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.
-
The self-billed "blind couple of Mali" have been recording since the '80s, but they've never stuck to one style. On Welcome to Mali, Amadou and Mariam absorb ideas from everywhere and sound like they're having a ball.
-
The second album by Somalia-born Canadian alt-rapper K'Naan finds the artist embracing a swing-infused bent, complete with Ethiopian samples and strong hooks. Troubadour fits alongside the best pop efforts of Lil Wayne and T.I., with music that stays in your head for days. -
Though the Congolese music known as soukous was Africa's biggest pop-music style in the '70s and '80s, it only reached the U.S. in bits and pieces. But a new anthology by the musician known as Franco goes a long way toward completing the puzzle.
-
Gregg Gillis is a Pittsburgh DJ and musical mixologist who was known only by his stage name, Girl Talk, until his music took off and he could quit his day job as a biomedical engineer. Often, music by mixologists sounds esoteric, but that could hardly be claimed of Girl Talk's latest mashup album, Feed the Animals.
-
The critically acclaimed rapper Jean Grae has released a new album, Jeanius. The rapping is remarkable for its rapidity, clarity and idiomatic cadence. The writing has a good-humored polysyllabic literacy.
-
Brooklyn's TV on the Radio has always been a forward-thinking rock band. Its new album, Dear Science, is its funkiest, but in a typically complicated way. Sick of living with pessimism, the band has brightened its tunes and beats.
-
Formed in Dallas, the Old 97's were long pigeonholed as an alt-country band. They never were — just a rocking quartet with a terrific songwriter up top. They've just put out their best album in seven years.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
