Robert Thomas Christgau ( KRIST-gow; born April 18, 1942) is an American music journalist and essayist. Among the most influential music critics, he began his career in the late 1960s as one of the earliest professional rock critics and later became an early proponent of musical movements such as hip-hop, riot grrrl, and the import of African popular music in the West. He was the chief music critic and senior editor for The Village Voice for 37 years, during which time he created and oversaw the annual Pazz & Jop critics poll. He has also covered popular music for Esquire, Creem, Newsday, Playboy, Rolling Stone, Billboard, NPR, Blender, and MSN Music; he was a visiting arts teacher at New York University. CNN senior writer Jamie Allen has called Christgau "the E. F. Hutton of the music world—when he talks, people listen."
Christgau is best known for his terse, letter-graded capsule album reviews, composed in a concentrated, fragmented prose style featuring layered clauses, caustic wit, one-liner jokes, political digressions, and allusions ranging from common knowledge to the esoteric. His writing is often informed by leftist politics (particularly feminism and secular humanism). He has generally favored song-oriented musical forms and qualities of wit and formal rigor, as well as musicianship from uncommon sources.
Originally published in his "Consumer Guide" columns during his tenure at The Village Voice from 1969 to 2006, the reviews were collected in book form across three decade-ending volumes: Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies (1981), Christgau's Record Guide: The '80s (1990), and Christgau's Consumer Guide: Albums of the '90s (2000). Multiple collections of his essays have been published in book form, and a website published in his name since 2001 has freely hosted most of his work.
In 2006, the Voice fired Christgau after the paper's acquisition by New Times Media. He continued to write reviews in the "Consumer Guide" format for MSN Music, Cuepoint, and Noisey (Vice's music section) where they were published in his "Expert Witness" column until July 2019. In September of the same year, he launched a paid-subscription newsletter called And It Don't Stop, published on the email-newsletter platform Substack and featuring a monthly "Consumer Guide" column, among other writings.
Christgau was born in Greenwich Village in Manhattan, New York City, on April 18, 1942. He grew up in Queens, the son of a fireman. He has said he became a rock and roll fan when disc jockey Alan Freed moved to the city in 1954.
After attending public school in the city, Christgau attended Dartmouth College, graduating in 1962 with a B.A. degree in English. At college, his musical interests turned to jazz, but he quickly returned to rock after moving back to New York. He has said that Miles Davis's 1960 album Sketches of Spain initiated "one phase of the disillusionment (in him) with jazz that resulted in my return to rock and roll." He was deeply influenced by New Journalism writers including Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe. "My ambitions when I went into journalism were always, to an extent, literary," Christgau said later.
Christgau wrote short stories, before giving up fiction in 1964 to become a sportswriter and later, a police reporter for the Newark Star-Ledger. He became a freelance writer after a story he wrote about the death of a woman in New Jersey was published by New York magazine. He was among the first dedicated rock critics. He was asked to take over the dormant music column at Esquire, which he began writing in June 1967. He also contributed to Cheetah magazine at the time. He then became a leading voice in the formation of a musical–political aesthetic combining New Left politics and the counterculture. After Esquire discontinued the column, Christgau moved to The Village Voice in 1969, and he also worked as a college professor.
From early on in his emergence as a critic, Christgau was conscious of his lack of formal knowledge of music. In a 1968 piece he commented:
I don't know anything about music, which ought to be a damaging admission but isn't. ... The fact is that pop writers in general shy away from such arcana as key signature and beats to the measure. ... I used to confide my worries about this to friends in the record industry, who reassured me. They didn't know anything about music either. The technical stuff didn't matter, I was told. You just gotta dig it.
In early 1972, Christgau accepted a full-time job as music critic for Newsday. He returned to The Village Voice in 1974 as music editor. In a 1976 piece for the newspaper, he coined the term "Rock Critic Establishment" to describe the growth in influence of American music critics. His article carried the parenthesized subtitle "But Is That Bad for Rock?" He listed Dave Marsh, John Rockwell, Paul Nelson, Jon Landau and himself as members of this "establishment". Christgau remained at The Village Voice until August 2006, when he was fired shortly after the paper's acquisition by New Times Media. Two months later, Christgau became a contributing editor at Rolling Stone (which first published his review of Moby Grape's Wow in 1968). Late in 2007, Christgau was dismissed by Rolling Stone, although he continued to work for the magazine for another three months. Beginning with the March 2008 issue, he joined Blender, where he was listed as "senior critic" for three issues and then "contributing editor". Christgau had been a regular contributor to Blender before he joined Rolling Stone. He continued to write for Blender until the magazine ceased publication in March 2009. In 1987, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of "folklore and popular culture" to study the history of popular music.
Christgau has also written frequently for Playboy, Spin, and Creem. He appears in the 2011 rockumentary Color Me Obsessed, about the Replacements. He previously taught during the formative years of the California Institute of the Arts. As of 2007, he was an adjunct professor in the Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music at New York University.
In August 2013, Christgau revealed in an article written for Barnes & Noble's website that he was writing a memoir. On July 15, 2014, Christgau debuted a monthly column on Billboard's website.
"Consumer Guide" and "Expert Witness" columns
Christgau is perhaps best known for his "Consumer Guide" columns, which have been published more-or-less monthly since July 10, 1969, in the Village Voice, as well as a brief period in Creem. In its original format, each edition of the "Consumer Guide" consisted of approximately 20 single-paragraph album reviews, each given a letter grade ranging from A+ to E−. The reviews were later collected, expanded, and extensively revised in a three-volume book series, the first of which was published in 1981 as Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies; it was followed by Christgau's Record Guide: The '80s (1990) and Christgau's Consumer Guide: Albums of the '90s (2000).
In his original grading system from 1969 to 1990, albums were given a grade ranging from A+ to E−. Under this system, Christgau generally considered a B+ or higher to be a personal recommendation. He noted that in practice, grades below a C− were rare. In 1990, Christgau changed the format of the "Consumer Guide" to focus more on the albums he liked. B+ records that Christgau deemed "unworthy of a full review" were mostly given brief comments and star marks ranging from three down to one, denoting an honorable mention", records which Christgau believed may be of interest to their own target audience. Lesser albums were filed under categories such as "Neither" (which may impress at first with "coherent craft or an arresting track or two", before failing to make an impression again) and "Duds" (which indicated bad records and were listed without further comment). Christgau did give full reviews and traditional grades to records he pans in an annual November "Turkey Shoot" column in The Village Voice, until he left the newspaper in 2006.