Quotes About Robert Christgau

If rock criticism is to be a political calling, which has always been my angle, that's obviously not because it's a fountainhead of protest songs.

There's a musicologist named Peter van der Merwe whose theory is that the blues generates tune families, and that their similarity to each other is in fact part of the pleasure you take in them - rather than the differentiation in which Jerome Kern and George Gershwin indulged to great effect.

I was never really a bohemian. I was a sloppy guy who liked cheap apartments and the arts, and who was very left-wing politically as the 60's progressed, though it took me a little while.

Prince Rogers Nelson was the most gifted artist of the rock era. Not the greatest genius - just the most musical in the broadest sense.

I actually think I learned to write concisely working for an encyclopedia company in Chicago.