Photo by Joe Mabel
Critic and editor Robert Christgau has been there from the very beginning, notoriously (and/or jokingly) referring to himself as the Dean of American Rock Critics since the early '70s. It’s a testament to his longevity and standing that the boast hasn’t lost the ring of truth. Never the most indulgent of critics, even his earliest and more reported longform pieces from the peace/love/dope 1960s for Esquire and Newsday (grab a copy of his collection Any Old Way You Choose It to read them) are soft on narrative and contain more than a few traces of the master’s fearsome imperiousness. The brevity and rhetorical snap of his most epochal work, the Consumer Guide reviews for the Village Voice and his exhaustive '70s, '80s, '90s by-decade record guides (including report card letter grades), has long entertained music obsessives, for good reason. Rooting around these short reviews—in short doses as inspired—almost always offers immediate pleasure. Here he is, putting the treatment on my favorite album, by the Replacements:
Let It Be [Twin/Tone, 1984]
Those still looking for the perfect garage may misconstrue this band's belated access to melody as proof they've surrendered their principles. Me, I'm delighted they've matured beyond their strange discovery of country music. Bands like this don't have roots, or principles either, they just have stuff they like. Which in this case includes androgyny (no antitrendie reaction here) and Kiss (forgotten protopunks). Things they don't like include tonsillectomies and answering machines, both of which they make something of. A+
These methods have often infuriated rock stars. Lou Reed was moved to call the Dean a "toe fucker" on a live album—surely a mark of pride for any critic. As Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth complained on "I Killed Christgau With My Big Fucking Dick":
I don't know why
You wanna impress Christgau
Ah let that shit die
And find out the new goal
What fan of music writing wouldn’t want to read a memoir about a "toe fucker" that pisses off Thurston Moore? Robert Christgau’s new memoir Going into the City: Portrait of a Critic as a Young Man is that book: a mash note to New York City, to his discovery of sexual love and quest for monogamy and family, and his life of ideas regarding pop music. The smashing together of big and small events can make for exhaustion and bewilderment to the lonely reader sifting for insights, and in this book there are some choppy waters right off the bat. The dense first 100 pages that end with his attendance at Dartmouth College tend to drag sorely. Dad was a firefighter, and Mom a secretary at a pencil manufacturer and housewife. Xgau’s long reckoning with religious dogma, love for Mad magazine, baseball and AM radio, and enjoyment of jazz with first girlfriend Miriam are all touched upon (no pun intended), and along the way, there are digressive treatises on the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Crime and Punishment for good measure.
You probably shouldn’t take out your snorkel for the middle section either; the river of thick 1-9-6-0-S soup threatens to drown everyone alive, then and now. This isn’t all the writer’s fault; to misappropriate Gertrude Stein, the '60s were the '60s were the '60s, and despite Christgau’s obvious disdain for pablum ("Sixties nostalgia has been turning my stomach since approximately 1974"), he dutifully extolls on his attendance at heavy events: political gatherings of every stripe and persuasion, Woodstock, the Monterey Pop Festival, the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, a lot of Rolling Stones concerts, and reports on the ceaseless drift of politics, politics and more politics.
Yet, the finest sequences in Going into the City are those in which he discusses the meat and potatoes work of writing and editing some of the foundational texts of rock criticism, inside baseball about music publications large and small and his descriptions of writers he worked with and admired. Then again, color me obsessed. For a very long time, I’ve read about music with Greil Marcus, Lester Bangs, Richard Meltzer and Ellen Willis perched on my shoulders like the fucking four horsemen of the apocalypse. None of them were perfect, but the work of Marcus and Willis have aged best. Bangs and Meltzer got to me first and most profoundly; their messy screeds were written in my language, even as I recognize that they all too often wrote offensively about politics and race, and with appalling shallowness about women. As gender parity in rock criticism (all too slowly) improves, and the stature of Willis’ work only seems to grow, my favorite pop critics—especially now—are far more adroit at expressing a quiet sort of self-doubt or at least political mindfulness than the male forbears. This has not always been a specialty of criticism’s (largely white) boys club or of Christgau himself. These days, even most white male critics would not see fit to call Jimi Hendrix a "psychedelic Uncle Tom" or craft a one sentence review of a Donnas LP that simply reads "skank hos get fucked" like the Dean has, even in jest.
As the book progresses, the litany of correspondents, associates, pals, writers he worked with and kindred spirits he met on the basketball court and in art galleries and at political gatherings bleeds together in a Pynchon-esque rush that can be hard to follow, especially when he goes into thumbnail family or educational backgrounds on so many of these chums. Breaking down your most important friendships is one thing, but there are enough Red diaper babies outed over the course of this memoir to organize a Pampers factory. Christgau isn’t a celebrity name dropper, and doesn’t seem interested in hanging out with pop stars apart from a few very famous exceptions. Would you be able to say no to John and Yoko?
That’s not to imply that Christgau doesn’t dish. His dedication to laying out the myriad contours of his intellectual discourse, power struggles and sexual relationships with women, most notably a few Sturm und Drang years in the late '60s with Ellen Willis (who passed away in 2006) and Carola Dibbell, his wife of over four decades and mother of their daughter, yields mixed results—and not because I think writing about the pleasures of boning is inherently corny or the quest for reproduction and joy of adoption is inherently beautiful. They just happen to be so in this book. Christgau treats the women in his life as fully flesh and blood, and maybe it’s to his credit as a writer that they so often come off as much more interesting than he is. Far be it from me to judge his motives for such frankness, but as a dedicated Ellen Willis fan, I kept ping-ponging between wanting her side of the story, especially about what Christgau assures were many of their jointly arrived at theories of pop criticism, and a grim relief that she wasn’t around to read certain portions of this book. His respect for her as a thinker, critic and intellectual equal is impressive and his heartbreak over the end of their love affair is palpable indeed, but we could’ve easily been spared his description of her breasts, or his obvious remorse at having had sex with her on the same day she was raped by an intruder in their stairwell.
My sense of NYC geography isn’t sharp, but it strikes me that Christgau has spent much of his life living within 10 square miles. That, and the professional project of his life—listening to records 8 to 12 hours a day and writing 15,000 record reviews over an almost 50 year career— is a monument to insane focus. After reading this book, while I feel even more strongly that that project is worth celebrating, I don’t feel especially connected to its author. That doesn’t mean the man can’t write up a storm. A lovely section of the book details the creation of one of his finest works, from 1969. "In Memory of the Dave Clark Five" is a travelogue mostly about listening to the radio in a car—it barely mentions the DC5 and has a lot of not-so thinly veiled #realtalk about his heartbreak over Willis, but it somehow doesn’t lean too hard on sentiment or rock criticism or anything much at all, apart from how music simply makes you feel more alive. Like the 5th Dimension song he describes, it’s "not quite real, but it’s far from false, and that is very sad and very beautiful. Like most things, if you’re in the mood."
The Village Voice fired Christgau in 2006. Financial troubles and cutbacks at the paper had cut down the champion of the music consumer and curator of the famed annual critic’s poll Pazz & Jop in the venue where he’d done his most famous work. Like his career at the country’s premier alt-weekly, a top-down chapter of homogeny in rock criticism’s history seemed to be closing for good. Flung to the winds like so many others, the Dean of American Rock Critics contributes to Billboard, writes his Consumer Guide for Medium.com, teaches at NYU and maintains his massive archival website. But the beat, and the search for newer voices and other rooms, goes on.