Is It Still Good to Ya? Fifty Years of Rock Criticism 1967-2017 by Robert Christgau (Duke University Press, 443 pages)

 By Allen Barra

“Rock criticism,” Frank Zappa once quipped, “is writing by people who can’t write, written for people who can’t read.” If Zappa had been honest, he’d have added “about musicians who don’t know music.”  But let that pass. 

It’s now been at least 50 years since smart kids thought enough of popular music to want to read and write and argue about it, and criticism is arguably more vital to music than film criticism is to film. For most of the last 50 years, Robert Christgau has called himself “The Dean of American Rock Critics,” and though he has always said it jokingly, I have no doubt that he means it. I also don’t doubt that he really is the Dean of American Rock Critics; as Sean Connery said to Kevin Costner in The Untouchables when he identified himself as a treasury agent, ”Who would claim to be that who was not?”

He certainly has earned the title. The spectrum of musics he has written about, and with authority, is staggering, and if you care enough about rock music to think about it, you have read him for decades in the Village Voice (which he calls in the introduction to Is It Still Good to Ya? “A weekly magazine masquerading as a weekly newspaper.”)

From the early ‘70s to the end of the century, the pulse of rock, reggae, rap, pop, punk, new wave, country, and every other flavor that invigorated the smorgasbord of music could be felt in Christgau’s “Consumer Guide” column every couple of weeks in the Voice. It’s difficult to explain to young music followers today how much the Voice meant from the ‘70s to the ‘90s; simply put, New York was the national nerve center for alternative music, and Christgau’s desk was the center of the center. When new hotbeds of rock sprung up in Athens, Akron, Austin, or Seattle, the bands came to New York in the hope of being written about and reviewed by Christgau or one of the legion of young rock journalists he discovered and cultivated.

So influential was Christgau on the hip music scene that rock demigod Lou Reed, pissed that that he hadn’t gotten a higher grade in the Consumer Guide for a previous album, dissed Christgau by name on his live album Take No Prisoners (1978): “You work on an album for a year,” Lou whined to the background beat of Walk on the Wild Side, “and you get a B+ from an asshole at the Village Voice.” Christgau’s response was that Take No Prisoners was “essentially a comedy record … Me, I don’t play my greatest comedy albums, not even the Lenny Bruce ones, as much as I do [Lou Reed’s] Rock and Roll Animal.”  He gave Take No Prisoners a C+.

Across the Hudson River, in outposts as distant as, say, Birmingham, Alabama, Christgau’s criticism inspired something of a cult. In Birmingham, where I grew up, the Village Voice was scarcely seen outside college libraries. The Consumer Guide and Creem were read and discussed by enclaves of fans as studiously as filmgoers read Pauline Kael in the New Yorker. 

Creem folded in 1989 and Christgau left the Voice in 2006, but his readership is larger than ever. In recent years he has written for, among others, Playboy, Spin, the New Yorker and regularly for Billboard and Barnes and Noble Review.

HIs website is a treasure trove for music fans, containing hundreds of his Consumer Guide album reviews and columns and essays on all subjects rock and pop.

Robert Christgau is 75 years old now and knowing that comes as a bit of shock to those of us who went through our college years reading him. But an amazing thing happened to him on the way to his seventies: “As a left populist skeptical of academic postmodernism and avant-garde obscurantism who stopped dissing the middle brow mindset decades ago,” he broadened his scope, not merely keeping pace with new developments in rock, rap, and pop, but in new music coming from the suburbs of the world which his readers are stranger to. 

“Over the past two decades, my work life has changed, and so has my regular life … I’ve always taken death so seriously that I hit the high ‘60s with no use for hope-I-die-before-I-get-old bushwack. But now I am old, and how about that, so is rock and roll. Suddenly major artists are dying of relatively natural causes even if they could have been nicer to their livers.”

Christgau has no inclination “to moon about the good old days or make my bones explaining why the end is here.”  Listening to so much new music “is good for me because it’s good to me. Being a seventy-five-year-old rock critics is a terrific way to keep your spirits up – so much so that undergoing the basic training described in ‘Ten Step Program for Growing Better Ears’ might be worth the while of any ‘senior’ worried about his or her mojo.”

Let’s look at his Ten Step Program:

1.    Don’t give up now.

2.    Have a few drinks—smoke a joint, even.

3.    At the very least, lighten up, willya?

4.    Forget about soothing your savage beast.

5.    Repeat three times daily:  The good old days are the oldest myth in the world. Or, alternatively: Nostalgia sucks.

6.    Go somewhere you think is too noisy and stay an hour.  Go back.

7.    Grasp this truth: Musically, all Americans are part African.

8.    Attend a live performance by someone you’ve never seen before.

9.    Play your favorite teenager’s favorite album three times while doing something else. Put it away. Play it again two days later and notice what you remember.

10. Spend a week listening to James Brown’ Star Time.

This is a pretty sound program not only for discovering new sounds but for putting old ones in perspective.

The pieces are spread over five decades but short or long, all “leave me stretch room for the politics that imbue my aesthetic – an ear for democracy that responded from the dawn of Maybellene to the cocky class consciousness of wild-haired rockabilly and street-corner doo-wop, that believe from the git that the Americans I called Negroes were rock and roll’s prime motorvators …” (“Motorvator” should go into the dictionary citing Christgau as its originator.)

I’d add one more step to Christgau’s Ten-Step-Program: Make Is It Still Good To Ya? a literary companion to the music.

The only way I have of conveying the spectrum of Christgau’s sensibility and the whip-smart ear and eye he’s always brought to his criticism is to quote.

— On the difference between rock lyrics and poetry: “Poems are read or said. Songs are sung. [Dylan’s] My Back Pages is a bad poem. But it is a good song.”  Dylan did not “revolutionize modern poetry … He may have started something just as good, but modern poetry is getting along fine, thank you.”

— At a rock festival featuring Smashing Pumpkins’ with his wife  “Carola, who isn’t normally given to hyperbole, called it the worst performance she’d ever witnessed in her life.  I told her she’d never seen Richie Havens.”

— Kurt Cobain:  “He gave a generation of losers a hero who felt like a loser even in success – as opposed to a hero whose triumph they could only admire, emulate, envy. And thus he turned the barely self-sustaining concatenation of tendencies called ‘indie’ into a hot genre called ‘alternative.’ ”

— Aretha Franklin:  “When she’s on, what defines her magic is that she’s in the music but not of it. All her great performances, even Who’s Zoomin’ Who? and Freeway of Love, are infused with suffering, and from Ain’t No Way to In the Morning, all her suffering is infused with joy.”    

One of Christgau’s greatest strengths is that he relentlessly keeps up with the times. At least seven or eight presidents ago, Christgau was already the indispensable guide to the Ramones, Talking Heads, and Parliament Funkadelic. Now he’s even more necessary, the only critic who can sift through new pop from Africa and Egypt and nudge us in the right direction. To paraphrase Dylan, Christgau was older then, and he’s younger than that now.

Allen Barra writes about books and film for Truthdig, the Atlantic, the Daily Beast, the Guardian, Salon, and the New Republic. He was recently cited by the National Arts and Journalism Awards for literary and film criticism.