Music The End of a Pointy-Headed Era
So, as Hannah Levin mentioned over on Line Out, the Village Voice has fired Robert Christgau, the contentious but undeniably vital “Dean of American Rock Critics,” and one of my favorite living writers.
Christgau’s not dead, and a lot of his greatest writing has appeared in non-Voice venues for years, so there’s no need for an obit. Still, it’s a major shift, one that makes me terribly sad. Since first encountering it as a pre-teen in Creem, Christgau’s writing has been an integral part of my reading life, and I’d look forward to the Voice’s annual Pazz & Jop Critics Poll—which Christgau’s overseen since 1974—like others anticipate Super Bowl Sunday. Lots of folks can’t stand his dense, reference-heavy writing, but when you find him pointing his exceedingly pointy head at a work of art you love, you realize how intricately he understands what makes it work, and makes it matter.
Here’s Christgau on two of my eternal beloveds, PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me and the Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs, respectively:
“Never mind sexual—if snatches like ‘Make me gag,’ ‘Lick my injuries,’ and ‘Rub ‘til it bleeds’ aren’t genital per se, I’m a dirty old man. And if the cold raw meat of her guitar isn’t yowling for phallic equality, I’m Robert Bly, which is probably the same thing. She wants that cock—a specific one, it would seem, attached to a full-fledged, nonobjectified male human being, or maybe an array or succession of cocks, it’s hard to tell. But when she gets pissed off, which given the habits of male human beings happens all the time, she thinks it would be simpler just to posit or grow or strap on or cut off a cock of her own. After which it’s bend-over-Casanova and every man for him or herself.”
“Accusing Stephin Merritt of insincerity would be like accusing Cecil Taylor of playing too many notes—not only does it go without saying, it’s what he’s selling. I say if he’d lived all 69 songs himself he’d be dead already, and the only reality I’m sure they attest to is that he’s very much alive. I dislike cynicism so much that I’m reluctant ever to link it to creative exuberance. But this cavalcade of witty ditties—one-dimensional by design, intellectual when it feels like it, addicted to cheap rhymes, cheaper tunes, and token arrangements, sung by nonentities whose vocal disabilities keep their fondness for pop theoretical—upends my preconceptions the way high art’s sposed to.”
Screw the Voice, and best of luck to Christgau.
Christgau is good when he's writing about certain things. But overall I do not appreciate his canon-building efforts. His version of "rock 'n' roll" history is blinkered, and misses out half of the good stuff, while he wastes his time with endless amounts of trivia. As an overarching vision I find it smaller than I would like. This is basically true of every pop writer who came of age in the supposedly glorious sixties; ironically, very few of these writers have a clue about the real meaning of the sixties.
That said, he IS the Voice, and the Voice without him has no chance of doing anything interesting ever again, as they get further and further from any kind of a purpose. When are they going to cut bait and just go as an upscale version of a full-on "Little Nickel" type of shopping sheet?