Photo: Joe Mabel / CC BY-SA 3.0 (source: Wikimedia Commons)
My Take
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.
Overview
Robert Thomas Christgau ( KRIST-gow; born April 18, 1942) is an American music journalist and essayist. Among the most influential music critics, he began his career in the late 1960s as one of the earliest professional rock critics and later became an early proponent of musical movements such as hip hop, riot grrrl, and the import of African popular music in the West.
Summary adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
1. Profile
- 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
- Blood type
- Private
- Height
- Private
- Agency
- Private
- Occupation
- journalist / reporter / essayist / writer / music critic
2. Background
- Elementary school
- Private
- Junior high
- Private
- High school
- Flushing High School
- University
- Dartmouth College
Awards & achievements
- Guggenheim Fellowship
3. Relationships
- Spouse
- Private
- Children
- Private
- Parents
- Private
- Siblings
- Private
4. Personality
Motto
Private
6. Links
Journalist — see all → · More people from United States →
7. About this entry
Tags
- Last updated
- 2026-06-02
Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public items are marked "Private / Unknown". English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.