Rock Criticism’s Musical Text: Robert Christgau’s Writing about Words and Music in Song

ABSTRACT

The academic study of rock criticism assumes musical works to be interesting for the way the words and music of song reflect history, society and culture. However, how did rock critics approach the musical text?  This paper examines Robert Christgau’s writing on the balance between words and music in song, 1970-89. Christgau is then examined as a music analyst, based on a smaller collection of case studies including a sustained passage on DJ Shadow. A productive dialogue is suggested between the study of rock criticism and a music theory attentive to writing as a form of music analysis.

KEYWORDS:

• Robert Christgau
• rock journalism
• music analysis
• words
• music
• song

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Also quoted by Lindberg et al. (155) and continued onto Christgau’s sentence: “Of course popular music is a collectively produced “cultural practice.”

2. Statistics for the Consumer Guide can be found at http://robertchristgau.com/cg_stats.php.

3. As this reference immediately indicates, I refer only to artist, date, and grade, leaving album titles to the interested reader to find either at robertchristgau.com or in one of the book collections.

4. The grading system changed over time. It is explained in the website at http://robertchristgau.com/xg/web/grades.php.

5. Anyone who studies Christgau is indebted to Tom Hull for his magisterial work on Christgau’s website.

6. Christgau’s Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies: “I’d have to write two-thirds of the book from scratch” (7). Christgau, Going Into the City: “I soon saw that my published columns would provide less than two-thirds of a book that would properly represent the decade” (333).

7. The sections are extracted from a longer study, which also covers: Christgau’s technical attention to the words of song; an analysis of metaphor and specificity; and a review of words in song in three types of music that drew Christgau’s attention in the 1980s: “rap and related dance musics, world beat, and what I’ve broadly designated postpunk” (Christgau’s Record Guide: The ‘80s 18; also see Christgau’s Consumer Guide: Albums of the ‘90s xi). My thanks to Dave Laing for advice concerning the project as a whole.

8. Christgau’s first Guide book appeared in 1981 with “rock albums” in the title, while the 1990 installment was left genre-free as Christgau’s Record Guide.

9. On “emergent,” one of a trio that includes “dominant” and “residual,” which arises from Raymond Williams (1977), see Christgau‘s “Living in a Material World” (1985).

10. Reference to the title of Wilder’s book.

11. The phrase “rock diction” is used three times in Christgau‘s “Rock Lyrics Are Poetry (Maybe)” (1967) (pages 238, 240, and 241).

12. The point may have derived from Simon Frith (35–36). Reviewing Frith, Christgau wrote that “though I’ve also spent years thinking about the aesthetics of lyrics, it was the chapter this sociology Ph.D. calls ‘Pop Music’ that solved their riddle for me” (“It’s Barely Rock and Roll”; see also Christgau, “Preface” xiii-xiv).

13. In Britain too, also in 1969, Nick Logan was turned down for a post on a British music magazine, twice in one year, “because I couldn’t read music–which you had to be able to do to work on the Melody Maker then” (Gorman, 90–91).

14. This is not to say that jazz was ever far from Christgau’s concern: See extended reviews of books on, for example, Thelonious Monk and Louis Armstrong, as well as A+ grades for both Armstrong and Monk, Ornette Coleman, David Murray, and Sonny Rollins, who has more A+ plus grades than anyone.

15. On “effete,” the Oxford English Dictionary: “That has exhausted its vigour and energy; incapable of efficient action. Also, of persons: weak, ineffectual; degenerate. More recently, effeminate.”

16. For representative samples of Goldstein and Willis, see the former’s Goldstein’s Greatest Hits and Willis‘s Out of the Vinyl Deeps. See also Astor; Powers.

17. This is only one perspective on the fascinating relationship between Christgau and both Goldstein and Willis. On Goldstein, see Christgau, “Can’t Stop the Music,” and on Willis, see Christgau‘s “Pioneer Days” and Going Into the City 161–208 passim.

18. While Christgau didn’t address directly the relationship between “rock diction” and the words of the “great American songbook,” he was certainly attentive to music before rock and roll. See his essay on Nat King Cole in Grown Up All Wrong (17–21), followed immediately by George Gershwin (22–26).

19. “Music appreciation” might be the missing term here. Christgau is provocatively happy to accept the terms “middlebrow” and “belletristic” at page 7 of Grown Up All Wrong.

20. See also Christgau’s analysis, using clock time for accurate reference, of Johnny Griffin’s saxophone solo on “In Walked Bud” on Thelonious Monk’s 1958 Misterioso. For example: “Then, boom, Griffin goes crazy. Phrasing double- and then triple-speed toward the top of his register while signaling intermittent slowdowns with low r&b honks and blats, he works fast-moderate-fast as if extending a God-touched Sam ‘The Man’ Taylor break toward an infinity lasting three minutes and twenty-one seconds. Monk yells or grunts approval at 3:42, 4:35, 5:38” (“Not So Misterioso”).

21. “Last Year’s Man,” “Dress Rehearsal Rag,” “Famous Blue Raincoat,” “Sing Another Song, Boys,” and “Joan of Arc.” Cohen’s vocal-verbal lines relate to the underlying three-time in a variety of ways.

22. The New York Dolls share only with Bob Dylan the distinction of two consecutive A+ grades, not counting two consecutive A+ grades for compilations by Franco Luambo.

23. “History Lesson” was written by D. Boon of the Minutemen, who died in 1985. The track is administered by BMI, but its publishing rights reside with New Alliance Music, which appears to have become defunct. I gratefully acknowledge the help given by BMI and by Mike Watt of the Minutemen in my effort to give due acknowledgment of the rights holders.

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Notes on contributors

Dai Griffiths

Dai Griffiths is Senior Lecturer in Music at Oxford Brookes University, and the author of books on Radiohead and Elvis Costello.