Robert Christgau
Robert Christgau contributes regular music reviews to All Things Considered.
Christgau began writing rock criticism for Esquire in 1967 and became a columnist at New York's Village Voice in 1969. He moved to Newsday in 1972, but in 1974 returned to the Voice, where he was the music editor for the next 10 years. From 1985 to 2006, he was a senior editor at the weekly as well as its chief music critic. He is best known for the Pazz & Jop Critics' Poll, for over 30 years the nation's most respected survey of rock-critical opinion, and his Consumer Guide column, where he began to publish letter-graded capsule album reviews in 1969. The Consumer Guide is now published by MSN Networks. Christgau is also a senior critic at Blender.
Christgau has taught at several colleges and universities, most extensively NYU, where after stints with the English and journalism departments, he now teaches music history in the Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music. In 1987, he won a Guggenheim fellowship to study the history of popular music. In 2002, he was a senior fellow at the National Arts Journalism Program, where he is now a member of the national board. He was the keynote speaker at the first EMP Pop Conference in 2002, and a Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University in 2007.
Christgau has published five books: the collections Any Old Way You Choose It (1973) and Grown Up All Wrong (1998), and three record guides based on his Consumer Guide columns. He has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The London Times, Playboy, The New Yorker, Video Review, Blender, Spin, The Nation, Salon, Believer, numerous alt-weeklies and many other publications. Most of his writing can be read on his website, robertchristgau.com. His capsule reviews are also part of the editorial content at the online music service Rhapsody.
Christgau was born in 1942. He attended New York City public schools and got his B.A. from Dartmouth in 1962. He married Carola Dibbell in 1974. In 1985, they became parents of a daughter, Nina.
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The Bright Eyes singer made Conor Oberst on an impulse while visiting the mystical mountain town of Tepoztlan in Mexico earlier this year. The approach is straight folk-rock, but it's less simple than it seems at first. But it also sounds like the next installment in the Bright Eyes catalog.
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Hayes Carll made a stir in Americana music with his self-released 2004 album, Little Rock. Music critic Robert Christgau says that Carll has matured some since then, and that maturity sounds good on him. Carll is good for a laugh, but Christgau says his sensitive side puts his new album, Trouble In Mind, over the top.
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A week after Lil Wayne's latest album was released, it had sold a million copies. Robert Christgau says the phenomenal success of Tha Carter III, especially in these dismal times for the music industry, is due to the risky marketing techniques Lil Wayne employed and the playful way he treats traditional gangsta rap themes. -
London-based 20-year-old Kate Nash is one of many British women poised to make pop breakthroughs in the wake of Lily Allen and Amy Winehouse. But music critic Robert Christgau thinks she's special, in large part because she's ordinary.
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The Australian band the Go-Betweens had a limited American profile, but they were huge in Europe until co-founder Grant McLennan died in 2006 of a heart attack. McLennan's old partner, Robert Forster, has a new solo album out.
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The Southern band remains guitar-heavy, but its new album features some of Drive-By Truckers' best songwriting so far — particularly in Patterson Hood's songs. On Brighter Than Creation's Dark the band tells stories about strugglers, musicians, and soldiers.
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The band's new album, Distortion, was influenced heavily by the feedback-laden guitars of The Jesus and Mary Chain. Songwriter Stephin Merritt and his band set typically glum lyrics to loud, fast, and fuzzy instrumentals.
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For many old-timers, soul music died when its Southern branch floundered at the end of the '60s. But as disco came on, Philadelphia produced a variant of its own, and now one of its sub-genres has been revived in credible fashion by The Legendary 3 Tenors of Soul.
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In an R&B world of larger-than-life divas, Jill Scott brings brains, heart and class to commonplace African-American culture. For the most part, The Real Thing is a murmured, whispered piece of work and the most purely pop record of her career.
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In the 1970s and '80s, pop music fans in Africa were dancing to a Congo-based music known as Soukous. One of its pioneers, Tabu Ley Rochereau, infused elements of American soul into the music. A major collection of his music was just released in the U.S.
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Ian Parton used to be the band's sole member, but his love of horns, hip-hop samples and female singers means the group keeps getting bigger. Proof of Youth, the band's second album, is just as fun as Thunder, Lightning, Strike, but stronger and louder.
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Jenny Lewis has the clear voice and honest melodicism of a guitar-strumming angel. But she is so good to look at and so forthright about her sexuality that some of Rilo Kiley's serious-minded natural audience suspect she is a pop starlet on the make, like Rihanna or the pitiable Britney Spears.
