Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Who Hates Robert Christgau?

Lots of people, apparently. Maybe you do, too, and don't even know it.

Cracked has one of several articles that describes why some of his attitudes and tastes might rub you the wrong way, assuming your "right way" is counter to The Christgau Way.

The WFMU blog, which I enjoy for reasons beyond Christgau, posted "The Ultimate Negative Christgau Review," which is "a text composed from thousands of negative words and phrases assembled from 13,090 reviews by Robert Christgau and turned into a single review." Here's how it begins — I've also linked to the reviews from which these quotes were pulled:
A born liar, showing all the imagination of an ATM in the process, a certain petty honesty and jerk-off humor, a man without a context, a pompous, overfed con artist, a preening panderer, mythologizing his rockin’ ’50s with all the ignorant cynicism of a punk poser, a propulsive flagwaver attached to UNESCO lyrics about people all over the world joining hands, a simpleton, but also a genuine weirdo, a spoiled stud past his prime, so that while he was always sexy he wasn’t always seductive, a stinker, from Jesus-rock to studio jollity, a tedious ideologue with a hustle, a tough talker diddles teenpop’s love button.
Consider it a greatest hits, where "hits" has more than one meaning.

In future posts, I'll discuss other people who hate Robert Christgau, including Sonic Youth and (notoriously) Lou Reed.

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