Top 35 Robert Christgau Quotes

I don’t think it’s such a bad idea that people learn the same history in school. I think it tends to ground people and give them something to respond to and react against.

What helps change bad writing into mediocre writing is editing. Editing is in bad shape in print journalism, and is in virtually nonexistent shape in online journalism.

Rock & roll fan that I am, Thelonious Monk is probably my favorite musical artist.

I don’t like most world music because you need to know what the words are to really understand it.

Subject is very important. If you’re going to write non-fiction the style means nothing or very little. The content justifies the effort you need to put into the writing itself.

I’m not happy that death is approaching because I like being alive but I’m glad I’ve escaped the two-post-a-day economy of contemporary journalism. Good writing takes time.

I don’t believe in pulling punches or being judicious, as the standard in literary criticism or academic musicology.

Every marriage is different, and it’s impossible to understand your own marriage, really, much less anybody else’s.

As a power listener who listens to music between 10 and 14 hours a day and who always has his earphones and MP3 player with him, convenience really means a lot to me.

My personal experience has been that in my free bohemian subculture, I’m not unique.

I am one of the barbarians – I love rock and roll.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is a canonizing institution. Jann Wenner has worked to make Rolling Stone the keeper of the canon since 1970. I don’t like that, because he uses institutional power and he uses economic power to enforce those standards.

Ultimately, to insist that rock criticism be political is first to insist that the humans who make and enjoy music are embroiled in politics whether they like it or not – and whether they know it or not.

My wife is more important to me than anything in the world – including music. She’s a great editor and companion for all of my work and she’s a great writer herself. If you live with somebody who’s smart, they’ll affect your thinking more than anything.

One of the many things I hate about Donald Trump is that he embodies a kind of very popular popular culture that, as near as I’m able to perceive and stomach, is of no quality whatsoever.

Believe me, I think if I stopped writing when I left The Voice I would have quite a legacy. But the fact of the matter was, it never occurred to me to stop.

Prince Rogers Nelson was the most gifted artist of the rock era. Not the greatest genius – just the most musical in the broadest sense.

As the editor at the Village Voice, I always tried to find writers of colour.

There’s a musicologist named Peter van der Merwe whose theory is that the blues generates tune families, and that their similarity to each other is in fact part of the pleasure you take in them – rather than the differentiation in which Jerome Kern and George Gershwin indulged to great effect.

One of the things that’s happened in the music I love over the past five, 10 years is that some people have gotten very old and continued to make music.

Because I’ve always been good at knowing what I thought and not reviewing prematurely and have gotten better at those things over the years, my flips are rarely that significant.

One meaningful distinction between high and popular culture, is that there’s way more good popular culture – because its standards of quality are more forgiving, because sobriety isn’t its default mode, because there’s so damn much of it.

Once people write criticism about something – and even in 1967 I was far from alone – they’re assuming it’s art, and art is supposed to last.

I don’t think that most of my peers in rock criticism are from the West Coast. I think most of them are from the East Coast.

Chuck Berry’s ‘Maybellene’ hit the airwaves at about the time Alan Freed got to New York, and it was definitely a song I really loved and related to.

I basically believe that all pop stars create personas and manipulate them. What we relate to are not their real selves; they are projections, which tend to shift in shape.

My experience of what a loving relationship is like rings true with a lot of people I meet. I have a theory that the people you meet, one way you choose them, is their suitability for you in that particular matter. Attitudes toward friendship and marriage are in many cases closely aligned.

You know, criticism began as the province of amateurs, of wealthy men who liked the arts.

If rock criticism is to be a political calling, which has always been my angle, that’s obviously not because it’s a fountainhead of protest songs.

I believe that writing on music is experienced inside your head, is not a physically present in the world, it has a different kind of authority and prominence and you absorb it differently.

I am interested in the highbrow/lowbrow synthesis. My sensibility, I am proud to say, is middlebrow.

I found dozens of albums I loved every year of the early 70s and more in the late 70s and more still in the decades since, partly because I knew more about music by then and partly because there were more to choose from.

Everything I know about Facebook makes me want to avoid it. Twitter has really improved my reading habits.

I was never really a bohemian. I was a sloppy guy who liked cheap apartments and the arts, and who was very left-wing politically as the 60’s progressed, though it took me a little while.

You can only adjust to so much history in your life. I still have trouble texting.