Robert Christgau Quotes

The critic should describe, and not prescribe.

All good criticism should be judged the way art is. You shouldn't read it the way you read history or science.

As a songwriter, it's kind of hard to listen to your own stuff with clarity.

If some band sucks, you're going to have to find out about it for yourself, because I don't have the interest in issuing warnings.

Music should be judged on what you hear, not what you think you might hear.

I'm the worst critic about music myself. I hardly ever, ever like something the first time I listen to it.

A work, however, should be judged by its design and its execution, and not by any preconceived notion of what it ought to be according to the critic, rather than the author.

It's hard for me to measure them, or to assess my books because I'm so close to them.

Whether my columns are worth reading isn't for me to say.

It's hard to understand the films that you're in, because you never truly get to see them.

I'm a big fan of Yoko, one of those weird people who really love her music, and who argues with people all the time, because people do write her off.

It's easy in music to tell what's good. It's hard to tell what's bad.

If a book I've committed myself to review turns out to be 'disappointing' I make an effort to present it objectively to the reader, including a good number of excerpts from the text, so that the reader might form his or her own opinion independent of my own.

When you play all that as a body of work there are four great songs, four mediocre songs and four bad songs. I didn't know it at the time; I was just doing my best.

Sometimes people talk about music, whether blogs or magazines, in a strange way where it doesn't seem like they're actually listening to it.

I don't read reviews. I find them very distracting, whether they're good or bad.

The critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.

I never want to be in a position where I have to defend my material. It's too subjective. It's for other people to defend or not defend.

We're also passionate about music and very critical about the music that we listen to.

I never read reviews of something I want to see.

I don't read reviews until after I'm done with a production, but when I do finally get to them, I'm always sort of floored by what the bad ones say.

Twyla Tharp put it together from the material I wrote and recorded over my whole career. I thought it was pretty good, but how objective could I be?

I'm not the best at choosing what's good and what's bad. I wouldn't even know what's a good pop song and what's a bad one. With that said, I wanted to say what's true to me. Some people might say that the Skrillex record was pop, but that was just about the chemistry between me and my boy.

I can never read this book, just like I can never see a movie that I wrote a screenplay for. I can read it and see it physically, but I can't accurately judge it. I'm too close to it. If I read it ten times I'll have ten different reactions.

If music was made by some kind of critical theorist, it would sound like my music.