If I’m lucky, the debt this blog owes to the work of Robert Christgau is painfully obvious to anyone who has read both. This is particularly true in Bookmarks, where I attempt to sum up an artist’s appeal – sometimes political as well as aesthetic — in a couple of sentences. No one is better at that – or its inverse, skewering poor work — than Christgau.
It was the end of a certain era when, after near enough 50 years of writing about popular music, Noisey published his last “Expert Witness” column in March. He’d had an itinerant professional existence since 2006, when New Times Media took over his long-time home, the Village Voice, and promptly got rid of him. The idea of Christgau type cultural critic is long dead; Drake or Lizzo might whine about “the media” as an amorphous whole, but who writing today matters enough that the likes of Lou Reed or Sonic Youth would disparagingly namecheck them on a record. Still, the idea that man himself, writing as well as ever, couldn’t get a paid gig in the current market is bracing.
I honestly don’t know of any other writer able to pack so much, not just information, but implication and tone, so much allusion into a sentence, or even a word. Famously, Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water got a one word review: “Melodic.” Ryan Adam’s Gold managed a sentence: “asked for Gram Parsons, they gave me Billy Joel”. I am extremely fond of both those albums. I know exactly what he means. His sentences weigh a tonne. It’s all still out there, decades of terse, dense writing. A lot of it for free on his delightfully hideous website – the absolute fucking state of it. It’s almost beautiful — and, going forward, for a little money on his patreon And it Don’t Stop.
Reading Christgau is often like having a drink with a smart, provocative, funny and maddening companion. As often as you are delighted to hear what you had thought so often and never said so well, you’re infuriated (“what are you talking about?!”). I realise I’m in a minority on this, but the best critics don’t just tell me whether I should or shouldn’t expend time and money on this album or that film, and why. They do do that, but in the process, tell me something useful about life, whether I think it’s true or not.
A few of my faves. On Elvis Costello’s This Year’s Model : “while I still wish he liked girls more, I’m now willing to believe he’s had some bad luck”. On Childish Gambino’s Culdesac: “he’s too keen on proving something, even if all the success and sexcess stories are true. Which is why I like him best when I’m surest he’s lying.”
Or DJ Shadow opening Endtroducing with a sample of “a square, self-taught drummer’s” nervous chuckle. Shadow “loops that chuckle for a second or two, making of it music and chaos and satire and self-mockery and music all at once.” On MIA’s Kala: “Where so many bands who consider tunes beneath them compensate with piddling portions of texture or structure, this record is full of things to listen to: zooms and scrapes and grunts and whistles and kiddie voices and animal cries, weird Asian drums and horns, down-home melodica and didgeridoo … The songs imagine and recreate an unbowed international underclass that proves how smart it is just by stating its business, which includes taking your money.” His observation that on Wu Tang Clan’s The W, leader RZA has “gone sensei, achieving a craft in which the hand leads the mind. Anyway, that’s how it sounds–which since this is music is what counts”.
I could go on. Some of those I had to look up to check exact wording, some I didn’t – his work has a tendency to come back to me like, well, music.
My personal gushing aside, of course, it does raise the question of what we lose when we lose figures like him. A white boomer guy, pontificating about the value of art, isn’t being published anymore? Who cares? Even I sometimes think “that’s quite enough of that tone, Robert”. I can only say, I think he does it right – he combines aesthetic and moral consistency, acknowledgement of his blind spots and prejudices with rigorous standards and unquenchable thirst for music and what it tells us, or fails to tell us, about life now, and life in general, about systems and about inter-personals. He’s engaged and curious; the first mainstream white critic to take hip hop seriously, he writes as energetically about pure pop now as he did in 1970. If you think a good culture requires a good conversation, singular voices of this sort are a basic requirement.
He gets music as science as well as art, and at his best he is like Feynman and his flower, offering a dissection that adds to rather than subtracts from the awe and mystery and beauty of its subject. Anyway, that’s how it feels –which since this is writing is what counts.
Dancing to Architecture 