38 Facts About Robert Christgau

Robert Thomas Christgau is an American music journalist and essayist.

Robert Christgau has 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.

Robert Christgau is best known for his terse, letter-graded capsule album reviews, composed in a concentrated, fragmented prose style featuring layered clauses, caustic wit, one-liner jokes, political digressions, and allusions ranging from common knowledge to the esoteric.

Robert Christgau was born in Greenwich Village, Manhattan, New York City, on April 18,1942, and was raised in Queens, the son of a fireman.

Robert Christgau has said he became a rock and roll fan when disc jockey Alan Freed moved to the city in 1954.

Robert Christgau wrote short stories, before giving up fiction in 1964 to become a sportswriter, and later, a police reporter for the Newark Star-Ledger.

Robert Christgau became a freelance writer after a story he wrote about the death of a woman in New Jersey was published by New York magazine.

Robert Christgau was asked to take over the dormant music column at Esquire, which he began writing in June 1967.

From early on in his emergence as a critic, Robert Christgau was conscious of his lack of formal knowledge of music.

In early 1972, Robert Christgau accepted a full-time job as music critic for Newsday.

Robert Christgau returned to The Village Voice in 1974 as music editor.

Robert Christgau remained at The Village Voice until August 2006, when he was fired shortly after the paper's acquisition by New Times Media.

Two months later, Robert Christgau became a contributing editor at Rolling Stone.

Late in 2007, Robert Christgau was fired by Rolling Stone, although he continued to work for the magazine for another three months.

Robert Christgau had been a regular contributor to Blender before he joined Rolling Stone.

Robert Christgau continued to write for Blender until the magazine ceased publication in March 2009.

Robert Christgau appears in the 2011 rockumentary Color Me Obsessed, about the Replacements.

Robert Christgau previously taught during the formative years of the California Institute of the Arts.

On July 15,2014, Robert Christgau debuted a monthly column on Billboards website.

Robert Christgau is perhaps best known for his "Consumer Guide" columns, which have been published more-or-less monthly since July 10,1969, in the Village Voice, as well as a brief period in Creem.

Under this system, Robert Christgau generally considered a B+ or higher to be a personal recommendation.

In 1990, Robert Christgau changed the format of the "Consumer Guide" to focus more on the albums he liked.

Robert Christgau did give full reviews and traditional grades to records he pans in an annual November "Turkey Shoot" column in The Village Voice, until he left the newspaper in 2006.

In December 2006, Robert Christgau began writing his "Consumer Guide" columns for MSN Music, initially appearing every other month, before switching to a monthly schedule in June 2007.

Robert Christgau began corresponding with dedicated readers of the column, named as "The Witnesses" after the column.

On September 10,2014, Robert Christgau debuted a new version of "Expert Witness" on Cuepoint, an online music magazine published on the blogging platform Medium.

In September 2019, at the encouragement of friend and colleague Joe Levy, Robert Christgau began publishing the newsletter "And It Don't Stop" on the newsletter-subscription platform Substack.

Robert Christgau selected Bob Dylan's John Wesley Harding, The Who's Tommy, and Randy Newman's 12 Songs as the best pop albums of their respective years, and Miles Davis's Bitches Brew as the best jazz album of its year.

In some years, Robert Christgau often gave an equal number of points to his first- and second-ranked albums, but they were nevertheless ranked as first and second, not as a tie for first; this list collects only his number-one picks.

Robert Christgau gets my vision, and I'm cool with that.

Robert Christgau has named Louis Armstrong, Thelonious Monk, Chuck Berry, the Beatles, and the New York Dolls as his top five artists of all time.

In July 2013, during an interview with Esquire magazine's Peter Gerstenzang, Robert Christgau criticized the voters at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, saying "they're pretty stupid" for not voting in the New York Dolls.

Robert Christgau readily admits to having prejudices and generally disliking genres such as heavy metal, salsa, dance, art rock, progressive rock, bluegrass, gospel, Irish folk, jazz fusion, and classical music.

Robert Christgau has been widely known as the "Dean of American rock critics", a designation he originally gave to himself while slightly drunk at a press event for the 5th Dimension in the early 1970s.

Robert Christgau married fellow critic and writer Carola Dibbell in 1974; they have an adopted daughter, Nina, born in Honduras in 1986.

Robert Christgau has said he was raised in a "born-again Church" in Queens, but has since become an atheist.

Robert Christgau has been long, albeit argumentative, friends with critics Tom Hull, Dave Marsh, Greil Marcus, and the late Ellen Willis, whom he dated from 1966 to 1969.

Robert Christgau has mentored younger critics Ann Powers and Chuck Eddy.