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

by Robert Christgau

One of our great essayists and journalists—the Dean of American Rock Critics, Robert Christgau—takes us on a heady tour through his life and times in this vividly atmospheric and visceral memoir that is both a love letter to a New York long past and a tribute to the transformative power of art. Lifelong New Yorker Robert Christgau has been writing about pop culture since he was twelve and getting paid for it since he was twenty-two, covering rock for Esquire in its heyday and personifying the music beat at the Village Voice for over three decades. Christgau listened to Alan Freed howl about rock ‘n’ roll before Elvis, settled east of Manhattan’s Avenue B forty years before it was cool, witnessed Monterey and Woodstock and Chicago ’68, and the first abortion speak-out. He’s caught Coltrane in the East Village, Muddy Waters in Chicago, Otis Redding at the Apollo, the Dead in the Haight, Janis Joplin at the Fillmore, the Rolling Stones at the Garden, the Clash in Leeds, Grandmaster Flash in Times Square, and every punk band you can think of at CBGB. Christgau chronicled many of the key cultural shifts of the last half century and revolutionized the cultural status of the music critic in the process. Going Into the City is a look back at the upbringing that grounded him, the history that transformed him, and the music, books, and films that showed him the way. Like Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City, E. B. White’s Here Is New York , Joseph Mitchell’s Up in the Old Hotel , and Patti Smith’s Just Kids , it is a loving portrait of a lost New York. It’s an homage to the city of Christgau’s youth from Queens to the Lower East Side—a city that exists mostly in memory today. And it’s a love story about the Greenwich Village girl who roamed this realm of possibility with him.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, Memoir, Biography, New York, Criticism, Pop Culture

384 pages, Hardcover

First published December 15, 2014

About the author

Robert Thomas Christgau (born April 18, 1942) is an American music journalist and essayist. He began his career in the late 1960s as one of the earliest professional rock critics and later became an early proponent of musical movements such as hip hop, riot grrrl, and the import of African popular music in the West.

Christgau spent 37 years as the chief music critic and senior editor for The Village Voice, during which time he created and oversaw the annual Pazz & Jop critics poll. He has also covered popular music for Esquire, Creem, Newsday, Playboy, Rolling Stone, Billboard, NPR, Blender, and MSN Music, and was a visiting arts teacher at New York University.

Reviews

[Danimal · Rating 2 out of 5]

Robert Christgau means a lot to me. When I came across his Consumer Guide collections for the 70s and 80s, they rocked my world. Here was a music critic tackling ALL the essential albums of the past two decades, weighing in with language that was equal parts smart and funny (if occasionally incomprehensible, but that was part of what made it interesting). Those books were an endless resource for a guy who was devouring music by the bucketload, not to mention trying to figure out how to write about it.

So.

I went into his memoir figuring it would be all those things (smart, funny, confounding) and more. And it is ... but it's the more that's the problem. Because I would add these terms: creepy, over-sharing, braggy, gross, and -- the most damning -- dull. I should've been forewarned, since he admits in the introduction that there are four kinds of memoirs (famous person, hanger on, unsung hero, triumphant dysfunctionist) and he doesn't fit any of them. What does that leave us with?

A lot of sex talk, apparently.

He fucks to the Stones' "Going Home." He fucks the multi-orgasmic, sex-loving Ellen Willis and her "zaftig, creamy body." He gets dumped by the lady with the "moist and succulent cunt." He ends up marrying "the woman who turned sex into a polymorphous game of button-button with sweetmeats at the end." He tells us way, way too much, and not in a fun or even interesting way. There are plenty of people who write about sex and don't make you go "ick" but Bob isn't one of them.

In the end, this is a minor book, more for fellow music critics or music obsessives who want to know what the 60s were like from every single angle (the book grinds to a halt in the early 80s and doesn't do much with the NYC punk scene that Bob was such a party to, oddly enough) than the average reader (who would be bored shitless). Bob has something to say about loving music and loving his wife. Not sure what it means that one of the most compelling sections was about his wife's affair. Maybe that tension and emotion carry a narrative the way big words don't.

[Tom Andes · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book seems sociologically significant partly because it documents the fact Christgau's then-partner Ellen Willis was paid $1500 for a landmark 7000-word essay about Bob Dylan the same year she paid $900 annually in rent. Christgau's smart enough to acknowledge the extent to which what he calls "the affluent society" -- which is to say, the twenty-somethings who benefitted from the post-WW2 economic expansion in the United States -- fueled not just the emergence of his chosen profession, but an explosion of culture in various media. I've always loved Christgau's reviews, as much for the quality of the writing as because I sometimes share his opinions, and because I find myself sympathetic with how he positions himself: a leftist with no patience for leftist cant, a music writer whose notion of art gives as much credence to Taylor Swift as it does to whatever band I haven't heard of Pitchfork is doting on this week. Ultimately -- because monogamy seems to be part of Christgau's intellectual stance -- the book develops into a meditation on the virtues and challenges of his marriage to writer Carola Dibbell. Perhaps because a few reviews griped about the lurid details, I was prepared for much worse. "She had an exceptionally moist and succulent cunt," about an early girlfriend, and which is a bit Hannibal Lechter-ish, aside, this is the prose of a man who likes sex, who loves women, and who particularly loves intelligent women. That's part of his intellectual stance, too. If you're interested in the ways in which Christgau's personal life informs his critical ideas, or if you simply want a window into this period of American (and New York City's) history, this is well worth the read: the moving account of a firefighter's son from Queens who skipped out on academia to become one of the last "public intellectuals" worth the name.

[Carol Storm · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was really disappointed by this memoir. As a teenager I loved reading Robert Chrstgau's record reviews. I thought he was more sensible and down to earth than Greil Marcus and Dave Marsh, though I enjoyed them too. But nothing in this memoir ever seemed to make sense. It's a strange thing to say about a first-person account, but it all felt weirdly artificial and inauthentic.

None of the biographical stuff rings true. There's so much over the top sentimentality, about the author's parents, his siblings, his high school classmates, his college classmates, his fellow writers, his girlfriends and his wife . . . yet none of them ever come to life. Christgau writes in a way that's indescribably glib and fake. He wants to offend none of the old gang yet again and again whatever story he tells comes back to his awesome abilities in the classroom, on the editing desk, in the sack. His writing has a rhythm to it, but it's grating and mechanical.

"Back then I was fortunate enough to FUNKY VERB with NAME CHECK NAME CHECK NAME CHECK. Of course I was very HUMBLE BRAG and HUMBLE BRAG, but in the end I HUMBLE BRAG and got NAME CHECK to hire me/sleep with me/give me a lead story!"

Then there are the glaring and often grotesque contradictions between what he pretends to believe as a critic and author and what he actually practices as a human being. Christgau calls himself a bohemian and socialist but makes it clear that he's spent his whole life cultivating the right kind of people, people with connections, people who come from money. He brags about how easily he ingratiated himself with Jews in high school, calling a whole chapter "The Wonderful World of Jews." He also writes about his early churchgoing and worrying about whether Jews were damned. But he doesn't ever ask whether the Nazis were damned. Nor does he confront the church's long history of anti-Semitism . . . or the existence of anti-Semitism in his own neighborhood, let alone his own home. He brags about his German roots, admits there was a large Nazi/Bund element in Queeens. and then promptly cops out. "I Never got that vibe from the Christgau clan." As Linus would say, off the old hookeroo!

His sexual politics are equally hypocritical and stupid. Christgau never shuts up about his commitment to "monogamy," like he's discovered the wheel or something. And he describes all his female friends in the most saccharine, ass-kissing way imaginable. And he takes all the safest and dumbest cheap shots imaginable at rock stars like Mick Jagger for writing songs like "Under My Thumb." (Though quite interestingly, there's no mention of any transgressions by rock's elder statesmen, like Big Joe Turner. Come on in this house, Robert Christgau, and stop all that yakety yak. Well, fix my supper don't want no talking back!)

Anyway, after shoveling his insufferable born-again feminist manure for about two hundred pages, our Jew-loving German/woman-loving pig lets slip that he once threw a piece of pie in Ellen Willis' face after she broke up with him. What, smashing a grapefruit in her face wasn't classy enough? Jimmy Cagney sez: I wish you was a wishing well, Robert Christgau, so I could tie you to a rope and sink you!

I think you can see the pattern here. This guy has learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Even at the end of a long life he is still in denial about just about everything. He's a fake with a guilty conscience, and his real enemy in life is not sexism or racism but self-knowledge. There's a direct link between his sentimentality, what James Baldiwn calls "the ostentatious parading of excessive and inappropriate emotion" and the secret inhumanity within. Only a guy weak enough to throw pie at a woman (and dumb enough to brag about it years later) would find it necessary to make prissy little moral judgments about Mick Jagger. Only a guy deeply insecure about his sexual potency would have to tell the reader how much he likes sex, and sex with rock music, and sex with his wife, over and over again. Poor Christgau reminds me of Tommy, the psycho gangster in GOODFELLAS. Not because he's tough, or a killer. But because he's got too much to prove.

Speaking of killers, it's interesting that Christgau (like his old buddy Dave Marsh) never actually served in the military, but is very interested in portraying himself as a guy who "never went along" with the hippy hatred of GI's in Vietnam. He distances himself in all the usual timid, weak-willed ways, talking about the soldiers like they were "dumb guys with few options" and graciously withholding any judgments about what they actually did over there. But what is striking is that he never mentions a single guy from Dartmouth who served in Vietnam. Or a single buddy from Queens. Or a single homeless vet he met on the street. This is a telling detail, especially given the fact that most of this book is name-dropping and ass-kissing.

I could go on for another ten pages about things that rubbed me the wrong way in this book. but I guess I better try to wrap things up before I end up chewing the carpet!

Things I hated most about this book but didn't yet mention. 1.) The easy, un-thinking cheap shots at bigger, better men. Everyone from William Styron to Norman Mailer to Jimi Hendrix. 2.) The nauseating sentimentality Christgau applies to classic novels like SISTER CARRIE and CRIME AND PUNISHMENT. It's part of his creepy, phony, transparently insincere woman-on-a-pedestal thing. But he misreads both novels because of it. 3.) The smug and utterly unconscious hypocrisy of castigating other people as racists who don't dig black people, when he smugly identifies his phony white-bread crew (at Darmouth, in Queens, on the Village Voice) as "his homies." 4.) Referring to the "grunts" working starter jobs in journalism for low pay. Christgau knows perfectly well that real grunts were infantrymen in Vietnam. But he wants to keep them nameless, voiceless, and faceless. 5.) Taking mean cheap shots at his rivals for having money or status, and then copping out thousands of times about his own ass-kissing and social-climbing, and then wrapping up all the assorted cop outs by whining, "class is a complicated thing." Yeah, it is. But there's no evidence in this book of Christgau ever acknowledging his own privilege, or his own toadying. Not even once!

[Todd · Rating 2 out of 5]

I expected a lot of things from a memoir by Robert Christgau. I expected it to contain some opinionated takes on various musicians and writers. I expected it to feel very downtown New York-y. I expected it to feature a number of big words and some hit-or-miss humor. I expected to like it.

I didn't expect it to be infuriating and dull, and -- at its worst -- like wading through sludge.

For a guy who was Present At The Creation of rock criticism and has produced a lot of marvelously pithy, aphoristic reviews for his Consumer Guide, Christgau is strangely detached. I once read a review (not Christgau's, I think -- probably Dave Marsh, but I could be wrong) of Bob Dylan's "Live at Budokan" that described him as in his "and then I wrote" mode. That's Christgau's book: "And then this happened, and then I disagreed with this, and then I met my lifelong friend ..." There's a surprising lack of heart here; a lot of names are dropped in a way that suggests either you know them or you don't, and Christgau doesn't seem to care either way. He seems reluctant to really engage with his own life, even when he's obviously going through some wrenching events -- including his wife's affair with a friend.

The early chapters are best, though they go on too long. Christgau grew up working-class in Queens, the son of a fireman, and one of his best toss-offs is when he noted that neither he nor onetime lover Ellen Willis could hate cops because they both grew up as offspring of what we now call first responders.

But then he gets to Dartmouth and his head is full of theory, and then he gets back to New York and ends up at Esquire for a time, and then ...

Well, he never comes out and says it, but it sounds like he never really got over Ellen Willis. And he does come out and say it, but his sex life really isn't interesting in the way that, for example, a Hollywood braggart's is.

I still love my Consumer Guides. And I could probably whine about some of Christgau's cohorts, including Marsh (with whom he apparently had a falling-out) and Greil Marcus (one of his best friends, a guy who's at HIS best when he's bluntest). But for a guy who's known to jab with a sarcastic joke once in awhile, all I could think of was how unnecessarily tedious this was.

So here's my Consumer Guide: Skim this book, and then skip this book. C minus. (On a curve.)

[Jeffrey Thiessen · Rating 1 out of 5]

Completely unreadable and even worse, totally uninteresting. One of the worst books I've ever read. What a gruelling book to get through.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

A few declarative sentences on Going Into the City: Portrait of a Critic as a Young Man. Nothing fancy, perhaps along the line of Nelson George, whom Christgau summarizes to the effect of wishing never to "write anything that couldn't be understood by a reader of New York's signature tabloid." Christgau continues: "Although Nelson's copy required considerable cleanup, he was always clear, and since he was an indefatigable learner who'd been on the beat since college, his insights were on point whether you agreed with his judgments or not." Finally: "He's been the kind of pop force my theory of pop once imagined all too vaguely. . . Nelson George and Greg Tate exemplified how foolish it is to pretend there's a single African-American culture."

Sound fairly diffident? Like Christgau will take for his "theory of pop" any rose-tinted reflection he can get? Even if the literacy ("considerable cleanup") suffers a bit? That notion of there being "a single African-American culture" is a funny one. This goes back, way back, though further on you may hear it in James Agee's "Psuedo-Folk" when he calls negroes "our best group en bloc," or in this flat dismissal of Donny Hathaway, from Christgau's Seventies Consumer Guide collection (written probably in the early eighties): "Perhaps the idealistic credulousness of a project that incorporated pop, jazz, a little blues, lots of gospel, and the conservatory into an all-over black style is linked to the floridity that mars much of his work." Whether this is a dismissal of Hathaway, that "black style" central to Agee's assumption, or Jerry Wexler (who signed Hathaway) is hard to say. Hathaway's work, meantime, continues to find its devoted listeners, and not just among those committed to the stalking horse of a discreditably "all-over black style."*

Christgau is a complex figure in the minor genre of literary history that is rock criticism. Christgau's book contributes a lot to that history, particularly in the long central chapter on Christgau's passage through the two storied years 1967-1968, as the boyfriend of the cultural journalist Ellen Willis, and as among the first in his generation to imagine a vocation that would "cover" the burgeoning manufacture of recorded music in the postwar period. Christgau certainly has a flair for self-drama -- one of the eddies the long chapter on Willis's shaping of his political imagination flows into emerges again several chapters later when he tells the story of the Village Voice's commitment to arts and cultural reporting in the late Seventies and early Eighties.

Here's what I think: much of the book is hard-going but it's leavened by that account of his relationship with Willis, about whom Christgau must sense that this is the story that needs to be told, as Willis was with him at the moment of his movement into the pages of Esquire, her being hired at The New Yorker, and together with their friend Larry Dietz, the founding of the venture counter-culture magazine, Cheetah, where both of them worked diligently as the country fell apart. This chapter gave me the feeling, similar to one from Michael Rossman's The Wedding Within the War, of being lost in amazing tumult, as when Christgau comes home one day in spring '68 (annus mirabilis) to find that his roommate and his lover has been raped, and Christgau reflects that he put his own needs first, which put me in mind of Patti Smith's book, when her roommate and lover (Robert Mapplethorpe) declares himself homosexual and Smith admits she tried to shame him . . . I much admire, and am very moved by, this sense of a stranded, or even inessential behavior against a backdrop of on-going action in the mid-distance.

Christgau gives us an image here. Yet the first paragraph of the last chapter reads wrong against the inessentiality of that image:

"As originally mapped out, this book would have ended in 1978, primarily because I didn't want people to think it was about theVoice. That's a book worth writing, but I don't know by who -- untangling the paper's interactions is not for outsiders, and judging its achievement is not for the news hounds who generally shoulder such projects. Me, I was there a long time. But I reported for duty to get my work done, not to gossip or scheme -- I wanted autonomy, not power, and I didn't follow office politics except to recommend the occasional hire, although I did once collaborate with [Geoffrey] Stokes in a union dispute. Even nailing facts for the glimpses I've provided was a chore. There presumably will be a Voice book sometime -- by an academic, perhaps. I bet I won't like it."

This paragraph should have been trimmed. It's wrong about five different ways. First of all, if he didn't think his readers wanted a book about the Voice, then he was probably surprised to hear someone who wrote for him there, Dwight Garner, in the Times, say: "This myopic book may be a memoir in part about the early years of rock and rock criticism, but none of the major figures Mr. Christgau knew and often befriended (Greil Marcus, Lester Bangs, Jon Landau, Lisa Robinson, Dave Marsh and James Wolcott among them) are sketched in intimate detail. Nor does he spend much time situating his work among theirs." I gather Christgau thought he was doing this, and did do it, just not in a way Garner expected. Of course the Voice is the work Christgau did that paid off on the promises and failure of those two passionate years he spent with Willis. He had to finish that story, the story that begins with their vision of a rock criticism the Voice became the most reliably serious venue for. If Christgau doesn't know who would be appropriate to write it then perhaps it's because he doesn't understand the account his chapter vide Willis offers, or its chronicler. The whole paragraph is telling for the bumpy road readers find if the story they hope emerges is of rock criticism as Christgau and Willis thunk it up. The sentence about who is right to be the Voice book's author is snide (about news hounds), patronizing (toward outsiders), and bullying all at once. Then it takes a dump on academics -- one of whom (Devon Powers) has, guess what? written a book about the Voice. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1... In fact, many rock critics who got their start under Christgau's tutelage at the alt-weekly are now academics. Hmm.

The problem, then, is that Christgau only partially understands who he is on the page, and sometimes can't get out of his own way. Lots of blustery stuff on poetry (the pastoral!) and the novel, about IQ scores and SAT scores (I promised myself years ago I'd never listen to another fool tell me their IQ, but here I was, reading, as Christgau offered his -- twice), loads and loads of narrative detail from what Freud calls the superego (about how great marriage is, how excellent his own matrimonial dinners are, what the increases to African American staffing at the Voice were like numerically); the Law rides high in Christgau's saddle. But in the sections on Willis, and on the "Riffs" column at the Voice, we do have Christgau situating his work in relation to rock criticism, if Garner would only have a look. Indeed, and duh, the book is all about Christgau's positioning, vis a vis rock criticism, daily papers, weekly papers, the academy, and who will have the opportunity to cover the art form. A last word, and a scrappy one.

*fn: Isn't this what Amiri Baraka called the "changing same of R & B music"?

[Tyler Roland · Rating 3 out of 5]

Too much old man sex talk for my liking, but a decent read now and again. I would only recommend this if you are a hardcore Christgau-ist, like I am...I met the guy, so I felt like giving this tome a spin! What can I say?

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been reading and arguing in my head with Christgau since I first noticed back in 1979 that his was the name on those short record reviews with letter grades that were in the front of Creem magazine and sometimes disagreed with the longer ones in the back. Heck, I even foolishly argued with him from a position of ignorance when he tried so hard to get me to dig deeper into the nugget of insight I had about Radiohead's "OK Computer" that he wanted to publish in the comments section of the Pazz and Jop Poll that one year. Yeah, Christgau is so fanatical about precision in writing that he edits two sentence blurbs, and for him, editing means trying to get the writer to try harder. And then there was the time I interviewed him and we talked about the meaning of "pretty" in regards to DeBarge, which we both loved but which I again didn't think as deeply about until after we'd had that discussion. So, what I'm saying is that the only target audience more carefully selected than me for a Christgau memoir is probably the very large number of family, friends, ex-lovers, influences, and writers name-checked in the book itself. Naturally enough, I enjoyed the thing immensely, especially when he gets into the way he developed his critical insights along the way, but also when he's just plain describing his place in the zeitgeist. He's way more informative about his views of life in the 50s and 60s than he is in the 70s and 80s, though part of that is because I already know more about that stuff, and part of it is that it's hard for me, who never for one second wanted a child, to relate to the long-term problems he and his wife had over their lack of conception. That and the fact that his discussion of punk rock aside, he spends more of that time editing others, and giving credit for their discoveries, than he does on his own striving to figure things out. Also, the latter part of the book just has fewer drop-dead hilarious lines in it. So, I don't know if you should read this, and I definitely think it's got a couple sexual descriptions that don't need to be there, but as he's done so many times before, Christgau has me all jazzed up about this critical thing I like to do.

[Neil Mach · Rating 4 out of 5]

Filled with fact, divulgence, declaration and utterance, these illustrative & expressive expositions from one of the finest - yet tersest - rock critics of all time is required reading for anyone who wants to involve themselves in the business of writing for rock...

[Vladan Maksimović · Rating 4 out of 5]

Four stars for honesty and the guts to think I'm important my work is important here's my memoirs. Else, just geeky i once got laid stuff.

[Byron · Rating 3 out of 5]

How do you write a memoir when you've spent your entire life sitting in a room listening to records? A lot of this is just a list of every single time Christgau ever had sex, along with analysis of what may have led to periods in which he wasn't able to get a rod. I'm surprised his wife signed off on it, but it's revealed here that she took a lot of psychedelics in the 1960s, so who knows. The girl he was with before he got married is dead now. He's obsessed with marriage in a way that I'm sure was intended to come off as noble and heartwarming but instead kinda comes off as creepy and (overly) codependent. Of course there's also plenty of talk about the music he's spent his life writing about. I found the stuff about early rock and roll especially interesting, just because it's interesting to think that someone could be older than rock and roll. Well, someone still alive and blogging and shit. I could have used more analysis of race as it pertains to rock, especially since Christgau is so eager to give himself credit for fostering diversity in the music department at the Village Voice, back before it was just one white guy working remotely out of LA. And I could have done without the constant references to his "theory of pop," which doesn't seem to be an actual theory, as far as I can tell, and gripes every few pages about an ancient Internets beef having to do with "rockism," an early example of the SJW-promoted cultural Marxism that eventually led to #gamergate, which he never actually discusses in any depth. Erectile dysfunction is one thing, but let's not get personal here!

[Karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Robert Christgau's Going Into The City is an exhilarating ride through the Mr. Christgau's childhood and early years as the most influential rock critic for the Village Voice. The self-professed "Dean of American Rock Critics" Christgau invented the genre of rock and pop criticism and he brings an intellectualism and muscularity to his essays and reviews as well as to this memoir. My appreciation for Christgau's work is partially due to his keen understanding of the impact of race, gender, and class and for his challenging me to become a better reader (with dictionary by my side). I learn a lot from Christgau's capsule reviews and not just about music.

My favorite part of the book is his portrayal of his three-year relationship with Ellis Willis. It was pretty sexy and this is meant in the broadest sense; their mutual love of theory, words, music, politics bring heat and richness to his depictions and his sadness at their ending is real and palpable. And at the center of this book, in the midst of the words and theories about art, his passion for music and love for New York City and that particular place and time, is his commitment to marriage, to his wife Carola Dibbell, to monogamy and his pride in that.

I love how Christgau uses language. He is insightful, bighearted, shrewd, complex. Sometimes, however, his sideways trips through theory, his digressions about literature are showy and tiring. Despite this, I have reveled in the joy and exquisite beauty of Christgau's story and I thank Edelweiss for allowing me to review it.

[Barry Hammond · Rating 4 out of 5]

Called by many "The Dean of American Rock Critics," Robert Christgau covered popular music for Esquire, Newsday, Creem, Playboy, Rolling Stone, Blender, MSN Music and The Village Voice, where he was a senior editor and chief music critic for thirty-two years. "Going Into The City" is his memoir about how an awkward outsider from Queens with a German Protestant religious upbringing became the ultimate fan, champion of pop and rock music, social theorist and astute writer of a generation. Not only does he talk about the music and times that shaped him but he speaks fluently about love, monogamy, feminism and politics, fondly remembers a range of other writers, critics and journalists and how the music scene changed and changed him over the years. It's worth reading for his take on Television's classic "Marquee Moon" disc alone and his coverage of the CBGB New Wave scene. A compelling, informative and moving read. - BH.

[Jonathan · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book just wasn't for me. I remember purchasing it and feeling sure I would like it since I frequently read rock journalism, and I lived for a few years in New York. But I found the style of writing to be dense and challenging. Unfamiliar names of fellow writers and editors from the 1970s listed in rapid succession, few direct quotes, little imagery-driven or narrative writing. It honestly felt at times like you'd have to be from the writer's own inner circle to get the rapid-fire references. Christgau's writing is clearly well-respected by many, so maybe I'm not a sophisticated enough reader.

[Herzog · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you are really are interested in learning about the life of Robert Christgau up to 1980, this book might be for you. Along the way you'll learn his IQ, his SAT scores and which of his girlfriends had "a moist and succulent c__t." Music is an afterthought. I'd really hoped to learn more of what music influenced his life. Perhaps, I read the wrong book?

[Simon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Going Into The City is Robert Christgau’s memoir of a post-World War II New York childhood and decades as a rock critic. The book is full of a hungry, scattershot energy that anyone who has spent even a short time in New York can’t help but recognize. It is also a book that could have been written for me, and if I’d read it at 22 instead of 42 I wonder if it might have changed the direction of my life. Born in 1942, Christgau was- and is - a voracious reader. He describes a fast journey from Dick and Jane to reading Book-of-the-Month Club fare (Kon-Tiki) by age nine. As a young reader I shared Christgau’s velocity but mostly lacked his ambition, though I do remember putting away 1984 in fifth grade (the year of the title, it was in the air) and also an infatuation with The Making of the President books a little later. I was notorious for rushing through assignments so that I could read, a habit that was greeted with mostly good-natured chagrin by my teachers. In the same 5th grade year the only thing that could interrupt my extra reading was a trip to the school library, where a primitive “computer lab” allowed to me to play state capital games and write programs in BASIC.

Christgau went to college at Dartmouth and began to discover a few things about himself that would define the rest of his life. Again, I relate. There’s a reoccurring attraction to smart women that would continue right up through his (still extant) marriage. The joys and trials of both Christgau’s marriage and his previous long relationship with the critic Ellen Willis are described in great detail, with evaluations of sexual taste and ability (including his own) made as perhaps only someone who came of age in the 1960’s could pull off. More germane to Christgau’s writing career is the idea of “contingency”, an idea he discusses at length that seems to have come from the waning of his Christianity and a liberal arts-fed dislike for “-isms” of any kind. Christgau’s contingency becomes clearer as he arrives in New York and finds work as a journalist: a distaste of elitism and theory, a healthy populism, and a lack of interest in labels are all a part of the superstructure that Christgau outlines. I wrote too serious movie reviews in college before I’d read much or any Sarris, but the auteur theory never made much sense to me. Kael all the way, though for a time in my 20s I did sit through too many bad action movies in the hope that something profound about the director would reveal itself to me.

The purpose of these few words isn’t to draw parallels between my life and that of Robert Christgau, nor is it to suggest that my nonprofessional writing in any way approaches the skill or insight of the “Dean of American Rock Critics”. (Christgau has been published in many outlets but is most closely identified with The Village Voice.) Rather, it’s to express my pleasure at finding connection in a book that evokes what it was like to have a press pass in New York City of the 1960’s and ‘70s. Christgau saw and listened to music constantly of course; the book is full of thoughts on pop, rock, jazz, disco, rap, and the “alternative” rock of the ‘80s and beyond. But there was also film and theatre, and outsized personalities like Patti Smith and David Johansen. Christgau’s enthusiasm for art bubbles over these pages; he stops the narrative of his life for mini-essays on personally meaningful works from Crime and Punishment to Jules and Jim to Sister Carrie. I’ll spare you what my list would include, but the exhilaration on display in Christgau’s writing about these favorites is irresistible to anyone of a similar mind.

Christgau’s central metaphor is, of course, “The City”. Christgau grew up in Queens, and his Manhattan is both the center of the world and the home of frontiers both personal and creative. I don’t have the same connection to New York, but in my desire to describe art on paper I am part of a great tradition.

[Elliot Chalom · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've said this again and again - often one's rating of a book - in fact one's entire experience with a book - can be tainted by expectations. I don't necessarily mean high or low expectations, though I mean that too. I mean expecting a book to be one thing and then having it be something totally different. In my mind I have a certain expectation for what a memoir by Robert Christgau, the "Dean of American Rock Critics," a man who spent his prime living in the '60s and '70s NYC, who was an integral part of the "scene", who worked at the Village Voice for decades, who apologizes in advance for his recounting of his many sexual experiences, should read like. I'm imaging a cross between Hunter S. Thompson and Iggy Pop. This book is NOT that. Christgau isn't gonzo and he isn't wild, even if everything around him was. Somehow, his story (and perhaps his real life) manages to miss all the excitement and capture only the little bit of that era that was dull and without heart or soul.

My issues with the book probably begin with the portion of his life that Christgau decided to devote time to. He is most known for his "Consumer Guide" albums reviews, which he began in 1969, his annual Village Voice Pazz & Jop music polls, began in the early 1970's, and for being a senior editor and chief music critic at the Voice, a position he attained in 1974, and staying at the Voice through 2006. Yet the dense 365 page book doesn't even reach the decade of the 1960's until page 150. That's 3/7 of the book slogging through by far the most uninteresting period in Christgau's life. I don't mean to say that this section could have been cut in half; I mean to say that it could have been cut down by 80%. From that point it picks up marginally, in fits and starts, but still suffers from a failure to get to the point - the point being his time at the Voice and beyond. In Chapter 10 (of 11) - literally page 284 - Christgau finally gets to the Voice/CBGB era. Although even here he meanders a bit at first. And at second, and at third ... CBGB's gets its first mention at around page 300! When you consider that the final chapter is generally about his wife's marital infidelity, hopefully you can understand my frustration.

And that is before we get to the writing. Christgau discusses the passing of fellow critic Lester Bangs, offering that the two weren't close because "he thought I was flaunting my Ivy League diploma when I argued ideas with him, as I did with almost everyone." Mr. Bangs - I couldn't agree with you more. I consider myself an intelligent person who has read hundreds of books, countless memoirs, and many books far more highbrow than the memoir of a rock critic. So why is "Going into the City" one of the most challenging books I've read in a long time? Sometimes (say when I read Kierkegaard) I know that a failure to understand the author's work is on me. I need to become smarter before I can properly understand what is on the page. Other times it's the author that's failed. If I can't follow your narrative, or keep track of the characters in your life, or know how things tie together or why they're relevant - maybe that's on you. This time it's on Christgau. For a linear memoir this story is damn hard to follow.

When all is said and done, it's not terrible. Two stars means "OK". There is some material here that entertained me briefly and a sentence or two that made me stop and think. But if I had to do it again ... I'd read the Consumer Guides instead.

[Bob Reutenauer · Rating 4 out of 5]

His self-appointed title of ironic prominence, goes against character, the “Dean of American Rock Critics” Robert Christgau very generously shares credit with the small fraternity— Ellen Willis, Greil Marcus, Dave Marsh, Jon Landau— who authored the very first rock-crit manifestos and reviews of a new thing called “albums.” In the immediate wake of this group’s original work sprang hundreds of underground and alternative small zines and others of mass circulation and Album Oriented Rock format FM stations and helped make “rock” the critical/intellectual, cultural/political, and commercial/corporate behemoth unmatched in artistic enterprise since the Medici’s promoted a deep bench of Florentine talent . Of Jan Wenner, on whom he layers none of the praise reserved for actual writers, he says distantly but admirably that “by 2000 _Rolling Stone_ was the largest left leaning mass circulation magazine in the United States, financing no holds barred investigative journalism with hide-bound music coverage.” Music coverage, lots and lots of it, over four decades of listening to albums 10-12 hours per day and writing at least a little about each of them—the web archive is monstrous— and the Village Voice paid him a decent living until the 1990s when Rupert Murdoch bought the Voice.

Beautifully drawn portraits of his friendships with Ellen Willis and Greil Marcus are a feature of the book. To them he cedes the big vision thing, the longer term, longer form anguish and rewards of writing the rock scene aesthetic as “pop” yes, but in a world historic fashion. Shakespeare was low brow once too— remember Huck and friends by the riverside playing for bits?

Christgau the memoirist’s New York City, like Patti Smith’s in _Just Kids_ and Pete Hamill’s in _A Drinking Life_ comes to life as a dynamic, but anchored, timeless character of it’s own. Great read. _The Ellen Willis Reader_ a recent collection edited by the late cultural critics daughter Nona, Christgau’s god daughter, is moved up on my list! Ellen's 8,000 word "Dylan" was an effort that she and RC lived together with, they shared a few late 60s "summers of love" together before the essay found a home in the underground sheet "Cheetah" (1967).

[Chazzbot · Rating 2 out of 5]

Memoirs are by definition written by those whose egos can either withstand the scrutiny of an unseen audience and/or have determined that their life has a relevance worth sharing. Christgau, for many years a critic who has influenced my musical tastes, plunges into memoir mode boldly, and there is not a trace of hesitancy or self-doubt in his enumerations of even minor aspects of his life. This can be, of course, good or bad depending on how absorbed you are with the memoir writer in question. I felt I had a healthy interest in Christgau (I'm certainly a fan of his writing style), but this memoir challenged even my optimistic expectations.

Overall, it's a very uneven read. Some chapters--detailing the origins of his relationship with his future wife, or chronicling the golden age of the Village Voice--hum along like the music Christgau champions. There are also interesting diversions into authors and artists that have influenced Christgau in one way or another. But, by the same token, there is also too little of this, and slightly too much about his parents, his childhood, his sex life. I guess I'm not THAT interested in Christgau.

But his words are sharp, his sentences dazzling, his phrasing sometimes convoluted, but in a way that rewards unpacking. Still, many will not have the patience to work through his paragraphs, and even those who may find Christgau's opinions useful may be hard-pressed to slog through the first half of this book.

While reading it, I often wondered who Christgau imagined his audience to be, but soon concluded that he wasn't really imagining an audience at all, but playing his tune for whomever wanted to stop and listen. There is a kind of charm in this, and this is possibly the best frame of mind in which to write a memoir, but as one who has read many of his reviews and essays on popular music, there was not enough here to make my trek through his musings seem rewarding, though I lost no respect for his ability as a writer.

[Steve · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bunch of stuff I did not want to know anything about and none of the stuff that I wanted to know about. An exercise in solipsism (trendy Voice term from the ‘70s) to the nth degree. Grade: C-

But seriously folks…

Robert Christgau was more important to my intellectual development than any other writer I can think of (besides Robert Stone). A pretty unsophisticated lad, I lapped up his verbiage in the Village Voice from about 1975 on. It was Christgau, along with the first edition of The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, that opened my eyes. Christgau was the first writer to reveal to me that the music I heard all around me growing up was significant and had actual meaning (which, of course, led to so much more). In short, Christgau was the one who spurred my own critical thinking, let alone introduce me to the very idea of critical thinking. (I actually wrote album reviews for my college newspaper between 1979 and ‘80, something that would not have been possible had I not been so excited by Christgau’s writing).

My brief residency in NYC between 1978 and 1981 (I worked at Sam Goody then J&R Music World back then) is, in fact, due to him – that and “Guiding Light” from Television’s “Marquee Moon”. (I was so disappointed when Christgau dismissed this, my favorite cut, as ‘soupy’!) I would not have seen Televison at the Bottom Line in June and July of ’78 if it were not for his writing in the Voice.

That Christgau writes in the same ‘voice’ as he did in his Village Voice pieces is interesting to me. I would think that he would have another way of ‘sounding’ when discussing his life. And, if I were not a fan whom the Consumer Guide and the Pazz & Jop poll meant quite a lot, I cannot imagine getting through this book what with all the office politics at the Village Voice, etc. (And how dare he say that Jimmy Cliff was not talented enough!)

And man, oh man, would I have loved to hear more about his trip to the Jamaica of 1973! Even as it is, his recollection of paying Big Youth $75 to visit his Trenchtown hovel and eating saltfish and ackee prepared by Joe Higgs (shades of Ras Kitchen!) are indelible. That Christgau relates more about his sex life while in JA (TMI, amigo) than what he thought about interviewing Bob Marley is, unfortunately, indicative of this book.

While I was working at J&R, a way-downtown Manhattan record store par-excellence in the shadows of the World Trade Center, we (the staff, down with the boxes of records in the basement) would often groan about Christgau’s obsession with South African music as we pored over the Consumer Guide. We were a very knowledgeable bunch, but we thought Christgau was just piling on at this point and felt we were being preached to. Not that 1981 was an exactly fruitful year, rock-wise… Adam and that Ants, anyone? But Verlaine’s “Dreamtime” was fantastic. As was “Beautiful World” by Devo, now that I think on it… I also recall seeing Johnny Ramone check out some WWII movie rental (on Beta!) in our video store back in ’81. But there was always something bordering on hectoring when reading Christgau around this time, and some of it is evident in reading “Going Into the City”. (Although I just re-read his three-sentence review of “154” by Wire and I can’t figure out how he so concisely nails such a nuanced album – but he does! And he did it over and over again. Three sentences. Wow.

One very good moment, however: “Three hundred twenty-five dollars for seven medium-sized rooms at Second and 12th. Correct for inflation all you want, then understand what a different place Manhattan used to be.” (Pg. 300) I lived at First Ave. and 18th during the summer of 1980, and I do not think I had ever been happier to be alive than while having a beer at the Grassroots in the afternoon and walking east on St. Marks, taking a right on First Ave. and passing a sun-drenched window display of a tiny record and what-not store a little bit south. (I recall the cover of Blue Oyster Cult’s “Cultosaurus Erectus” fading in the window along with ‘50s kitsch space toy figurines). I eventually had to decamp to Brooklyn (I could not afford to live alone in Manhattan), but the East Village (St. Marks Sounds, the aforementioned Grass Roots) was the place to be for me and I cannot imagine a little shop like that one on First Ave. existing again except in my dreams.

There is a lengthy interview that Jim Derogatis did with Robert Quine about Lester Bangs that is on-line and is probably the best thing I have ever read about what downtown Manhattan was like in the ‘70s (for a musician and/or hipster). I really expected Christgau to have this covered in spades, but it really just ain’t in this book. You really get no sense of what it was like hanging at CBGB, Slugger Ann’s or Max’s Kansas City, or just residing in the East Village in the mid-‘70s. And I was at the first Clash show at the Palladium in February of ’79 and Christgau fails to note how The Cramps and Bo Diddley both out-classed the only band that mattered. (To me, they were a one-album band, but that import version of “The Clash” is a timeless work of art). And Christgau’s rating of Roxy Music and Steely Dan as being more important in the early ‘70s than Bowie is spot-on.

But Christgau, however, continues to influence me in mysterious ways. I just downloaded “Have Moicy!” and after a few listens I can understand why he thinks this is such a great record. What “Marquee Moon” does for late at night in lower Manhattan, “Have Moicy!” does for being young and goofing off out in the country for a weekend. And because of something I read by him long ago, I have had a copy of “All That is Solid Melts into Air” among my books for decades now (but Christgau’s portrait of Marshall Berman scared me off a bit – I just don’t know who all these people Berman is talking about!)

There are only two people, that I have never met, whose opinions and actual words they used still have an impact on me from way back then (that is I can still remember my responses to them as I heard them). One is the father of sports talk radio, the late, criminally ignored Art Rust Jr., whose take on Sonny Rollins over Coltrane and his preference of “The Set-Up” over “Raging Bull” still resonates, and Robert Christgau. “Going Into the City” is not what I expected, or would have wanted. But once again Christgau’s voice got those juices flowing as his ideas got me all hopped up and excited as a reader as I had not been in some time. New York was an amazing place back then, and Christgau was a big part of my walking around day-to-day existence down there. And that is a true impact on a life.

[Ted Burke · Rating 3 out of 5]

I made it halfway through Robert Christgau's memoir Going Into the City: Portrait Of a Critic as a Young Man before I had to put it down. Memoirs are a literary excuse for interesting people to talk about themselves due to an inherent belief that merely being themselves, sans abstraction or objectively intriguing art--novels, movies, poems, paintings--is enough to fill a book. it's likely that my lapse was due to the format Christgau chose; too much him, not enough of the world that formed him as a thinker about Pop Music and related concerns.I'm tempted to pick it up again, but I hesitate, I stall, I make excuses to do something else, considering that Christgau's obsessiveness, perfect for a critic, can be hard to take for long in a book that is supremely autobiographical in nature. I have been wishing that someone would take his best essays from his website and collect them into a volume or two; on rock and pop and some other matters of culture is always an intriguing point of view and it would be great to have those views between covers.

I'd been reading Christgau's insular, fannish, personal and idiomatically dense reviews for decades and rather liked the idea that I was part of the cognoscenti who could parse his sentences and follow his train of thought. "Any Old Way You Choose It", his collection of longer reviews and pieces gathered from the Sixties and Seventies, is one of my all-time favorite essay collections, a brainy, chatty, at times exasperatingly idiosyncratic journey through a couple of decades of extraordinary innovation; I love it for the same reason I still cherish Pauline Kael's "I Lost It At The Movies", for that rare combination of true fan enthusiasm and discovery. As with Kael at her best, you can sense the moment when Christgau comes to an insight, a discovery yet undiscovered by other writers; he has that element of "ah-HA! “Coming to his Consumer Guide column, where he would review anything and everything available, from the varied strands of rock, disco, reggae, folk, jazz, and pop was like meeting that clutch of friends you knew in college who considered rock and pop the emerging Grand Art. His was a column where I found someone who kept the conversation going, and strange and self-indulgent as it may have seen, it was fertile ground to debate and exchange ideas on the relative qualities of music. Anyone who's been through this bit before, the obsession with rock music is an art and establishing the critical terms with which one can assess, appraise and make note of what makes albums worth the purchase, appreciates the kind of critical thinking which becomes a habit of mind. In college I was Arts Editor of the thrice-weekly campus newspaper and was required, in addition to my studies, to write a crushing amount of column inches a week on matters of music, theater, television, movies. Rough life, I know, but it was a lot of writing none the less, and the chief debt I might have toward Christgau, an admittedly sketchy model for a minor league reviewer, was the creation of a tone, a style.

The Village Voice, founded in the fifties by Norman Mailer and Dan Wolfe, was formerly noted as a magazine where the pittance that writers were paid was somewhat compensated by the freedom they had to develop a writing style, ideas, and journalistic beats. It was a writer's publication, and that was the chief attraction for a reader who wanted more than cooker cutter reviews or cursory coverage of politics and culture. Christgau is a product of that freedom and developed an argot and style that was intended for those as obsessed and concerned with music as he was; he is a critic, not a reviewer distinction being that the critic assumes that his or her reader has the same background in the area under discussion as they do. Unlike reviews, which are final and absolute and brook no discussion beyond name calling, Christgau's essays are addressed to the concerned, the convinced, the true believer that pop music traditions matter as much as so-called High Culture expressions. This leaves him incomprehensible for many who think his writing is too dense with insular references and verbal shorthand to bother with, but that was a chief part of my attraction to his writing. There were many a time when I was in my twenties when I hadn't the slightest idea of what he was talking about-- who was Adorno? Marcuse? Sun Ra??-- but the subject matter at hand compelled me to investigate references further. It was an old-fashioned enterprise, his column in one hand, a dictionary and an encyclopedia at the ready to clarify the murkier waters of his prose. Any inspiring critic does that. Christgau and the late Lester Bangs gave me some ideas and methods in learning how to write fast, and well (or at least well enough that some light editing could be done without a major operation and my copy could be taken to the typesetter before the deadline). What is impressive about Christgau is his catholicity of taste, his constant curiosity about new sorts of noise and racket, and his ability to form connections and generate operate theories.

His writing is unique, and the Village Voice's loss will be another editor's gain. Christgau certainly tried to be confessional, tell all essayist, a horrible habit from the sixties that still infests popular nonfiction these days, as when he reprinted a long piece in "Any Old Way" about a trip across country with his girlfriend Ellen Willis and, in what was ostensibly an essay dealing with ideas, chronicled the events precipitating their break up. It was a rather aimless accounting, neither interesting as personality gossip nor compelling as an intellectual argument. It was just...awkward, not unlike someone who feels they have to talk about something that is a change in their life but cannot find the words that make you empathize. I rather enjoyed his prejudices, snobbery and the like, and I liked the fact the reserved the right to change his mind about an artist, even if only for one album. He as a critic, a dilettante, someone's who's a propensity toward prolix was intriguing, attractive, worth the bother to pour over when he was engaging the popular culture he thrived on.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

A straight biography of Christgau might not have interested me too much (although I would totally read one), but I've been pretty excited about the memoir, and really enjoyed it. Yes, it veers into self-indulgence at times, and yes, I really didn't need to read as much about his his sex life as he included (although most of it wasn't that awful), but it's a fun look at a time in New York history, publishing history, and rock history that absolutely doesn't exist anymore, and his perspective is informed and insightful.

People complaining that he didn't write enough about music here are clearly confused and should, I dunno, read his criticism instead. I like that he does, here and there, take a few pages to write about some works of art that clearly touched him or crystallized something for him. That felt like enough to me.

My only real complaint, other than that some parts could've been a little more focused, is that the ending felt sort of abrupt. But on the whole, this was a really fun read. I'm glad he had the idea to do this, or that someone talked him into it, and I'm glad someone thought it was worth publishing. It was.

[Steve Peifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

You could say that Brian Wilson invented an entire genre of American music. So later, when he remakes Good Night Irene and it sounds like a Beach Boy song, you don't get mad. It still sounds great, and you realize that even a genius like Wilson has limits. In the same way, Christgau was SO GREAT at the genre of music criticism he created it's easy to forgive him and say ' In his day, in his field, he could still hit one.' The problem is that this book was written with such a restricted audience in mind that the only person who could totally enjoy it was the author. At one point, I thought if you weren't his age, didn't grow up in NY and didn't love a hugely broad spectrum of music, there is no way you could possibly understand much of this book. A biography without an effort to give history and context is an towering testimony to self love in almost unmeasurable quantities. There is still his way with a phrase that made me hang in there until the bitter end, but expectations were pretty high for this and that is why it is such a disappointment.

[Michael Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you rate Robert Christgau as a music critic - or perhaps want to know what his high reputation is based on - this is a great read, in the end: I had to persist. Christgau brings a similar level of prose density, intellectual rigour and deliberate provocation to analysing his own back story, as he does to his capsule reviews. The book is a kind of Consumer Guide to the Critic.

There is a lot of personal disclosure here, especially around his significant loves and friends, but it never seemed gratuitous. There's a pretty solid core of themes and variations, all linking back to Christgau's evolving theories of culture and ethics of interpersonal relationships. Pretty impressive really.

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jessica Hopper's putdown, that he wants the reader to know about every ejaculation he ever had, isn't inaccurate. But the book is still pretty great and a good entry in the bulging sweepstakes for "Memoirs Doubling as Laments for the Old, Scary New York." I didn't pay for it, though, which probably colors my take on it.

[Neil · Rating 3 out of 5]

As big a fan as I am of the seminal Consumer Guides (I own all three, first editions, read countless times), I found the memoir to be a bit dry, much like I've always found Christgau's longer writing. But reading it did make me re-read the CG books and remember how they inspired me - both to listen and to write.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little too self-indulgent too often, with Christgau overdoing the "I'm an intellectual too" card. Don't get me wrong, I have read him for decades, but this was not what I expected. The parts dealing with 70s and early 80s New York are fantastic, both the music and journalists, but I found myself skimming many sections.

[Kevin A. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Probably not recommended to anyone who isn’t already familiar with Robert Christgau’s work as the “Dean of American Rock Critics.” (He claims to have half-jokingly given himself that title, but has become quite comfortable with it as well.) At this point it’s been earned through 50 years of writing about popular music, most of that time at The Village Voice between 1974 and 2006.

I first encountered him through his “Rock Albums of the 70s” book in 1983. When I started reading it in the store as 16-year-old, it equally enthralled and infuriated me. (I particularly remember his put downs of the George Harrison catalog, which seemed disrespectful to someone who had been a member of The Beatles, after all.) Ultimately I bought it (or perhaps asked my mother to get it for me for Christmas, I forget.)

His writing was smart, analytic, incisive, and often quite funny. While I didn’t always share his critical assessments, I was often on the same page, and he proved a reliable and helpful guide to exploring that decade’s music. I haven’t found his 80s or 90s books as useful, perhaps because I experienced those decades firsthand as a more or less adult. He still had interesting things to say, but his reactions no longer presaged mine in quite the same way. But maybe it was more because popular music itself had become atomized into almost innumerable sub genres, even more so than in previous years. Or maybe it’s what happens with every father figure when he’s taught you everything he knows and it’s time to go out into the world and make your own way.

In any event, this autobiography shares the qualities of his best writing. It’s specific, well-reasoned, smart and sometimes funny. It can also be annoyingly parochial, arrogant, and bogged down in Pop Culture Theory. I think it would impossible to come to this book cold without already being well-acquainted with him and his milieu without losing track of what the hell he was talking about half the time.

On the other hand, most anyone who is going to pick up this book probably does have such prerequisite knowledge, and he doesn’t waste his time or ours telling us what we already know about the 1960s, rock and roll, New York, etc. So it’s highly recommended to acolytes; others enter at your own risk.

[Timothy Rg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Aside from choosing a book title that manages to be both generic and glib, The Prince of Hipsters* delivers the memoir that none of us thought he would leave his cave to do**. As a professing Christian, I disagree with Christgau's approach to the topic of Sunday-school, given his authority and influence on minds both young and vulnerable. He could be more forgiving toward the Presbyterians who raised him, to say nothing of chapter titles like "The Wonderful World of jews***."

However, it helps that the author gives himself permission to wax prosaic on his marriage to Carola Dibbell, as well as having write the memoir after getting to know his fans via Expert Witness blog activity. We all can make claim to rockcrit royalty. In fact, I am going to bother him via Xgau says now. Favorite quote from the Bildungsroman portion: "So I guess I was bullied a little.... I lost more sleep over my current events notebook."

While I am the farthest from being able to relate to growing up in Ridgewood,**** we writers can all commiserate!

*Which must make Dylan the King, if only because he has one year up on Xgau.
**Yes, unlike such posers as Marcus Mumsford, Xgau actually does live in a cave.
***In other words, the Jews receive hero worship, while mainline Protestants get to play in Ridgewood's trash heap. But let's face it, with their talk of predestination and their high church polity, Presbys don't hold a candle to the neighborhood United Methodist Church :)
**** Queens, that is. Ridgewood, Nj? Now that's a little more familiar.

[Gabby Lambert · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you properly like Christgau - not just his reviews - but the actual person behind them, you'll enjoy the book. The technical content is haphazard, it's true. You don't receive a clear picture of New York in the 60s/70s. That's not what the memoir is about. Read Beth Ann's Macrobiotic Diet and Christgau's essay on the Summer of Love as replacements - for free - if that's why you're checking this page. Or, read Patti Smith's Just Kids.

In regard to the frequent ridicule of Robert's 'humble brags' I am quite of the opposite opinion. Christgau is one of the most brilliant writers of the 20th century. Period. He purely derives pride from his writing ability, work ethic, and honesty. In my opinion, that renders him pretty damn impressive. If in your camp intellect is a surefire shoot to pretension, then Christgau's unbearable, but if you like your intellect sans bourgeois accoutrements (cough cough Adam Gopnik), Robert's your guy.