct and concise. Is that something that later informed your style as a music writer?
I actually think I learned to write concisely working for an encyclopedia company in Chicago. I had to write about [Russian author] Isaac Babel in 11 lines. That’s like 90 words. So I learned how to squeeze a lot into a small space. I don’t remember how long those high school sports features I turned out for the newspaper were. They were about 400 words, I don’t know. But in any case, it didn’t feel like I had to leave a whole lot out to write about these high school guards who I knew for about 15 minutes over the phone. But I learned. I learned how to make [the stories] hookier. It was a skill I had to master. It was because I read journalists who I really loved, like A.J. Liebling and the sportswriter Red Smith, who were great stylists inside the journalistic medium. So I always tried to be a little classy, a little funny… But both of my daily newspaper gigs, at the Star-Ledger for a little over a year and Newsday for two years, they both taught me to be productive and practical about getting stuff done.
I think that’s what comes from a newspaper background—that feeling that a story needs to get done regardless of outside factors or circumstances.
That’s right, but I would like to think my standards are higher than most newspaper writers, even the really good ones. Or not necessarily higher, but different. I make different kinds of demands of myself than they do. One of them is: avoid cliches at any cost. And: if somebody else said this, don’t say it again. Say it a little different.
One of the things you’re best known for is your capsule record reviews.
It’s my legacy. I used to think I’d written 14,000, but I did some figuring it out. I’m at around 13,400. 14,000 including duds and stuff, but I don’t think that counts. I’ve gone through over 16,000 records and I’ve written capsule reviews of at least Honorable Mention length of 13,400.
Tell me about the process of how you approach a record you’re reviewing. How do you listen to it? How many times? Do you take notes as you sit with it?
I completely immerse and I play things over and over again. Things happen to you somatically when music goes through your head, and then one day you say, “Oh, I know that!” If I play something three, four, or five times, even if I like its looks, and I don’t have that moment where I say, “Oh, I know that!”, then I figure there’s something wrong with it. Unless a lot of people tell me I’m wrong, and then I try some more. Then there are things that sound so drab and no one else writes about that I can’t even get through it once. That happens a fair amount. But I don’t write a full capsule review of anything I haven’t heard five times. It’s usually closer to ten”.
When do you think you’ll stop writing about music?
Probably never. But I may not write at the same pitch. And I may not necessarily do these Consumer Guide-style reviews forever. But on the other hand, I don’t intend to stop writing, while I can still write. But I may not write as much. I wouldn’t mind working less. [Laughs] I really wouldn’t”.
2019’s Book Reports: A Music Critic on His First Love, Which Was Reading “establishes Christgau as not just the Dean of American Rock Critics, but one of America's most insightful cultural critics as well”. Is It Still Good to Ya? Fifty Years of Rock Criticism 1967-2017 is another book to get. This “definitive collection also explores pop's African roots, response to 9/11, and evolution from the teen music of the '50s to an art form compelled to confront mortality as its heroes pass on. A final section combines searching obituaries of David Bowie, Prince, and Leonard Cohen with awed farewells to Bob Marley and Ornette Coleman”. I am excited to see what comes next for Robert Christgau. You can check out his work here. Still writing reviews and articles, I think we will see more books and essays from him. Someone determined to keep writing for as long as possible, Christgau is surely among the most influential music journalists ever. Definitely one of the most prolific. I don’t think anyone will catch him. Seeing this great brought to the screen would be a dream. Hopefully that will be realised…
ONE day soon.