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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
The self-styled dean of American rock criticism talks about rock's past, its future and why he hit Ellen Willis in the face with a piece of pie.
May 9, 2001 | For 35 years, Robert Christgau has written about pop music, first for Esquire in its new journalism salad days and then, for fully 29 of the past 31 years, at the Village Voice, where he still holds a senior editor title. Over that time he has tracked, with unmatched energy and unflagging interest, the course of our culture's most protean art form.
It's also our most youthful art form; yet, at 59, Christgau still maintains a sympathetic ear for the music's newest sounds, even as he's matured into a sophisticated appreciation of world pop on a scale few American writers can claim.
His work is unmistakable: At Christgau's best, he's fiercely analytical, dispensing dense sentences that twist in on themselves and (sometimes) the reader, rife with allusions both academic and street and displaying both a ready conversance with theory and a scathing contempt for puffery.
He has lived in a book-strewn flat in New York's East Village for decades. He married Carola Dibbell in 1974; they have a daughter, Nina, now 15. Over the years Christgau has maintained combative friendships with critics like Ellen Willis, Greil Marcus and Dave Marsh, and mentored a generation or two of young critics, notably Ann Powers, now a staff critic for the New York Times.
The 28th edition of the Voice's Pazz & Jop Critics' Poll was published in March. A lineup of nearly 600 critics voted Outkast's "Stankonia" the album of the year. Created and still overseen by Christgau, the poll incorporates the views of ever-new generations of younger critics and can lay claim to having rarely missed talent when it first appeared, making it arguably the most comprehensive and respectable award operation in any medium.
Christgau continues to write a column, "Rock&Roll&," for the Voice and pens a monthly "Consumer Guide" of capsule record reviews. He has three recent books: "Grown Up All Wrong," a collection of his recent Voice essays; "Christgau's Consumer Guide: Albums of the '90s," the third assemblage of the Consumer Guide capsules; and "Any Old Way You Choose It," a reissue of his first, 1973 anthology of his earliest work.
We spoke to Christgau recently in New York.
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How do you feel about the notion of a rock canon?
I've been accused of being a canonizer myself and I'm pleased to say that that's now a complete absurdity.
Do you think you worked out of that way of thinking?
I think that the culture simply passed me by. Canonization is institutional. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is a canonizing institution. Jann Wenner has worked to make Rolling Stone the keeper of the canon since 1970. I don't like that, because he uses institutional power and he uses economic power to enforce those standards. Similarly, when MTV does one of its incredibly stupid historical rundowns -- which it does four times a year of some dumb shit or other -- it's using its institutional and economic power to enforce a canon. I just express my tastes. But I think that there was a time in, say, the '70s when my tastes were so in keeping with the conventional critical wisdom that I was a kind of a canon keeper.
Kind of an anti-canon canonizer?
I was and I wasn't. For the critics I wasn't. Maybe for the industry I was 'cause I always liked punk. But critics never had any problems with the Sex Pistols and the Clash; it was just the industry that did.
None of your books has presented your work in a canonizing way. Maybe specific essays do.
Somebody may well ask me to write a canonizing record book.
And would you?
If the money were right, I wouldn't hesitate to do it. But even then, Dr. Dre and Radiohead would not be in that book. Now Radiohead is the most important rock band in the world by acclamation. Bull fucking shit, you know. They suck. And whether I'll be vindicated or not I don't know.
What's the next thing after the teen boom?
I never prophesy. I've been saying hip-hop, hip-hop, hip-hop, hip-hop for a long time, and now I'll say hip-hop, hip-hop, hip-hop, hip-hop. I don't see any signs that it's slowing down. And obviously other stuff is going to go on. You know what I mean: The trend is no trend -- that's the trend. The trend is the proliferation of outlets, genres, audiences. That's clearly the case and it makes perfect sense structurally in terms of the economy and the way the society is structured.
You're not a doomsayer about audience fragmentation?
No, I'm not. But I also don't think it's a good thing that we've lost what's called the monoculture. I grew up with the monoculture. I don't think it's such a bad idea that people learn the same history in school. I think it tends to ground people and give them something to respond to and react against. But on the other hand, if 25 years ago you had said, "Oh, there'll be 50 different radio stations that'll all play different kinds of music and there'll be thousands of different songs on the radio," people would have said, "Oh really? That sounds great." Now they say, "Oh, it's the end of the world." Well, it's one or the other. Maybe it's neither.
You know, information overload is a phrase I've been using in my criticism for a long time. Change seems disturbing, threatening, fucking irritating, an affront to one's very existence. But it's not a good idea to base a career on it. I'm very anti-nostalgia and I'm very anti-golden age.
