Robert Christgau

Christgau is one of those rare figures who didn't just review music, he built the grammar everyone else borrows from. What impresses me most isn't the famous letter-grade verdicts, it's the curiosity behind them: championing hip hop, riot grrrl and African pop years before the mainstream caught up takes real ears and real nerve. A Greenwich Village kid with a Guggenheim who treated rock criticism as serious intellectual work, he basically legitimized a whole profession. I read him less for whether he liked an album and more for how sharply he could argue. That argumentative honesty is the part I'd want today's critics to inherit.

Name (English)

Robert Christgau

Name (Japanese)

ロバート・クリストガウ

Reading

ろばーと・くりすとがう

Born

April 18, 1942 (age 84)

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Aries / Horse

Origin

Greenwich Village, New York, United States

Occupation

journalist / reporter / essayist / writer / music critic

High school

Flushing High School

University

Dartmouth College

Awards & achievements

• Guggenheim Fellowship

Motto

Private

• Official sitehttps://www.robertchristgau.com/index.php
• Xhttps://x.com/rxgau
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%AD%E3%83%90%E3%83%BC%E3%83%88%E3%83%BB%E3%82%AF%E3%83%AA%E3%82%B9%E3%83%88%E3%82%AC%E3%82%A6

Tags

• New York
• journalist
• reporter
• essayist

Last updated

2026-06-02

Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.