As a critic, I should probably be offended by the title “The Last Critic.” This film is a fascinating portrait of Robert Christgau, the legendary music writer who was one of the founders of what was once known as “rock criticism”. (These were the days before hope, not to mention Taylor Swift’s fan base.) To be fair, the film never really confirms its title — that Christgau was or is “the ultimate critic.” In fact, he was one of the first writers to establish rock criticism as a strong and important method, others being Greil Marcus and the late Ellen Willis (both of whom he was close to; Marcus is featured in the picture) as well as Lester Bangs, a good bad boy who died in 1982.
One thing about Christgau is that he invented himself, and had his own style of criticism. Born in 1942, he started out as a talented writer and journalist, with stellar journalistic writings (in 1966, he published an award-winning piece about a girl who died from eating a macrobiotic diet). Attracting the attention of Esquire magazine, which at that time was at the top of the new world of media, he began to write a column on youth culture there, and in 1969 he came up with the Christgau Consumer Guide, a monthly series of capsule reviews that would examine – and condition! – the latest rock album chart.
That doesn’t sound surprising, but Christgau’s prose had a strange electricity, and in a world where rock writers were salt monks (Marcus was a pipe-smoking schoolboy), he had a sixth sense for making a name for himself. An acerbic genius, full of egomaniacal vitriol, he once jokingly introduced himself as “the chief of American rock critics,” and the label stuck. From then on, that’s how he was mentioned and thought of.
At the Village Voice, where Consumer Guide became one of the most influential weekly fiction sections from the 1970s to the 1990s, Christgau wrote like an insightful activist, making each capsule sound like a psychedelic sonnet. And the idea of pairing each test with a letter grade (from A+ to E-) was so counter-intuitive – at least in the post-counterculture world – that it became Christgau’s signature.
He played in his judgments (on Prince’s “Dirty Mind”: “He notices the writing of the songs, passes the person, raises the guitar, muscles to the voice, leans hard on the stable “4-4″, and thinks about sex, especially. Cougar Mellencamp, but I’m damned if I will let John Cougar Mellencamp teach me to hear Bryan Adams”). He was so popular that he inspired funky album tracks from Lou Reed and Sonic Youth, and I guess you could call Christgau the unintentional god of Entertainment Weekly. At one point in the documentary, Christgau refers to a certain group of students that he considers to be “high B+,” adding that “nobody knows what that means” except him. As a critic who has graded EW for decades, I’m probably the only other person in the world who knows. well that means.
In “The Last Critic,” we meet Christgau as the rock-crit grandmaster (now 83), a tough guy knocking around the streets of the East Village. He’s a little more bent than he used to be, with white hair and arthritis, but he’s still a bad model, straight and mean, with the mind of a machine gun, ageless in his strength (and in his hunger for new music). And God bless him, he’s been pumping out the Customer Directory every month (currently on Substack). The way he walks is the real subject of the documentary, because writing the Buyer’s Guide is the backbone of Robert Christgau’s life; every part of it reflects his insistence. The film opens with him quoting the following words from an old word processor: “Forever ‘Feelings are like assholes – everyone has one,’ I’m just saying, but not everyone has ten thousand of them.” Christgau has 14,000 views, and that’s his glory and commitment.
He and his wife, author Caroline Dibbell, have lived in the same 2nd Ave apartment for 50 years. Although it has seven rooms, Christgau has organized it like an encyclopedic pack rat. The space has hundreds of feet of books, and he built special industrial shelves to store his 36,000 vinyl albums and CDs (and even cassette tapes), which cover every square inch of wall space in his cramped office. It is his cave of knowledge, and every day he sits in the middle of it, fiddling with CD players of that kind of work, listening to music all day, taking out his thoughts on an old computer, feeling in every moment that this is his happiness. It’s critique as a calling, a mission, a quest to find great new music, and to capture the essence of each album in a single paragraph of poetry. It’s what gets Christgau up in the morning, and what keeps his spirit fresh. (When he recovers from the operation, he will not take three days and not write.)
He’s slowed down with age (well, not much), but he’s still smart and intellectual and a good person. He is clearly controversial – in his day, he was not just a critic but the editor of the Village Voice who invented his own authoritarian ways. He would make the writers sweat (but only with the goal of producing the best version of themselves), and would sometimes cycle to their apartments to pick up an overdue copy. But what cemented the legend of Christgau was a surprise mind mania that informed the Consumer Guide. When it came to music, Christgau truly believed in the existence of a hidden grand order. He wanted to turn the act of eating records into a system – the heavenly kingdom of judgment, which was the all-seeing king.
That’s the way of thinking that some critics have (shows A: and me). Yet Christgau, in the Consumer’s Handbook, was the only music critic to wear his system-making brain on the outside. The title of this column was a challenge, because here was this writer who was presenting himself as a “revolutionary,” yet he had the audacity to say that the revolution was a form of to buy. He meant this as a joke (“I used to punch my colleagues in the nose,” he says), the joke is that he was really serious about it. He was going to rank the counterculture as the ultimate cool professor.
And that is what Christgau became. The documentary has a lot of pictures of him back then, when the bohemian New York critic was still a celebrity, and when he was the only person you could call him who changed into long hair and big glasses and a weird smile. He was like an underground version of Poindexter. In the late 1970s, it felt like he was the last guy left with shoulder length hair, but the vibe was about as far from hippie as you could get. Christgau was from Queens, the son of a firefighter, and he had a disdain for the elite, as he had been.
“The Last Critic,” directed with great respect by Matty Wishnow, is full of strong evidence of Christgau’s special qualities as a critic. We hear from writers like Kit Rachlis and Ann Powers and Amanda Petrusich and Chuck Eddy and Rob Sheffield. Nelson George and Greg Tate make the important point that Christgau, when he organized a music review section in the 1970s that featured different voices, went on a journey of what the Village Voice should have been. As someone who grew up in the early days of rock, I especially enjoyed the film’s depiction of Christgau’s friendship with Greil Marcus, a legendary West Coast critic (we see the two of them sitting today in Christgau’s living room, looking like the Statler and Waldorf of rock criticism). They wrote letters to each other like a smart mash, and spoke several times a month on the phone but had serious disagreements. “I don’t think you feel hip-hop. And I think it’s a function of whether you feel James Brown,” says Christgau of Marcus.
Christgau heard James Brown, well (he was a great advocate of funk), but I would argue that his Achilles’ heel as a critic is that he did not hear pop. We see him in a TV interview from the 1980s where he lists his favorite things, saying, “I like African music, I really like country music, I like the best called world music, I like rap, I have nothing against pop, I like fun and dance music a lot…” Consider this sentence: I have nothing against pop. It shows what almost all rock critics (except Stephen Holden) felt about pop music, which was that they had something against it. They thought it was shiny, superficial, emotional, artificial, cosmetic, corrupt, “commercial,” or something else that came out of the left. At one point in the documentary, we see a list of albums by various Christgau bands, and forgive me, but I don’t live in a world where Sleater-Kinney’s “Dig Me Out” is Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” is a B. (I live in a world where Supertramp’s “Breakfast of Breakfast, Oplaces” is a bigger hall than America. Against the pop animus of old rock criticism it didn’t show anything like neurotic puritanism, or perhaps an inability to hear the deep beauty of pop.
My craziness aside, early rock critics invented their own brand of beauty. The reason they were able to spread this kind of criticism on the map is because they were extraordinary writers. What you feel, in every capsule of Robert Christgau, is that he directs whatever he writes about, and that’s what made Consumer Guide a compulsive read – the drama of listening to Christgau let each of those albums flow from him. “The Last Critic” is a dignified word picture, but above all it is a testament to everything that a great critic is: a priest, a supporter, a murderer, a cruel person, a merciless truth-teller and a vessel of love.
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