“Robert Christgau: Rock n’ Roll Animal”

I stumbled across a fun half-hour 1999 documentary on legendary music critic Robert Christgau the other day (videos below), and thanks to YouTube, was able to watch it in four segments over the course of four days. Consider it snacking rather than bingeing.  

As the documentary suggests, Christgau can be an acquired taste, although the extreme hatred from Russ Smith, publisher of The New York Press seems extreme. I first discovered Christgau in the 1980s, not from reading Village Voice, where he worked for decades, but from his Christgau Record Guides, once-a-decade overviews of popular music.

Above all, the man has enormous passion for his work, and effectively balanced quality with voluminous production. Remarkably, 15 years after this documentary, Christgau is still going strong, feeding his personal website, a seemingly endless trove of remarkable work. 

Amen for that.