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213.42.21.81
...was last month given the marching order by his longtime employer. Reason cited by the new owners of Village Voice for his dismissal was his "taste" in music. Christgau was editor of the monthly 'Consumer Guide' column since 1969 and whose opinion during the height of its cultural influence agitated stars like Lou Reed and Billy Joel to the extend of a public reprisal.Being a small-time fan of his, i find his writing ranges at times from the mighty interesting to the mighty hilarious. I guess one would not agree with his taste so long as they avoid the 'entrapment' of his reviews.
Follow Ups:
brianjones64 said:
I agree with the Village Voice , his tastes in music sucked .
I don't read the Village Voice, except for an occasional look back decades ago here & there. I didn't even know Christgau was still writing. I have a few of his books.... compilations of his brief reviews of rock recordings of the 70's & 80's. He's pretty mainstream, and many people dump on him, but you CAN get a good idea of where he's coming from by seeing what he likes & doesn't like. The fact one may disagree with his taste... so what? I sometimes found (those books) to be useful if you're looking for artists & LPs you've somehow missed along the way.
Nat Hentoff has been a fave of mine for decades. He writes more on culture & politics (freedom), but he's also one of the best writers on jazz. I'll occasionally (get to) read him through his (many) other online outlets/links.
On a similar (NYC papers) note here, I should mention that 2 weeks ago I stopped buying the NYTimes. (Sunday's paper). I've been buying & reading it for over 30 years! ....a habit that I got from my dad. I know the paper has been bleeding over the past few years, largely from idiotic management. But the Sunday paper had yet another price increase and that was that (for me). In recent weeks they've already eliminated their TV-guide section... it had a great 24-7 easy-to-navigate layout. It allowed for picking out rare movies & programs on at weird times & taping them for future watching. A great way to keep up with all sorts of things you'd otherwise miss. Their Arts section has gotten worse over the past 2-3 yrs... the only music they seem to cover now is weird world/pop type musics... they ignor anything that most curious seekers raised within the jazz & Rock traditions. I'd almost label it a "politically correct" music section. So it's become a joke. The Book section was always horribly written, although it's become somewhat better with Tennenhaus(sp) now editing it. But I'll miss (most) the fact that it at least keeps you hip with all the new stuff coming out every week... which is a veritable TON these days... obscure(r) things you might never see listed anywhere else. Oh well. Even it's Sunday Magazine section has gone down in quality a bit, although THAT's probably still the best part left in the Sunday edition.
I don't think their reason given is valid. They couldn't give a more honest reason? Like, 'this guy's got a big name in rock crit & we don't feel like paying him when we can get younger folks to do it for less'?Well, of course not.
Honestly, I think letting Jules Feiffer go was more of a shock to the system, and that happened before the internet changed everything. I'm actually surprised they haven't jettisoned Wayne Barrett & Nat Hentoff (tho he's good to keep around since having a guy like him who holds views far counter to that of much of their readership is real hip & all).
It's been decades since most people took the Voice seriously beyond their one or two pet columns or columnists. Or the listings & classifieds. The record industry is in the toilet. They let go of Chuck Eddy some months back. Christgau couldn't have been too surprised by this. I tried so many times to venture beyond the 2 or 3 things I picked it up for every single week of my adult life until a few years ago. I found it to be a load of crap, for the most part. He won't miss them.
But...it should be noted that 10 years ago we had a real good alternative weekly around here. A great read, with depth & attitude. It was a rag that happened to have politics that leaned in the other direction, which was part of what made it more interesting than the Voice. With the Voice, you always knew what you were getting. This other paper spiced things up for quite a few years, until the owner, who lived far downtown, was spooked enough by 9/11 to move his family to Baltimore. It was called the NY Press & while I had to have the Voice for the comprehensive listings detailing what band was playing in what venue, the Press rendered it relatively unreadable. But, the music coverage was already weak by that time. Christgau's credibility never really recovered from a divide that existed as a result of his refusal to cover Sonic Youth back in the early/mid 80s. It pissed a lot of people off, just because SY was doing something that most felt deserved coverage. Hell, I was never a fan, but they were amazing live, and refusing to cover them was just plain silly. And someone tried to attack him one night to strike a blow for the avant-garde, or something like that.
By the time the dust settled from that, there was a real good monthly called Spin that was outstanding for the first couple of years it was around, leading fewer & fewer people to take the pop & rock music coverage in the Voice seriously. Hell, Christgau'd probably make for a better read now, than he did then.
By the mid-90s, it hadn't gotten any better. And the NY Press ran an ad in their pages that poked fun at Christgau's style. Spin had nearly gone under & ended up reinventing itself as something nowhere near as good as it had originally been, and it's not like Rolling Stone was being taken seriously either...so he had retained his position as the Dean, or whatever the hell he is/was known as, due to little in the way of competition, beyond a fanzine here or there that was either painfully obscure, hard to find, or downright unreliable. NY Press skewered him, as follows:
"Auterist avatar of more seminally epochal, randomly eclecticized oeuvres, an enormous vinyl residue over the course of many more decades, yet a patently counterintuitive master of rock's primal, primordial sturm-und-drang, a name that conjurs and invokes the patently misinformed biographers of a career of peaks and valleys notwithstanding, indubitably avant-blues-funk of the murkiest backwater mojo bag discord egg cream since Delmore Schwartz Willie Dixon I saw them live at the Fillmore before you were born putative tragicomedic discord, minimalistically aleatoric with a swamp boogie idiomatic verbal aural Lester Bangs and Ellen Willis in diapers, pretrnaturally post-pop in its expansive formal swaggering ego loss and raw Aufnamen-Gesichtung-Gesundheit without the searing intermelodic revelations of peerlessly instructive though prior iterations of 4 p.m. and time for my medication not wholly unsubsumed nor associative concatenous pulsating counterrhythmic thud."
Underneath, it read"No, Robert Christgau didn't really write that. But could you tell the difference?
"NY Press: Music Criticism for People Under 50"
Well, their crit wasn't top-notch, but it was far better, for the times, for sure, than what Christgau was eking out up Lafayette Street. At this point, though, I don't see him as a target for that sort of thing anymore, and the NY Press, sadly, has become just another McWeekly. However, the Voice was the template for that sort of thing, so screw them too.I'll say this, though: give me Christgau's worst piece vs. the best batch o'words that a site like Pitchfork will ever find it within themselves to deem fit for publication. Yuk. But, as a final aside, I will say that there's something about live rock music in NYC that may play into this equation: headline acts (who these days are usually onstage by 9 pm or thereabouts) used to go on, typically, well past 11 pm at night. Often after midnight. Quite a few times after 1 am. Sometimes later. I saw the Ramones take the stage one night, more than 20 years ago, not long before 2 in the morning, and in the same era the Cure once began a set around 3 am or even later. This wasn't the exception, it was the norm. Unless there was a worthy opening act, it rarely seemed urgent to get to a room before 11 or midnight. By the mid-90s, things had changed. Maybe it had something to do with the unions, I'm not really sure. I remember seeing the Sex Pistols 10 years ago & thinking how strange it seemed that they went on at 9:30, and that I was home before midnight. Anyway, needless to say, this points towards the music scene having a different vibe, being such a late-night activity. Well, I'm not sure that the shift that occurred that moved set times hours forward didn't have an effect in ways that people don't necessarily think much about. And it's not that Christgau's writing struck me as being that of a late-night lounge lizard, but in the end people tend to look at things differently when they become different. His writing, taking this into consideration, or the perception of his writing, may have been affected by this, and in a way that fell out of vogue over time.
In any case, he'll live, I've got one of his books in the closet somewhere, I'll always respect the guy, but the idea of the Consumer Guide just never sat well with a guy like me who always far preferred the likes of Nick Tosches & Lester Bangs.
I enjoyed his writing, especially Grown Up All Wrong. I didn't always agree with his taste, but he turned me on to a few musicians I really grew to like that I would have otherwise missed, and for that reason alone, his is okay in my book.
I agree with the Village Voice , his tastes in music sucked .
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