Same Consumer Guide as it ever was. Don't be put off by the off-putting institutional site design.

Originally posted on Monday, April 30, 2007.


UPDATE, Sunday, November 18, 2007: See Jody Rosen for insight into Christgau's strategy, technique and props in writing the short review (X-ed out: The Village Voice fires a famous music critic [05-Sep-06], Slate, online at slate.com). The highlighting below is mine.

Christgau's project at the Voice was to create a venue for popular-music writing that assumed a certain readership – one equipped not just with broad cultural knowledge but with a fluency in music history, the pop canon, and all the little meta-narratives of individual artists and their discographies. The goal, in other words, was to talk about pop music in the way literary critics talked about books. Christgau succeeded in making the Voice the indispensable source for serious music writing – in the '70s and '80s, it was a local alternative weekly read by music nuts from coast to coast. The critical ideal of serious music writing was best exemplified in his own pieces, packed tight with erudition and insight.

Isn't that the truth. The Voice in the 70s and 80s published the best music writing available anywhere, every week. The best, most knowing, irreverent writing about rock. The most authoritative writing about jazz. The most righteous writing about R&B. And the most informed writing about all of the permutations that new, creative music took during that period. All thanks to Christgau's editorial direction. Surprisingly (to me, anyway), during that time, Christgau edited jazz writer Gary Giddens, whose astounding ability to describe music in words turns out to owe a debt to Christgau – As does anyone who ever thought that dancing this mess around was enough only half the time.