Going into the City

February 2, 2015
This sprawling, rambunctious, memoir by rock critic Christgau is sometimes tedious and dreary, often arrogant, yet nevertheless brimming with insight. He handily, and mostly affectionately, chronicles his childhood and youth in Flushing, Queens, where he didn’t excel at sports, but was good enough not to be picked last in pickup games, and where he developed a lifelong love of reading and music. A peripatetic forager among the fields of art, Christgau stops along the way to relish Dostoyevski’s Crime and Punishment (“He conveys the pain of poverty in physical detail and with psychological acuity”) and Truffaut’s Jules and Jim: the film “changed my life.” Even more than the arts, Christgau’s romantic relationships—his long-term partnership with rock critic Ellen Willis and his four-decade-old marriage to writer Carola Dibbell—”constituted an emotional education more action-packed than my professional progress.” In the late 1960s, Christgau rose to the top of a pack of such rock critics as Paul Williams and Richard Meltzer, and he declares, “like most young critics... I was pretty damn sure of myself.”

March 15, 2015

Artists draw on a variety of influences to create their works. With this title, longtime rock critic Christgau uses the memoir format successfully, revealing the influences on his career as a "professional appreciator"--to borrow a phrase from High Fidelity. A book that nods to James Joyce in its title has a lot to live up to. But Christgau--like Jonathan Lethem in Fear of Music or Chuck Klosterman in Fargo Rock City--dives right in, starting in Queens, his parents' birthplace, and eventually ending up in the Lower East Side, where he honed his editing and writing chops at the Village Voice for 37 years, 32 of them as chief music critic. The memoir, loquacious at turns, is actually a love poem to his wife, set to some of the biggest music and cultural moments of the 20th century. VERDICT Christgau is a critic's critic and a music aficionado. This one is a must-have for those interested in music, journalism, pop culture, and U.S. history. [See Prepub Alert, 8/4/14.]--Stacie Williams, Lexington P.L., KY

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2015
When one thinks of the pantheon of rock criticism, Christgau, one of the pioneers of the form, is a platinum member. He helped establish a field and vocation that took pop music seriously, and has spent close to 50 years discerning currents in American life, including 32 years as music editor of the Village Voice. In passionate, opinionated, erudite, and eloquent prose, he astutely documented the counterculture, punk rock, hip-hop, and beyond. His groundbreaking Consumer Guide has rated thousands of albums in a distinctive, idiosyncratic voice. Critics understand art better than artists understand criticism, he notes. Here, Christgau chronicles his life and times as a record nerd, recounting significant influences, major discoveries, turning points, and his heartfelt love for his wife, along with their attempts to have a family, culminating with the joyous adoption of their daughter in Honduras in 1985. At times confessional, bordering on giving the reader too much information, and driven by an ego that's all too readily apparent, Christgau proves his essentiality with sharp insights and a profound take on popular culture.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

January 1, 2015
A veteran rock critic takes readers deeper into the recesses of his thought processes than many might wish to venture.Even more than most memoirs, this is a book that only its author could write. As the self-anointed "Dean of American Rock Critics," Christgau (Christgau's Consumer Guide: Albums of the '90s, 2000, etc.) could have written about the seismic cultural changes he has observed and analyzed; or about how rock music, originally dismissed as kids' stuff, gave him a career he has never outgrown, a vocation that didn't exist before he began writing seriously about rock and popular culture during the mid-1960s; or about the progression of the music (he goes deepest here into New York punk and hip-hop); or about the changes in journalism or the proliferation of cultural criticism (and celebrity journalism). Christgau does touch those bases, fleetingly, but any number of other writers could explore those areas. What no one else could write about in such detail are the author's IQ, childhood memories, romantic relationships and sex life. And no one but a critic-and this critic in particular-would write like this about the woman he would marry: "Sex was hot, crucial and engrossing, but not simple-she was pickier and more changeable than I was used to in hot relationships, and my faulty pleasure receptors, while not impinging on my performance quote unquote, generated emotional disconnects as they gradually righted themselves." As his work for a variety of publications confirms, he is a provocative and perceptive critic and, by all accounts (including his own), a good editor. But his focus here is so narrowly self-absorbed that the most engaged readers will not be those who care most about the culture at large but his journalistic colleagues and contemporaries, who will want to see how they are treated and what scores he settles. Christgau indicates from the start that he is "hardly self-effacing in print," but anyone who borrows his subtitle from James Joyce would never be accused of false humility.

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