A rare audience with America's greatest rock critic, Robert Christgau.
Robert Christgau is on the move. Inside the lounge of his cluttered East Village apartment, in a building that smells of old marble, the bespectacled dean of American music critics – all chipmunkish looks and boyish overbite – is vacuuming a few stray crumbs from the carpet, cocking a slightly worried ear to the frenzied street sounds billowing in from an open window. This is someone who knows that any decent recording session, not least one in which his own spoken words will be committed to tape, requires the proper arrangements. For good measure, New York’s youngest 64-year-old slips a disc of down-tempo soundscapes by the Hungarian performer DJ Bootsie into the stereo.
Okay.
So many sounds, so little time. Easing back into a chair, Christgau murmurs something about, oh, the 200 other albums “I wouldn’t mind playing at this instant to find out what they sound like” if he wasn’t holding court for a visiting New Zealand reporter, and he’s probably not joking. By the famed reviewer’s count, he has been listening to new music for up to 16 hours each working day since 1969.
Call it maladjusted, if you will; he doesn’t. “I am a well-integrated person,” the author of some 13,000 record reviews offers by way of personal introduction.
A few years ago, worried about the physical effect the lifetime of heavy listening might be having, Christgau took a hearing test. He aced the exam. “I don’t think that I have especially physically acute hearing,” he explains, “but rather my ability to notice what I’m hearing is exceptionally well-developed.”
For nearly 40 years now, this Ivy League grad has enjoyed a reputation as the guy who explains those differences more pithily, prolifically and sharply than almost anyone else in the field. Christgau is a chronicler of contemporary – he prefers to call it “semipopular” – music whose essays and interviews have appeared in most of the flagship American cultural titles, including the New Yorker, Playboy, Rolling Stone, Spin and Creem. He has published, as well, three album guides in reference-book form and a couple of anthologised collections of essays. Back in the era of rock criticism’s greatest influence during the early 1980s, he was one of a very few music writers whose name tended to be as recognised in some quarters as the performers he wrote about.
Among New Zealand music fans of the same vintage, he is probably best known as the senior pop critic at his city’s Village Voice. It was at the alternative New York weekly that he first devised his famous monthly Consumer Guide, with its 20-odd tiny single-paragraph reviews of mostly new albums, each with a letter grade from A+ through E-, which ran continuously from July 10, 1969 until earlier this month, when Christgau became the latest high-profile redundancy at the ailing publication.
And what reviews they have been – “the first and last word on the subject, rendering more long-winded analyses superfluous”, the Californian novelist Steve Erickson has written. What’s more, he has said, Christgau has managed to “remain conspicuously undated and relevant in a medium that almost immediately renders everything else dated and irrelevant”.
The British writer Charles Shaar Murray makes a similar point, in a separate conversation, by adapting Lenny Kaye’s famous summation of Iggy Pop: “Nobody does it better; nobody does it worse; nobody does it, period.” A nice line for sure, but probably only half right: yes, probably nobody does the capsule review better than Christgau, but just about every aspiring music critic who’s ever tried typically ends up faring worse. Worse judgment. Worse wit. Worse use of arcane information. Worse perception. Worse, most of all, in matching Christgau’s remarkable skill at providing, in no more than 120 words, a complete scale-model of what for nearly anyone else needs to be a standard 2000-word piece of criticism.
It would be a mistake, however, for any visitor to the home he shares with his wife, Carola Dibbell, and their daughter, Nina, to expect the man himself to precisely reflect the intellectual reputation of his published judgments. As it turns out, he’s actually more like that, not least when asked for a capsule review of his own selling points.
“I use bigger words,” he begins in a nasally voice, rattling off the ways in which his distinctive style has not only managed to survive but also endure in semi-popularity. “I assume knowledge on the part of my reader. I assume my reader has a tolerance for cognitive dissonance – which is to say, if there are things my reader doesn’t understand, they will not immediately turn the page – that they don’t mind being challenged or having the best assumptions made of them. I’m varied in my rhetorical approach. I’m someone who’s very good at grading – well, not early on in my career I wasn’t, but I learnt how fast – someone who knows that place where taste and judgment join. And I know how to recognise when I have my take.”
Every new disc Christgau reviews will be listened to “at least” five times, often closer to 10. “What I do is not like going to a movie,” he explains. “Sure, right, people buy DVDs, but still, people can absorb a movie once, and maybe some good critics will see it twice. But no one expects to see a movie 20 times. It happens, but it’s very unusual. Whereas a record I like is almost certainly going to be played 20 times.”
Oh sure, he’s the first to admit that other critics may outstrip him when it comes to formal musical literacy, “so that’s why I have to sort of absorb music corporeally. It’s a time-consuming process. I have to hit it at different moods, let it catch me unawares and see how it emerges after I look at it different ways. So I’m also good at identifying my own pleasure responses, which I’ve long since learnt to trust.”
Readers have learnt to trust them, too. Christgau was, after all, one of the first to critically certify the emerging hip-hop wave, the riot grrl movement and, long before Paul Simon walked off to look for Africa, the American-influenced urban Afro-pop showcased on landmark (as they were later recognised) sets like Jive Nation’s first Indestructible Beat of Soweto compilation. Leftist boho humanist he may be, Christgau nonetheless cham-pioned, for instance, a number of Al Green’s critically reviled gospel albums.
Alas, give or take the Go-Betweens and the Chills’ Submarine Bells, the music of the South Seas has yet to intrude. Yes, he announces a little sheepishly, there was indeed an antipodean band “I once discovered whom nobody else had ever heard of, but unfortunately I’ve now forgotten their name. I’m sorry.”
This time he really is joking. Sort of. As Christgau points out on the New Zealand question, only a few countries – most of them African – have ever really come up with stylistic interpretations of their national identity. Besides, jurisdictional issues, for him, aren’t really part of the listening experience: “I’ll take a white guitar band from wherever I find it.”
Still, he’d probably approve of the New Zealand Government’s European-style policy of backing some of the popular arts. “Capitalism has its advantages, and for that reason I’ve never been a very ideological socialist. And you cannot look at the way music developed in America without realising it was independent entrepreneurs, in that spirit, who made it happen.
“On the other hand, it is possible, say, to look at a Sweden and think, ‘Hmm.’ Not a bad place for popular music these days, not bad at all. There’s a bunch of decent minority bands rising out of Sweden – more than you’d figure. So I like countries where there’s a certain amount of government support for the arts, too.”
Christgau first began supporting the arts for a living in 1967 when, after a brief professional moment as one of the era’s recognised New Journalists (an earlier piece by him found its way into Tom Wolfe’s anthology, The New Journalism), he signed on as Esquire’s “secular music” columnist. Along with three or four others – Lester Bangs, Dave Marsh and Greil Marcus perhaps being the most notable – he quickly moved on to assume something of a headmaster’s role in the following decade’s first big school of US rock critics.
Today, arguably, Christgau is the only one from that earlier crew still holding the earplugs. Bangs, a hallucinogenic, combative reviewer, died early, and Marcus is perhaps better known these days for constructing vast literary diagrams of tradition and influence. Marsh, a sentimental working-class battler, is known, if at all, as Bruce Springsteen’s hagiographer-in-chief.
Then again, the phenomenal explosion in the amount of new sound being recorded in 2006 – far more hours of it produced now than there are hours in a year to hear it – has effectively shut down the possibility of any single reviewer claiming the gatekeeper role that was possible in that far-off time.
“Greil, Dave and I were at one time very good friends, but Dave and I are no longer friends at all,” recalls Christgau. “We shared political assumptions and were all a part of the counter-culture, even though we all were extremely sceptical about drugs and the religious strain of hippiedom, which in fact was the dominant strain.
“But even back then we had serious political differences. And, as you know, it’s the curse of the minority-left to be sectarian. Our musical tastes were completely different, too. These days I would call Dave a cultural conservative, and Greil has become a person with, ah, extremely intense and narrow interests: he loves what he loves and ignores almost everything else.”
The same perhaps could be said of most professional arts critics. And since our conversation is taking place in the incinerating heat of an American heatwave, which may or may not have something to do with the perils of global climate change, and against the backdrop of the Middle East’s latest filthy war, it seems a good moment to ask the critic who introduced the idea of the politically conscious reviewer if he feels there could be other issues deserving of more attention than the latest pop releases.
“Yeah I do, actually,” he replies after a moment’s thought. “Sometimes I think I really ought to spend my last years being involved in politics. But I don’t think I’ll do it. Hey, I’m not working ’cause I like the job – I’m working ’cause I need to make a living.”
Still, he did shuck the reviewing gig for a brief period during the 2004 presidential election campaign, for which he worked in Ohio as a volunteer for John Kerry. Canvassing in the battleground state was “very exciting”, he agrees, even though the work left him too exhausted to listen to much music.
“I thought he had a chance,” he says of Kerry. “Well, he did have a chance, for Christ’s sake, just like Gore, who won in 2000. If people had been allowed to vote in Ohio, then he would have won.
“I’ve never been very apocalyptic in my politics, but I do believe these are apocalyptic times. I do not make the assumption that this apartment we’re in is going to be here in three months.”
Seriously? “Yes, seriously. I believe there are going to be terrorist attacks in New York City for sure. I mean, I opposed the Iraq war, but I take Arab terrorism very seriously indeed. These are bad, bad, bad people, who don’t seem to realise they have more friends here in New York than anywhere else in the country. And that’s one reason they’re bad, bad people; the other is that they’re religious fundamentalists and I hate them. They’re horrible. And they need a much smarter person than George Bush opposing them.”
For once, Christgau doesn’t even need to add the obligatory E-.