Robert Christgau: Book Reports

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Book Reports
A Music Critic on His First Love, Which Was Reading

Hardcover, [May 3] 2019, Duke University Press, 416 pages, $104.95.
Paperback, [May 3] 2019, Duke University Press, 416 pages, $28.95, ISBN 978-1-4780-0030-3.

Description

In this generous collection of book reviews and literary essays, legendary Village Voice rock critic Robert Christgau showcases the passion that made him a critic--his love for the written word. Many selections address music, from blackface minstrelsy to punk and hip-hop, artists from Lead Belly to Patti Smith, and fellow critics from Ellen Willis and Lester Bangs to Nelson George and Jessica Hopper. But Book Reports also teases out the popular in the Bible and 1984 as well as pornography and science fiction, and analyzes at length the cultural theory of Raymond Williams, the detective novels of Walter Mosley, the history of bohemia, and the 2008 financial crisis. It establishes Christgau as not just the Dean of American Rock Critics, but one of America's most insightful cultural critics as well.

Praise

"[A] substantial collection of nearly 100 eclectic, thought-provoking, and idea-laden book reviews. . . . [Christgau's] range of topics is impressive, and his references are prolific. These sprightly, highly opinionated 'adventures of an autodidact' reveal Christgau to be a highly literate, astute, and discerning book critic." -- Kirkus Reviews

"Christgau mostly writes on books by or about notable musicians, though he hits other cultural touchstones too, such as George Orwell's 1984. It's in these nonmusic pieces that Christgau is most successful, shifting focus from his encyclopedic music-industry knowledge to the nuances of language. His essay on books about the 2008 financial crisis is a highlight." -- Publishers Weekly

"There are few critics working today with the life-long commitment, focus, and curiosity of Robert Christgau. Book Reports doesn't scan the over half-century of the man's work, and that's what makes it all the more impressive. He's still searching, still pulling volumes from the shelves, looking at new or old ideas, cracking open the spines of preconceived notions all in the service of taking just one more look before walking away with the promise of yet another return." -- Christopher John Stephens, Popmatters

"Robert Christgau, writing on books, is enthralling and energetic, and as persuasive and argument-sparking as he is on records. He sees them both as entrances into a thousand subject matters, but also as formal objects--that's to say, books. His stock is his comprehensive confidence, no matter the arena; so often, as declaring The Country and the City to be Raymond Williams's essential book--he's stunningly right. Book Reports made me glance at my shelf longingly where a run of compilations of his 'Consumer Guides: Books of the '70s, '80s, '90s' (and beyond) might sit, but alas. If we're not that lucky, we're lucky enough to have this generous compendium of his longer-form stuff." -- Jonathan Lethem

"You hope any book you read would be insightful, funny, rude, deeply researched, and filled with humanity. Well most books don't have those qualities, but all of Robert Christgau's book reviews do." -- Nelson George

"Robert Christgau writes with an infectious energy and applies his unflagging intellectual curiosity to an unpredictable array of subjects. His critical sensibility is so developed that the book generates its own interest, as the reader will want to know how this sensibility plays itself out over the course of this unfailingly interesting book." -- Greil Marcus

Introduction
I. Collectibles
The Informer: John Leonard's When the Kissing Had to Stop
Advertisements for Everybody Else: Jonathan Lethem's The Ecstasy of Influence
Democratic Vistas: Dave Hickey's Air Guitar
II. From Blackface Minstrelsy to Track-and-Hook
In Search of Jim Crow: Why Postmodern Minstrelsy Studies Matter
The Old Ethiopians at Home: Ken Emerson's Doo-Dah!
Before the Blues: David Wondrich's Stomp and Swerve
Rhythms of the Universe: Ned Sublette's Cuba and Its Music
Black Melting Pot: David B. Coplan's In Township Tonight!
Bwana-Acolyte in the Favor Bank: Banning Eyre's In Griot Time
In the Crucible of the Party: Charles and Angelilki Keil's Bright Balkan Morning
Defining the Folk: Benjamin Filene's Romancing the Folk
Folking Around: David Hajdu's Positively 4th Street
Punk Lives: Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain's Please Kill Me
Biography of a Corporation: Nelson George's Where Did Our Love Go?
Hip-Hop Faces the World: Steven Hager's Hip Hop; David Toop's The Rap Attack; and Nelson George, Sally Banes, Susan Flinker, and Patty Romanowski's Fresh
Making Out Like Gangsters: Preston Lauterbach's The Chitlin' Circuit, Dan Charnas's The Big Payback, Ice-T's Ice, and Tommy James's Me, the Mob, and Music
Money Isn't Everything: Fred Goodman's The Mansion on the Hill
Mapping the Earworm's Genome: John Seabrook's fThe Song Machine
III. Critical Practice
Beyond the Symphonic Quest: Susan McClary's Feminine Endings
All the Tune Family: Peter van der Merwe's Origins of the Popular Style
Bel Cantos: Henry Pleasant's The Great American Popular Singers
The Country and the City: Charlie Gillett's The Sound of the City
Reflections of an Aging Rock Critic: Jon Landau's It's Too Late to Stop Now
Pioneer Days: Kevin Avery's Everything Is an Afterthought and Nona Willis Aronowitz's (ed.) Out of the Vinyl Deeps
Impolite Discourse: Jim Derogatis's Let It Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, Richard Meltzer's A Whore Jus Like the Rest, and Nick Tosches's The Nick Tosches Reader
Journalism and/or Criticism and/or Musicology and/or Sociology (and/or Writing): Simon Firth
Serious Music: Robert Walser's Running With the Devil
Fifteen Minutes of . . . : William York's Who's Who in Rock Music
The Fanzine Worldview, Alphabetized: Ira A. Robbins's (ed.) Trouser Press Guide to New Wave Records
Awesome: Simon Reynolds's Blissed Out
Ingenuousness Lost: James Miller's Flowers in the Dustbin
Rock Criticism Lives: Jessica Hopper's The Fist Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic
Emo Meets Trayvon Martin: Hanif Abdurraquib's They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us
IV. Lives in Music Inside and Out
Great Book of Fire: Nick Tosches's Hellfire and Robert Palmer's Jerry Lee Lewis Rocks!
That Bad Man, Tough Old Huddie Ledbetter: Charles Wolfe and Kip Lornell's The Life and Legend of Leadbelly
The Impenetrable Heroism of Sam Cooke: Peter Guralnick's Dream Boogie
Bobby and Dave: Bob Dylan's Chronicles: Volume One and Dave Van Ronk's The Mayor of MacDougal Street
Tell All: Ed Sanders's Fug You and Samuel R. Delany's The Motion of Light in Water
King of the Thrillseekers: Richard Hell's I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp
Lives Saved, Lives Lost: Carrie Brownstein's Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl and Patti Smith's M Train
The Cynic and the Bloke: Rod Stewart's Rod: The Autobiography and Donald Fagen's Eminent Hipsters
His Own Shaman: RJ Smith's The One
Spotlight on the Queen: David Ritz's Respect
The Realist Thing You've Ever Seen: Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run
V. Fictions
Writing for the People: George Orwell's 1984
A Classic Illustrated: R. Crumb's The Book of Genesis
The Hippie Grows Older: Richard Brautigan's Sombrero Fallout
Comic Gurdjieffianism You Can Masturbate To: Marco Vassis' Mind Blower
Porn Yesterday: Walter Kendrick's The Secret Museum
What Pretentious White Men Are Good For: Robert Coover's Gerald's Party
Impoverished How, Exactly? Roddy Doyle's The Woman Who Walked into Doors
Sustainable Romance: Norman Rush's Mortals
Derrnig-Do Scrapping By: Michael Chabon's Telegraph Avenue
Futures by the Dozen: Bruce Sterling's Holy Fire
YA Poet of the Massa Woods: Sandra Newman's The Country of Ice Cream Star
A Darker Shade of Noir: The Indefatigable Walter Mosley
VI. Bohemia Meets Hegemony
Épatant le Bourgeoisie: Jerrold Seigel's Bohemian Paris and T. J. Clark's The Painting of Modern Life
The Village People: Christine Stansell's American Moderns
A Slender Hope for Salvation: Charles Reich's The Greening of America
The Lumpenhippie Guru: Ed Sanders's The Family
Strait Are the Gates: Morris Dickstein's Gates of Eden
The Little Counterculture That Could: Carol Brightman's Sweet Chaos
The Pop-Boho Connection, Narrativized: Bernard F. Gendron's Between Montmarte and the Mudd Club
Cursed and Sainted Seekers of the Sexual Century: John Heidenry's What Wild Ecstasy
Bohemias Lost and Found: Ross Wetzsteon's Republic of Dreams, Richard Kostelanetz's SoHo, and Richard Lloyd's Neo-Bohemia
Autobiography of a Pain in the Neck: Meredith Maran's What It's Like to Live Now
VII. Culture Meets Capital
Twentieth Century Limited: Marshall Berman's All That Is Solid Melts into Air
Dialectical Cricket: C. L. R. James's Beyond a Boundary
Radical Pluralist: Andrew Ross's No Respect
Inside the Prosex Wars: Nadine Strossen's Defending Pornography, Joanna Frueh's Eroctic Faculties, and Lara Kipnis's Bound and Gagged
Growing Up Kept Down: William Finnegan's Cold New World
Jesus Plus the Capitalist Order: Jeff Sharlet's The Family
Dark Night of the Quants: Ten Books About the Financial Crisis
They Bet Your Life: Four Books About Hedge Funds
Living in a Material World: Raymond Williams's Long Revolution
With a God on His Side: Terry Eagleton's Culture and the Death of God, Culture, and Materialism
My Friend Marshall: Marshall Berman's Modernism in the Streets
Index