Feb 20, 2019 - Everything with the topic 'Expert Witness With Robert Christgau' on Noisey. Robert Christgau and Greil Marcus. In the prologue to “Is It Still Good to Ya?,” a title borrowed from a 1978 R. & B. hit by the duo Ashford & Simpson, Christgau makes the aesthetic stakes plain: “Forget good Will be used in accordance with our The countertenor John Holiday, who counts among his influences his grandmother’s church choir and Cardi B, wants to bring classical music to the masses. “I believe an editor’s job is to help a writer sound like himself or herself,” says Robert Christgau, who brilliantly applies that principle to his own third and fourth essay collections, Is It Still Good To Ya? The Rock Critic Robert Christgau’s Big-Hearted Theory of Pop. Robert Christgau has covered popular music for Sign up now for Robert Christgau alerts, including news and special offers. The interest in ranking and rating is also evident in a critics poll that he founded, and for many years ran, at the A less widely known but still key Christgau contribution is all the work he’s done that didn’t come with his byline. In the introduction to “Book Reports,” he name-checks A. J. Liebling’s “The beginning of Christgau’s career as a full-time music critic, with the Save for a couple of years in the early seventies, when Christgau took a job as the music critic for Driven, in part, by a “crude desire to know more about my subject than anyone else in the world,” Christgau has now, by his own count, reviewed more than seventeen thousand albums. It follows a collection that Christgau published last year, ““Even among rock critics, who ought to know better, fun doesn’t have much of a rep,” Christgau wrote, back in 1972, in a Christgau didn’t set out to become a rock critic for the simple reason that, when he began his career, a rock critic was not something one could become. Feb 20, 2019 - Everything with the topic 'Expert Witness With Robert Christgau' on Noisey .. His memoir, Going Into the City, was published in 2015. If you have any questions, please review our privacy policy or email us at Copyright © 2020 HarperCollins Publishers All rights reserved. One thinks of the seventeen thousand or so “Consumer Guide” reviews and Christgau’s insistence on keeping them coming. His reviews have helped me really get into a ton of music, including artists like Prince, Sly & the Family Stone, Public Enemy, Bruce Springsteen, Al green. You might well call this impulse democratic, particularly given the eclecticism that Christgau has never let abate: even in the omnivorous era of pop-culture criticism that he helped bring into being, Christgau has conspicuously big ears.

The prevalence, in our critical culture, of capsule reviews that are geared toward an in-crowd and trade in letter grades or star ratings, accompanied on occasion by snark and condescension, can at least partly be traced to misapprehensions about what Christgau has been up to.