Robert Christgau > Quotes

“One concept the non-old have trouble getting their minds around is the difference between taste and judgment. It's fine not to like almost anything, except maybe Al Green. That's taste, yours to do with as you please, critical deployment included. By comparison, judgment requires serious psychological calisthenics. But the fact that objectivity only comes naturally in math doesn't mean it can't be approximated in art.
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― Robert Christgau

“All lives are interesting – how interesting depends on the telling,”
― Robert Christgau

“To the eternal “Opinions are like assholes—everybody’s got one,” I just say, “Yeah, but not everybody’s got ten thousand of them.” It distresses me that the wit of this riposte so often fails to impress the asshole I’m talking to.”
― Robert Christgau, Going into the City: Portrait of a Critic as a Young Man – A Love Story and Homage to Rock 'n' Roll's Transformative Power in New York

“the old anti-‘commercial’ tendencies mocked throughout this book have been bulked up into a worldview by the runaway growth of what I call semipopular music.” (Oh yeah, “semipopular music.” Er, “music more popular in form than in market share.” At least when it starts out. Under the rubric “alternative,” now also an established image-making strategy that informs many of the “brands” ambitious young musicians concoct for themselves.”
― Robert Christgau, Going into the City: Portrait of a Critic as a Young Man – A Love Story and Homage to Rock 'n' Roll's Transformative Power in New York

“...unlike Aretha, [Al Green's] only rival vocally, Al never sold himself short in the studio. Where the albums follow the vagaries of genius, the hits exploit Al's personal production line, every one a perfect soul record and a perfect pop record in whatever order suits your petty little values. Brashly feminine and seductively woman-friendly, he breaks free in a register that darts and floats and soars into falsetto with startling frequency and beguiling ease. He's so gorgeous, so sexy, so physically attractive that only masochists want to live without him.”
― Robert Christgau

“One of the many foolish things about the fools who compare writing about music to dancing about architecture is that dancing usually is about architecture. When bodies move in relation to a designed space, be it stage or ballroom or living room or gymnasium or agora or Congo Square, they comment on that space”
― Robert Christgau

“In the worst of times music is a promise that times are meant to be better. Ultimately, its most important political purpose is to keep us human under fire.”
― Robert Christgau

“In the worst of times, music is a promise that times are meant to be better. Ultimately, its most important political purpose is to keep us human under fire.”
― Robert Christgau

“Punk nostalgia, on the other hand, is a grotesque oxymoron. What can it mean to pine for a time when you were young and nihilistic? To look back twenty years to when you believed there was no future?”
― Robert Christgau, Grown Up All Wrong: 75 Great Rock and Pop Artists from Vaudeville to Techno