Robert Christgau
I believe an editor's job is to help a writer sound like himself or herself.
I basically believe that all pop stars create personas and manipulate them. What we relate to are not their real selves; they are projections, which tend to shift in shape.
People believe that criticism should be objective, whatever that means, but I really don't understand what people mean by that. I guess if you're doing sonata-allegro procedure analysis, you can be objective for a page or two. But in pop? Really hard.
I like to say that I don't have the slightest doubt that Barack Obama read me in the early 80s. It's the kind of person he was!
Believe me, I think if I stopped writing when I left The Voice I would have quite a legacy. But the fact of the matter was, it never occurred to me to stop.
The idea with a collection is sort of to begin with a kind of bang.
Subject is very important. If you're going to write non-fiction the style means nothing or very little. The content justifies the effort you need to put into the writing itself.
If you wanna write non-fiction you have to be interested in the world.
I believe that writing on music is experienced inside your head, is not a physically present in the world, it has a different kind of authority and prominence and you absorb it differently.
I don't know any celebrities. I know a lot of people that most people have never heard of.
You know, criticism began as the province of amateurs, of wealthy men who liked the arts.
I'm not that Internet-savvy. I get by. But that's all. I don't have serious skills or any other stuff.
Everything I know about Facebook makes me want to avoid it. Twitter has really improved my reading habits.
The most important single fact about pop music in the Nineties, is the number of hours made commercially available increased by an estimated factor of ten.
I don't believe in pulling punches or being judicious, as the standard in literary criticism or academic musicology.
Certainly it's much more important for me to go to a good movie and spend a nice night with my wife than it is to listen to a specific piece of music.
I've always been a jazz fan, but I don't write much about jazz, because I don't have the chops. But it's really, really hard to write about improvised instrumental music when you don't have a good knowledge of harmony and can't identify rhythm signatures very easily either.
Prince Rogers Nelson was the most gifted artist of the rock era. Not the greatest genius - just the most musical in the broadest sense.
Prince had always told us he just wanted to get through this thing called life. But now that his own physical life has ended, his artistic life will continue.