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And It Don't Stop on Substack Robert Christgau's newsletter And It Don't Stop appears three (or four) times a month on Substack. Subscribe here. Robert Christgau's Big-Hearted Theory of Pop 
Book Reports features reviews of not only the pop-music tomes you'd predict but also literary fiction, Marxist-adjacent cultural commentary, feminist debates over pornography, and even books about the past decade's financial crisis. It follows a collection that Christgau published last year, Is It Still Good to Ya? Fifty Years of Rock Criticism, 1967-2017, which includes Christgau's takes on, among many other things, classic rock, Kanye West, the music of Desert Storm, Lollapalooza, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, and so-called guilty pleasures--a category that Christgau rejects, since, for rock critics, as he puts it, "pleasure is where meaning begins." Together, these collections make the sneaky case that Christgau is not just the Dean of American Rock Critics, his self-awarded and perhaps slightly off-putting nickname, but one of America's sharper public intellectuals of the past half century, and certainly one of its most influential--not to mention one of the better stylists in that cohort. Fun is a big part of why. --David Cantwell, The New Yorker NewsExpert Witness: Tinariwen, Terakaft, and Sidi Touré
[posted by Webmaster on 2015-11-27] Expert Witness: Craig Finn's Best Bunch of Songs This Decade
Carola Dibbell's novel, The Only Ones was listed by the Washington Post as one of the Best science fiction and fantasy books of 2015. [posted by Webmaster on 2015-11-20] Expert Witness: Middle Eastern Rap to Jewish Southern Folk
Robert Christgau also has a new article at BN Review:
[posted by Webmaster on 2015-11-13] Expert Witness: You Should Always Listen to More Jazz
We've also added some archival pieces by Carola Dibbell:
Our books were selected for the "Reading Room" page of the Oprah's Favorite Things issue of O. To quote:
[posted by Webmaster on 2015-11-06] Expert Witness: Love, Doubt, and Death in New York City
[posted by Webmaster on 2015-10-30] Expert Witness: Just Rhythm Music, on Its Own Unrelenting Terms
Carola Dibbell's website was crippled for a few days but is back up now. Unfortunately, the outage occurred while she is promiting her novel, The Only Ones, in Portland, Oregon. She appears Friday night, October 23, 7-9PM at Late Night Library's All Fines Forgiven, reading and conversing with Amelia Gray. [posted by Webmaster on 2015-10-23] Expert Witness: Canada, Croatia, and the Misery of Sufjan Stevens
Robert Christgau and Carola Dibbell will be appearing at the Texas Book Festival in Austin, TX:
Carola Dibbell will be speaking and reading from The Only Ones in Portland, Oregon:
[posted by Webmaster on 2015-10-16] Expert Witness: A Trip Down Country Road
Also a technical note: for some time now, the
Random A-List page has been stuck in a rut
where the same dozen items appear nearly every time you load the page.
This was a consequence of the ISP installing some server-side caching
software: a good idea in terms of overall performance, but crippling in
this case. I've disabled the caching, so the page works now. I've also
added a convenient "reload" link near the top. By the way,
the page has a couple options built in: if you add to the URI
[posted by Webmaster on 2015-10-09] Expert Witness: Future Is the Proof We Need That Money Doesn't Buy Happiness
[posted by Webmaster on 2015-10-02] Expert Witness: Chance the Rapper and Friends Count Their Blessings
[posted by Webmaster on 2015-09-25] Book Events Robert Christgau and Carola Dibbell will be at the Brooklyn Book Festival on Saturday, September 20:
They also have an event scheduled for Austin, TX (October 18). In addition, Dibbell has an event sponsored by the Portland Public Library (October 23) in Portland, OR. [posted by Webmaster on 2015-09-19] Expert Witness: Exploring Legendary and Overlooked Afropop
[posted by Webmaster on 2015-09-18] Expert Witness: Young Thug's Most Useful Performance Since Black Portland
[posted by Webmaster on 2015-09-11] Expert Witness: You'd Think Willie Nelson Wrote the Song About Pot
[posted by Webmaster on 2015-09-04] Expert Witness: Yo La Tengo Made Their Loveliest Album Ever
[posted by Webmaster on 2015-08-28] Website Update Status: Working I attempted an update of the website this afternoon (about 3:30 PM CDT). The flat file part went smoothly, so there are a number of new files and minor programming changes. See Changelog for further information (although I doubt it actually covers everything). Initially the database failed due to a version incompatibility. I found a workaround for this, so the database is currently loaded and functioning. Sorry for the brief inconvenience. Please send mail to webmaster [@] robertchristgau.com if you find further problems. [posted by Webmaster on 2015-08-25] Expert Witness: Hopping Along Into a Girlpool
[posted by Webmaster on 2015-08-21] Expert Witness Returns
[posted by Webmaster on 2015-08-14] Perfect Sound Forever Robert Christgau was guest editor for the August/September 2015 issue of the online music magazine, Perfect Sound Forever. In his introduction, Christgau wrote:
[posted by webmaster on 2015-08-06] Expert Witness at Cuepoint/Medium It took a while, as new business models cough-cough always do, but as of June 25 what had seemed increasingly likely ever since my June 5 submission was put on hold became official: 10 months in, Expert Witness's run at Cuepoint/Medium is over. Editor Jon Shecter compensated me well and always gave me the freedom he'd promised, for which I'm very grateful--it felt so right to be reviewing (and grading) albums after a year's hiatus. But let me emphasize that both the compensation and the institutional home were part of the satisfaction--I like earning money for my work and I like being part of a top-edited periodical. As with MSN in 2013, I have not been singled out here. Where MSN offed its entire freelance sector, Shecter's bosses have apparently decided that their music "vertical" will now feature what web publishers like to call "reader-provided" copy. Me, I think the term "unpaid" is more to the point. Having made a living as a journalist for more than 50 years now, I don't regard writing as a hobby, or as "self-expression." It's a job, and better for it. Having taken a teaching post in part because it's hard out there for a freelancer, I expended most of what little spare time remained between September and May keeping EW afloat. One sad thing about the timing of the Medium reboot is that with the spring term over I was going back to stuff I'd never fully borne down on and seeking out titles I'd missed. It was interesting--in fact, kind of exciting. I'm still listening to current music all day and writing occasional reviews, but with less organizational purpose--often as a way to get my head around something I've immersed in deep enough. My basic theory hasn't changed. My working assumption is that popular music is of lasting artistic value, that the album format remains an excellent way to realize that value, that an album's potential often becomes more vivid when it's a physical object, and that my little reviews have proven of some importance in a complex historicizing process. If somebody wants to pay me to continue to publish these reviews, I'll definitely consider it, and it's possible the Witnesses, as I call the amazingly articulate fan base that crystallized when MSN turned the Consumer Guide into Expert Witness in 2010, will persuade me to go it alone in some format yet to be determined, although I have reservations about every one so far proposed. I can't see any way, however, that such a development will come to fruition before Carola and I take a two-week European vacation set to commence three weeks from today--although I do admittedly have a dozen reviews in the kitty and may even turn out a few more before we leave. It's conceivable I'll see you in September--even August. Just in case, though, I figure I owe the Witnesses at least one small thing--the final listing in a file called EWMDEX in my WP51 files. It goes:
[posted by Robert Christgau on 2015-06-30] Most Recent -- More Recent -- More Ancient More Information |
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