Robert Christgau: Dean of American Rock Critics

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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

News

Ornette Coleman

Robert Christgau reviewed Ornette Coleman's last live performance (he believes) for Billboard almost exactly a year ago: Ornette Coleman in Prospect Park, June 12, 2014.

Website Charset Errors

UPDATE: I believe that the following problem has been fixed. Please let us know if it hasn't, or if you see other problems. Thanks.

The website was recently migrated to a new server with more recent software releases of PHP, MySQL, etc. The effect of this change is that the software now defaults to the UTF-8 character set, instead of the previous default, ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1), in effect way back when the website was originally built. All of the text/data in the website is encoded according to the old standard. However, when the new software processes the old data, it tends to drop strings when encountering characters that are encoded differently (mostly characters with accents used in French, Spanish, German, and other West European languages).

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Excerpts from Robert Christgau's Going Into the City:

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Robert Christgau's memoir, Going Into the City: Portrait of a Critic as a Young Man, was published by Dey Street Books and released on February 24.

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