Robert Christgau Doc Captures the Birth of a Literary Form and the End of an Era

Matty Wishnow wasn’t planning on becoming a documentarian. Even as a fan of what the Austin filmmaker called “‘old master in sunset’ documentaries,” like many serial entrepreneurs he was all set to write a business book. It was to center on startups – why they succeed, why they fail, and most importantly the value of listening. “So I went down this wormhole of asking who are some of modernity’s great listeners,” Wishnow said, and that took him to “the person who has almost inarguably listened to more music than any person ever.”

He still finished the book, which was published by Lioncrest as Listening for Growth. But the wormhole also led him to The Last Critic, his accidental documentary about NYC rock writer Robert Christgau, which premiered Saturday at South by Southwest.

What’s most amazing is that, six decades on, Christgau is still dedicated to rock. Even now, Wishnow said, he shows “the act of physical stamina of every single day listening to music for 14 hours. And it’s not like Bob goes, ‘I’m going to review this new album.’ He doesn’t do that. He listens to music until the album talks to him, and then he leans in and listens to the album five, six, seven, ten more times, and then he has to distill that into 150 words. It’s an astounding feat of intellect and journalism.”

By sheer luck, Wishnow manages to chronicle that whole six decades of Wishnow’s career due to a remarkable archive of footage dropping into his lap. Wishnow explained that, when he first conceived of the film, he talked it over with another Austin filmmaker, Ben Woo, who mentioned it to his creative partner, Paul Lovelace, “and Paul immediately said, ‘Not only am I aware of Bob, but I interned for Bob when I was at NYU, and made a college thesis movie about Bob, and therefore have 50 or 60 hours of archival footage from the Nineties.’ That was like lightning striking.”

Filmmaker Matty Wishnow

The title of The Last Critic is a little ironic, since there’s actually a strong argument that Christgau was the first real rock critic. There were others who wrote about rock and pop “but a lot of them came out of the mold of jazz or classical music critics, where they were writing as though they were writing about high art.” By contrast, Christgau’s reviews were filled with a pop sensibility that “balanced quality of writing with a depth of coverage,” and became a forum for his belief that “some popular music being important, of rap being popular, of non-Western music being important and worthy of the same consideration.” Christgau wasn’t alone in those beliefs “but Bob distilled it and had the platform.”

Take the very idea of his Consumer Guide, which he continues to pen to this day. “He was looking at it the way Andy Warhol was looking at fine art, which is to say elevating a commercial product and treating Chuck Berry or Bob Dylan or the Beatles the way an art critic might treat Matisse or Picasso.”

Christagu may not have the immediate name recognition of peers like Greil Marcus and Lester Bangs, but his work has been just as impactful, if not more. As music editor of the Village Voice, he was hanging off the walls of CBGBs before it was CBGBs, and was one of the first “mainstream” music critics to treat hip hop with the respect it deserved. But for Wishnow what’s important about Christgau is that he defined the conventions of modern rock criticism. The capsule reviews of his Consumer Guide are constantly replicated, rarely equaled. “Some of them are so epigramatic that you read one sentence and you know everything you need to know about this album,” Wishnow said. “It’s like getting Pauline Kael’s ideas into Leonard Maltin’s real estate.”

While Christgau’s influence is undeniable, and his heirs are everywhere, there is still a bitter truth to the title. “The idea that being a rock critic is a vocation or a job, that they could actually be incisive and critical, is clearly a dying art,” Wishnow said. “When Bob stops writing, it will represent the end of something.”

The Last Critic Documentary Feature Competition, World Premiere Monday 16, 2:15pm, Alamo Lamar Wednesday 18, 11:15am, Alamo Lamar Find more of The Austin Chronicle’s continuing coverage of SXSW.

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