Robert Christgau ’62 is the definitive music critic for rock ’n’ roll. He began his career as a music columnist for Esquire in 1967 and was a music editor at The Village Voice for 10 years. He is best known for publishing “capsule reviews,” or short album reviews, in his “Consumer Guide” columns from 1969 to the present.
Christgau currently teaches at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University. He has published five books, three of them based on his “Consumer Guide” columns. His memoir “Going into the City” will be published in February.
When did you first become interested in rock ’n’ roll?
RC: The question of when one gets interested in music is a complicated one. Was it when I sang “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” on a post office desk? Or was it when I fell in love with Bing Crosby’s “Swinging on a Star”? Or was it later, when I got interested in listening to Jack Lacy’s top 40, which was before the rock ’n’ roll era? I would say that by 1953 when I was 11, I was a pretty serious pop music fan. That’s very much same way I was with baseball — I was interested in the details, I was interested in the numbers. But like many New Yorkers of my generation — I grew up in Flushing, Queens — I definitely underwent a kind of conversion experience with Alan Freed, probably the person who named rock ’n’ roll — certainly the person who publicized the name (the phrase existed long before him) — whose so-called Moondog Matinee, a name that had to be changed to, I think, “rock ’n’ roll party” in 1954 or 1955, when he moved here to station WINS from Cleveland where he was putting on interracial dances as early as 1951. Only they weren’t really interracial, they were mostly black, but they were interracial. There were other rock ’n’ roll disc jockeys and every locality has their own special heroes, the ones who were important to them. But it seems to me that Freed was the most important. He was certainly the person who made me a rock ’n’ roll fan and who instilled certain values in me.
Freed refused to play what were called cover versions, which meant white people recording R&B songs. He made us aware, without ever saying, “this is a black person singing.” Nevertheless, we all knew what he meant, and we all knew which one we liked better. We liked Fats Domino and Jerry Lee Lewis better than Pat Boone, the McGuire Sisters, et cetera, et cetera. Cover versions continued.
In the wake of the segregation decision — and as a baseball fan, for me, in the wake of my adoration for Willie Mays — these racial distinctions were something I was very conscious of as a white kid growing up in a completely white suburb who had no black friends and whose high school was at most only 10 percent black — and they were tracked away from academics, as I discovered when I worked [on my memoir] there.
I remained a serious rock ’n’ roll fan until I graduated from high school, which was in June of 1958 when I was 16. I was the youngest member of my graduating class. At that moment, I switched to first folk music and then jazz, because I was in with a hipper, almost entirely Jewish — I was brought up an evangelical Christian — crowd, who liked those musics. I didn’t stay with folk music very long, but I was a jazz fan in college. What I knew about rock ’n’ roll between ’58 and ’62 was completely random: what I heard on the jukebox while I was busing tables at the college snack bar, what I heard as a Parkie in the summer of ’59, trying to make friends with the hoodlums who dominated the park where I was working.
What’s your writing process?
RC: The basic trick is, I listen to music all the time. I listen to music between 12 to 16 to 18 hours a day. I don’t write a consumer guide review of anything I haven’t heard five times. That doesn’t mean I’ve listened to it five times, it means I’ve played it five times in my presence. So it sinks in, the way music on the radio sinks in, and I see what sticks. I see whether an album sticks the same way a song sticks on the radio. I’ve done it 10, 12, 14,000 times. [For] the full reviews, of which I’d guess there are probably 10 or 11,000, I don’t write about anything I haven’t heard five times, and there are many cases where it’s 10 or 15.
And then I concentrate. Sometimes I do research. I try to see what other people have said, because I don’t care about getting there first. I’ve never cared about that. I want to get it right — not first, but right for me. Then I wait [for] some detail or turn of phrase or what seems to me to be an interesting angle or idea that really reflects what it is that has attracted me to record, that’s made me think it was worth writing about. I wait for the language to come — sometimes it comes easily. Usually it doesn’t. And I sit there until it’s done. Generally, a consumer guide review represents two to three hours of writing. Then I rewrite a lot — I rewrite constantly, finding better language, and I try not to repeat myself — that’s important to me.
Who are your favorite artists?
RC: There are two different ways to answer it: what do you listen to, and what do you think is best? It’s not quite the same thing, because they’re different kinds of listening. Most of the listening I do is in a social context, especially with my wife, a good critic herself who is publishing her first novel in March. Her name is Carola Dibbell. One thing I do is I play music that she likes, and her tastes are like mine, but it does make a difference.
But artists: Chuck Berry, Thelonious Monk, James Brown, The Clash, the New York Dolls. My favorite album of the year is an obscene hip-hop bootleg called “Black Portland” by Young Thug and Bloody Jay. You might find it vile — it is a little vile, but it’s sonically amazing. My favorite alt band these days is a band called Wussy, who I’ve been trumpeting for nearly 10 years and are finally getting a little traction. I’m crazy about an artist you’ve never heard of called Withered Hand, from Edinburgh, Scotland. My favorite singers are Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday. My favorite rock singer is John Lennon. And Chuck Berry always is in there. I think Louis Armstrong and James Brown are the most important musicians of the 20th century. It took me a long time to come to them, though — I wouldn’t have said that in 1969; I wouldn’t have put Brown there until ’85 or ’90. Armstrong I got into in the late ’70s early ’80s. I liked him. In fact, I saw him at Dartmouth in January of ’59, and I thought he was great until all of my hip friends told me he was corny. I was still 16 — give me a break. He wasn’t corny, he was great.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
This article has been revised to reflect the following corrections:
Correction appended (9/15/14):
Robert Christgau ’62was a music editor at The Village Voice for 10 years, not 37, as the article initially reported. His short album reviews did not stop in 2013; they continue to be published. Three of his five books are based on his "Consumer Guide" columns — the initial article separated these three from the total count of books. These factual inaccuracies have been corrected.
