Robert Christgau
The Village Voice gave me an outlet. They encouraged writers to publish idiosyncratic, intellectually ambitious journalism in voices that ranged from demonic to highfalutin. And they paid me well once the magazine was unionized. Getting paid is motivational.Collection: Motivational
My experience of what a loving relationship is like rings true with a lot of people I meet. I have a theory that the people you meet, one way you choose them, is their suitability for you in that particular matter. Attitudes toward friendship and marriage are in many cases closely aligned.Collection: Friendship
In the worst of times, music is a promise that times are meant to be better.
I am one of the barbarians - I love rock and roll.
One of the many things I hate about Donald Trump is that he embodies a kind of very popular popular culture that, as near as I'm able to perceive and stomach, is of no quality whatsoever.
I'm not a musician, I can't read music, but I came from a family of music fans. Not mad music fans, but people who like music. Both of my parents can play the piano. They were very good dancers, which I am not.
I think Theodore Adorno was profoundly ignorant. I think even Adorno's fans think he was bad at understanding popular music. He thought it was all jazz.
Anyway, you know, when Richard Meltzer said rock and roll died in '68, what he means is Jefferson Airplane were no longer his buddies, that's what he really means. He means it in a political way: that was when the artists and the audience found themselves on different levels.
My personal experience has been that in my free bohemian subculture, I'm not unique.
Bonnie Raitt and Lynyrd Skynyrd were two people I went on the road with.
Rock & roll fan that I am, Thelonious Monk is probably my favorite musical artist.
The idea is every time I go to a show, that night or the next morning I write it down in the gig log. Sometimes they're very scant, sometimes they're very long.
I review albums - really positive reviews - I know I'll never hear again, 'cause I'm just not going to have the time.
Chuck Berry's 'Maybellene' hit the airwaves at about the time Alan Freed got to New York, and it was definitely a song I really loved and related to.
There's a musicologist named Peter van der Merwe whose theory is that the blues generates tune families, and that their similarity to each other is in fact part of the pleasure you take in them - rather than the differentiation in which Jerome Kern and George Gershwin indulged to great effect.
I was never really a bohemian. I was a sloppy guy who liked cheap apartments and the arts, and who was very left-wing politically as the 60's progressed, though it took me a little while.
I don't like most world music because you need to know what the words are to really understand it.
When I grew up, there was a monoculture. Everybody listened to the same music on the radio. I miss monoculture. I think it's good for people to have a shared experience.
I don't have any thoughts on blogs, because I don't read them. I don't read them not out of any principle, but because there are only 24 hours in a day, and I like to read books.
What helps change bad writing into mediocre writing is editing. Editing is in bad shape in print journalism, and is in virtually nonexistent shape in online journalism.
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.
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.
I'm slow on the uptake about things. I didn't understand that the first Wu Tang album was great when I first heard it.
Every once in a while there's a day or two when I say, 'Gee, electric guitars, what an ugly sound.' But I'm a very enthusiastic person. For sure I'm an excitable, fun-loving person. I enjoy life.
Because I've always been good at knowing what I thought and not reviewing prematurely and have gotten better at those things over the years, my flips are rarely that significant.
I actually think I learned to write concisely working for an encyclopedia company in Chicago.
But I don't write a full capsule review of anything I haven't heard five times. It's usually closer to ten.
I think I've had a certain amount of success at making phrases. I'm a good writer. But obviously, I'm incredibly flattered and pleased when people remember things that I say.
I don't see myself as having had an exceptional life. Yeah sure, I've had an interesting life, but I'm more interested in what's not exceptional about it.
One meaningful distinction between high and popular culture, is that there's way more good popular culture - because its standards of quality are more forgiving, because sobriety isn't its default mode, because there's so damn much of it.
Forget good for you - art should be good to you.
Once people write criticism about something - and even in 1967 I was far from alone - they're assuming it's art, and art is supposed to last.
You can only adjust to so much history in your life. I still have trouble texting.
I found dozens of albums I loved every year of the early 70s and more in the late 70s and more still in the decades since, partly because I knew more about music by then and partly because there were more to choose from.
I love collections. I got into journalism with the idea that I'd be doing them.
The first half of 'Book Reports' deals with the history of popular music and rock criticism. When I hooked all those historical pieces together, building on the minstrelsy piece, it became my history of popular music.
My love of written language is every bit as great as my love for music.
I am interested in the highbrow/lowbrow synthesis. My sensibility, I am proud to say, is middlebrow.
As the editor at the Village Voice, I always tried to find writers of colour.
My wife is more important to me than anything in the world - including music. She's a great editor and companion for all of my work and she's a great writer herself. If you live with somebody who's smart, they'll affect your thinking more than anything.
I'm not happy that death is approaching because I like being alive but I'm glad I've escaped the two-post-a-day economy of contemporary journalism. Good writing takes time.
Every marriage is different, and it's impossible to understand your own marriage, really, much less anybody else's.
Even when I was working at The Village Voice, I only put in about 20 hours at the office.
I don't think that most of my peers in rock criticism are from the West Coast. I think most of them are from the East Coast.
If you're intimate with a mind as powerful as that of Ellen Willis, it takes you a long time to separate yourself from her ideas. She had an extremely powerful mind.
One of the things that's happened in the music I love over the past five, 10 years is that some people have gotten very old and continued to make music.
As a power listener who listens to music between 10 and 14 hours a day and who always has his earphones and MP3 player with him, convenience really means a lot to me.
One way I judge music is whether it compels me to listen to it.
If rock criticism is to be a political calling, which has always been my angle, that's obviously not because it's a fountainhead of protest songs.
In fact, many rock critics look askance at explicitly political lyrics, which I think is pretty stupid, without denying that some political lyrics are also pretty stupid.