Going into the City: Portrait of a Critic - Robert Christgau.epub

One of our great essayists and journalists—the Dean of American Rock Critics, Robert Christgau—takes us on a heady tour through his life and times in this vividly atmospheric and visceral memoir that is both a love letter to a New York long past and a tribute to the transformative power of art.

Lifelong New Yorker Robert Christgau has been writing about pop culture since he was twelve and getting paid for it since he was twenty-two, covering rock for Esquire in its heyday and personifying the music beat at the Village Voice for over three decades. Christgau listened to Alan Freed howl about rock ‘n’ roll before Elvis, settled east of Manhattan’s Avenue B forty years before it was cool, witnessed Monterey and Woodstock and Chicago ’68, and the first abortion speak-out. He’s caught Coltrane in the East Village, Muddy Waters in Chicago, Otis Redding at the Apollo, the Dead in the Haight, Janis Joplin at the Fillmore, the Rolling Stones at the Garden, the Clash in Leeds, Grandmaster Flash in Times Square, and every punk band you can think of at CBGB.

Christgau chronicled many of the key cultural shifts of the last half century and revolutionized the cultural status of the music critic in the process. Going Into the City is a look back at the upbringing that grounded him, the history that transformed him, and the music, books, and films that showed him the way. Like Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City, E. B. White’s Here Is New York, Joseph Mitchell’s Up in the Old Hotel, and Patti Smith’s Just Kids, it is a loving portrait of a lost New York. It’s an homage to the city of Christgau’s youth from Queens to the Lower East Side—a city that exists mostly in memory today. And it’s a love story about the Greenwich Village girl who roamed this realm of possibility with him.

Critical Praise

“Often maddening, always thought-provoking . . . With Pauline Kael, Christgau is arguably one of the two most important American mass-culture critics of the second half of the 20th century.”
——Jody Rosen

“Christgau is the last true-blue record critic on earth. [He’s] pretty much who I make my records for. He’s . . . the last of that whole Lester Bangs generation of record reviewers, and I still heed his words.”
—?uestlove

“Going Into the City is at once a vivid reminder of one of New York’s golden ages and a blessed glimpse into the forming mind of one of our great critics. Both hilarious and full of juicy detail . . . in that utterly inimitable voice.”
—Ann Powers, Author of Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America and, with the artist, Tori Amos: Piece By Piece

“I’ve waited years for this book. An intellectual bildungsroman in which one of our keenest cultural critics unpacks his own New York story alongside . . . the evolution of pop music criticism—an artform that owes him more than anyone.”
—Will Hermes, author of Love Goes To Buildings On Fire: Five Years In New York That Changed Music Forever

“A New York love story like no other—the greatest of rock & roll writers spends a lifetime devoted to a city . . . as caustic and confrontational as a Clash single, yet as sustaining as an Al Green LP—a story as instantly memorable as Robert Christgau’s voice.”
—Rob Sheffield, author of Turn Around Bright Eyes and Love is a Mix Tape

“Soul satisfying . . .Vintage Christgau here—wise, sharp, funny, rigorous, and genuinely searching, a mighty work of reflection by a major critic who has never turned his back on the pop lives of everyday people.”
—Eric Lott, author of Love and Theft

“Remarkable. Contains the energy, bravado, and heart of rock ‘n’ roll itself-and far, far more depth and ambition than we expect in what passes for memoir these days.”
—Robert Hilburn, author of Johnny Cash: A Life

“Here . . . Christgau proves his essentiality with sharp insights and a profound take on popular culture.”
—Booklist

“An intellectual autobiography that beautifully captures what it feels like when a cultural experience trapdoors you into a new life.”
—Grantland