Synopses & Reviews
One of our great essayists and music journalists, the Dean of American Rock Critics, leads a heady tour through his life and times in this atmospheric, visceral memoir—both a love letter to a New York long past and a tribute to the transformative power of art
Lifelong New Yorker Robert Christgau has been writing about pop culture since he was twelve and getting paid for it since he was twenty-two, covering rock for Esquire in its heyday and personifying the music beat at The Village Voice for over three decades. Christgau listened to Alan Freed howl about rock and roll before Elvis, settled east of Manhattan's Avenue B forty years before it was cool, wit-nessed Monterey and Woodstock and Chicago 1968 and the first abortion speakout. He caught Coltrane in the East Village, Muddy Waters in Chicago, Otis Redding at the Apollo, the Dead in the Haight, Janis Joplin at the Fillmore, the Clash in Leeds, Grandmaster Flash in Times Square, and every punk band you can think of at CBGB.
Christgau chronicled many of the key cultural shifts of the last half century and revolutionized the cultural status of the music critic in the process. Going into the City is a look back at the upbringing that grounded him, the history that transformed him, and the music, books, and films that showed him the way. Like Alfred Kazin's A Walker in the City, E. B. White's Here Is New York, Joseph Mitchell's Up in the Old Hotel, and Patti Smith's Just Kids, it is a loving portrait of a lost New York. It's an homage to the city of Christgau's youth from Queens to the Lower East Side—a city that exists mostly in memory today. And it's a love story about the Greenwich Village girl who roamed this realm of possibility with him.
Review
“Often maddening, always thought-provoking . . . With Pauline Kael, Christgau is arguably one of the two most important American mass-culture critics of the second half of the 20th century.” & #151;Jody Rosen
Review
“Christgau is the last true-blue record critic on earth. [Hes] pretty much who I make my records for. Hes . . . the last of that whole Lester Bangs generation of record reviewers, and I still heed his words.” ?uestlove
Review
“Going Into the City is at once a vivid reminder of one of New Yorks golden ages and a blessed glimpse into the forming mind of one of our great critics. Both hilarious and full of juicy detail . . . in that utterly inimitable voice.” Ann Powers, Author of < i=""> Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America <> and, with the artist, < i=""> Tori Amos: Piece By Piece <>
Review
“Ive waited years for this book. An intellectual bildungsroman in which one of our keenest cultural critics unpacks his own New York story alongside . . . the evolution of pop music criticisman artform that owes him more than anyone.” Will Hermes, author of < i=""> Love Goes To Buildings On Fire: Five Years In New York That Changed Music Forever <>
Review
“A New York love story like no otherthe greatest of rock and roll writers spends a lifetime devoted to a city . . . as caustic and confrontational as a Clash single, yet as sustaining as an Al Green LPa story as instantly memorable as Robert Christgaus voice.” Rob Sheffield, author of < i=""> Turn Around Bright Eyes <> and < i=""> Love is a Mix Tape <>
Review
“Soul satisfying . . .Vintage Christgau herewise, sharp, funny, rigorous, and genuinely searching, a mighty work of reflection by a major critic who has never turned his back on the pop lives of everyday people.” Eric Lott, author of < i=""> Love and Theft <>
Review
“Remarkable. Contains the energy, bravado, and heart of rock ‘n roll itself-and far, far more depth and ambition than we expect in what passes for memoir these days.” Robert Hilburn, author of < i=""> Johnny Cash: A Life <>
Review
“Here . . . Christgau proves his essentiality with sharp insights and a profound take on popular culture.” Booklist
Review
“An intellectual autobiography that beautifully captures what it feels like when a cultural experience trapdoors you into a new life.” Grantland
Review
“An excellent memoir . . . full of rock-critic lore, with vivid cameo appearances by titans like Greil Marcus, Lester Bangs, and Ellen Willis . . . Christgau writes with contagious insight about the records, novels, movies and paintings that have shaped his thinking.” Rolling Stone
Review
“Christgau is among Americas first and best rock critics.” New York Times
Review
“With the possible exception of his friend Greil Marcus, no American music writer has exerted more influence over the tastes of rock music “consumers” (as hed insist on calling them) and on the craft of other rock critics.” Los Angeles Times
Review
“A personal bildungsroman . . [he] brought to a relatively disrespected popular genre in the 1960s and ‘70s a new degree of critical intensity and erudition, delivered with an American vernacular energy and wit and let-it-fly opinionatedness.” Los Angeles Review of Books
Review
“To read Going Into the City is to spend hours in the company of a completely sui generis critical mind, one thats not only encyclopedically knowledgeable about mid-to-late 20th-century pop culture but capable of lapidary prose, astute insight, and savage wit.” Slate
Review
“From growing up . . . to formulating his critical process in the Lower East Side of the 1960s, Christgau takes as rigorous an analytical approach as he does with his reviewing. Its as much a memoir of the development of his editorial sensibility as it is of his life.” Brooklyn Magazine
Review
“Remarkable in its unflagging conviction that the disciplined attention a critic applies to art ought to apply to the self as well . . . Also, its funny and has a lot of sex and music in it.” Christian Science Monitor
Review
“Saying something new and distinctive, even about art thats derivative and undistinguished, is a critics perennial challenge. Christgau embraces it with undimming energy, his diction swerving between the academy and the street, his sentences unspooling and spilling references without waiting for you to catch them.” The Guardian
Review
“Song titles, political movements, and aesthetic notions, in particular Christgaus restless, kaleidoscopic portrait of the late ‘60s . . . What makes good criticism work, Christgau argues, is ‘a brew of genre knowledge, general knowledge, aesthetic insight, moral passion, palpable delight, prose style, more prose style, and what-have-you.” Boston Globe
Review
“Honest, detailed, stirring and sweet. And isnt that how all the best love songs should be?” Time
Review
“Like his reviews, this is compelling, thoughtful and, of course, opinionated.” Minneapolis Star Tribune
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“A deeply smart, charmingly gregarious read.” New York magazine
Review
“Brimming with insight.” Robert Hilburn, author of < i=""> Johnny Cash: A Life <>
Synopsis
One of our great essayists and journalists--the Dean of American Rock Critics, Robert Christgau--takes us on a heady tour through his life and times in this vividly atmospheric and visceral memoir that is both a love letter to a New York long past and a tribute to the transformative power of art.
Lifelong New Yorker Robert Christgau has been writing about pop culture since he was twelve and getting paid for it since he was twenty-two, covering rock for Esquire in its heyday and personifying the music beat at the Village Voice for over three decades. Christgau listened to Alan Freed howl about rock 'n' roll before Elvis, settled east of Manhattan's Avenue B forty years before it was cool, witnessed Monterey and Woodstock and Chicago '68, and the first abortion speak-out. He's caught Coltrane in the East Village, Muddy Waters in Chicago, Otis Redding at the Apollo, the Dead in the Haight, Janis Joplin at the Fillmore, the Rolling Stones at the Garden, the Clash in Leeds, Grandmaster Flash in Times Square, and every punk band you can think of at CBGB.
Christgau chronicled many of the key cultural shifts of the last half century and revolutionized the cultural status of the music critic in the process. Going Into the City is a look back at the upbringing that grounded him, the history that transformed him, and the music, books, and films that showed him the way. Like Alfred Kazin's A Walker in the City, E. B. White's Here Is New York, Joseph Mitchell's Up in the Old Hotel, and Patti Smith's Just Kids, it is a loving portrait of a lost New York. It's an homage to the city of Christgau's youth from Queens to the Lower East Side--a city that exists mostly in memory today. And it's a love story about the Greenwich Village girl who roamed this realm of possibility with him.
About the Author
Robert Christgau has covered popular music for Esquire, Newsday, Creem, Playboy, Rolling Stone, Blender, and MSN Music, and from 1969 until 2006 for The Village Voice, where he was a senior editor and chief music critic for thirty-two years. He is currently a columnist for Billboard.com, a contributing critic at NPR's All Things Considered, and a Visiting Arts Professor at New York University. The author of three books based on his hundreds of Consumer Guide columns and two essay collections, he has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a National Arts Journalism Program Senior Fellow, and a Ferris Teaching Fellow at Princeton. Born and raised in Queens, he has lived in Manhattan's East Village since 1965.