The end of the Consumer Guide

For my first Sound of Blackbirds (SoB) posting, a news item: Robert Christgau has ended his 41 year old Consumer Guide. I have been reading Christgau since I was in college, when I discovered a collection of his Consumer Guide columns from the 1970s and was drawn to his tight, compressed, witty way of capturing, in a fiercely anti-bullshit way, what it is about a popular music recording that merits someone paying $X for the pleasure of owning it. He writes for music lovers, that's for sure, and he assumes his readers already have a certain knowledge of pop music, not to mention a certain level of intelligence. He and I have different tastes so, of course, we don't always agree, and I wouldn't expect anyone to always agree with him. But I'd never spent much time thinking about the difference between taste and judgment before reading his work, and now it's become something I think about an awful lot. Not to mention the relationship between pop music and political economy....

Here's one my favorite essays of his, written in 1972.

Here's one of my favorite positive record reviews from recent years.

And here's his Consumer Guide column from January 18th, 1994, from his Village Voice years, featuring an excellent "Dud of the Month," which I'll leave to the U2-lovers (I'm not one of them) to suss out.