I’m A Lot Like You Were: On Robert Christgau’s “Is It Still Good to Ya?”
Robert Christgau | Is It Still Good to Ya?: Fifty Years of Rock Criticism, 1967-2017 | Duke University Press | October 2018 | 456 Pages
If Greil Marcus is the academic and Lester Bangs the demagogue, then Robert Christgau constitutes the everyman. That flattens all their strengths and weaknesses, naturally, but if you want it put simply, “The Dean of American Rock Critics” is a fan. And he says as much. Christgau has never professed to be a technical demonstrateur, opting instead for an obsessive collection of music that spans the twentieth and twenty-first century to exhaustion. As a music writer, everything me and my ilk do is indebted in some way to “The Dean” for better or worse. And in a time when music criticism is skewered, ridiculed, invalidated, and unloved, Christgau’s 50-year archive of essays Is It Still Good To Ya? is a reminder that sticking to your guns is a timeless value.
As part of the first wave of rock critics, Robert Christgau was perfectly positioned to have taken in every seismic shift in modern popular music. The allure of rock n’ roll crated his ambitions about jazz writing, and since the mid-60s Christgau took it upon himself to make sure rock criticism was considered just as valid and intellectually rich as jazz and classical critique, a pertinent example of this effort being his piece “Rock Lyrics Are Poetry (Maybe).” In the essay, published in Cheetah in 1967, Christgau ritually cites Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams alongside Dylan, Crosby, Lennon, and McCartney in order to beef up their poetic bonafides. This is Christgau at his most idealistic, precociously granting the day’s music a level of legitimacy that his elders would’ve scoffed at—much like my peers did with Young Thug and Future against the bemoaning tides of rap purists.
Act I of Is It Still Good To Ya does a lot of this historicizing, which is wholly welcome. Treatises from the era provide key context to someone who was never there, unblemished by retroactive falsehoods and embellishments. “We Have to Deal With It,” Christgau’s English punk report for Village Voice in ’78, is a salient time capsule for a moment so thoroughly mined in the public imagination. He grounds it in dichotomy, between the Sex Pistols and the Clash, pomp vs. materialism, style v. substance. But there is also an acknowledgment of the working-class Briton sensibility that informs both bands. Christgau is clearly in love with both; the energy coming from the scene is palpable, and his boots-on-the-ground approach feels more natural than any overwrought VH1 documentary on the same subject.
The thematic shift in the book’s second section comes as quite curious. Much of Act II: A Great Tradition consists of Christgau situating the great figures of the twentieth century: Holiday, Guthrie, Sinatra, Armstrong. They sometimes accompany reviews of artist biographies like Charles R. Cross’ classic Heavier Than Heaven on Kurt Cobain and Julia Blackburn’s With Billie on Billie Holiday. Maybe it’s this metatexuality that makes the section so off-putting—or maybe Christgau’s book reviews just aren’t nearly as compelling as his music reviews. Regardless, the myth-making within these passages is melodramatic, lacking the intuitive synthesis necessary for a younger reader like myself to fully grasp these cultural titans.
Christgau is most guilty of this when talking about Black women like Holiday and Etta James. I’m not expecting him to have a pristine racial understanding, and certainly Christgau has been one of the most vocal white critics in clarifying that American pop music as a whole is genetically African. But he spends a quizzical amount of time dissecting the hardship and heartbreak they endured as a result of colonial oppression and impoverished circumstances. These are facts, but with this treatment the section smacks as another tome in the pantheon of white fascination with Black suffering, the juiciest treasures by which to examine Black artists.
Race keeps chipping at the edges of Is It Still Good to Ya?, not to an obscene detriment, but like a small mushi that keeps reappearing. While Christgau is an ardent devotee to African music and goes lengths to dignify artists like Youssef N’Dour and Ladysmith Black Mambazo to a largely ignorant Western audience, he just as often denigrates “gangsta rap” in a very PMRC manner that’s contrary to his usual critical persona. 50 Cent, Lil Wayne, and Snoop Dogg are constant targets of a stereotypical “sex, drugs, and money” viewpoint that makes Christgau come off as comically out-of-touch. It’s a testament to Christgau’s enduring curiosity that he didn’t calcify himself with such regressive takes.
Christgau seems to simply abhor vulgarity, even when it’s accompanied by good music, and his rap views err toward backpacker territory. Endtroducing, The Marshall Mathers LP, Late Registration, and We Got It from Here... Thank You 4 Your Service are some of his notable hip-hop AOTYs, while Wayne and Jay-Z receive lengthy, sometimes scathing essays about their lyrics and conduct even when being lauded. Rappers might be more blatant about their id, but I can guarantee you Chuck Berry and James Brown have done way worse shit than Weezy and Jay, and Christgau has far less faint praise for them.
But hey, that’s the man’s taste, and I won’t damn him for it. He acts the same way toward metal, finding it brusque and unpleasing to the ear, and inversely on techno, dismissive of its plodding repetition. And for all I’ve found to lambaste about him, these idiosyncracies are part of Christgau’s greatest strength: he is who he is. That he became the platonic ideal of a music critic is largely due to his ability to interrogate why exactly he enjoys certain musicians and what stops him from enjoying others.
That’s what makes “A Month on the Town” one of the best entries in Is It Still Good to Ya?. Here is a writer enamored with music, live music, unbuoyed by trends or clout, taking in New York’s resident jouissance with fervor. Nowadays we struggle to separate ourselves from the social media cavalcade, whether we want to or not, hurried by deadlines, self-aggrandizing our own curation and tastes. Christgau is blissfully unconcerned with any of that, packing in as many acts as possible in his birthday month and trying to place the reader squarely in his seat witnessing such icons as Robert Plant, Ornette Coleman, and Sonic Youth. Even when his taste is questionable (Gogol Bordello should best be left in 2006), dude’s hustle at 65 in chronicling the culture is no small feat.
As one of his progeny (again, for better or worse) it gets to the heart of why we even do this shit. Christgau is generally concerned with dominant culture—at his core he’s a musical sociologist and doesn’t delve into subculture nearly as thoroughly. But whether sizing up M.I.A.’s cross-cultural boundary-breaking or examining Lady Gaga’s well-curated celebrity personae, there’s a noticeable trace of his shadow among my peers’ inquiries into dariacore or city pop or gorge music. Christgau has had a rhizomatic impact on music criticism, one where there’s merit in being both on the outside looking in and enmeshed in the thick of a scene.
To be frank, I’m not the biggest fan of Christgau the writer. He’s self-indulgent, uses too many turns of phrase, and it’s evident the man has been too big for an editor for 30 years now. Critics like Kodwo Eshun, Nitsuh Abebe, and Greg Tate synthesized his concepts with more coherency, their prose better for it. Perhaps I see too much of myself in his style. Nonetheless, his is the standard by which to be judged. Is It Still Good to Ya? functions as the quintessential document of a rock critic who has seen it all, and for those carrying on the practice, even if we don’t get behind every take, there remain valuable lessons. Keep crate-digging, stay ostentatious, don’t apologize.