As though lamenting the deaths of Whitney Houston and Levon Helm were not enough, the year 2012 was a particular disappointment, for it was clear by the year's end that there would not be a book collecting Robert Christgau's album reviews for Reference Christgau2000–2010, to follow the compilations that gathered reviews from the seventies, eighties and nineties (Christgau Reference Christgau1982, Reference Christgau1990, Reference Christgau2000). In particular – for by then the reviews were effortlessly, seductively available online – we didn't read an introduction to mirror those of the previous three books, essays, crucial in my view, where Christgau presented historical overviews that contained aesthetic and methodological premises. If one conceives of Christgau's calling-card, the capsule review, as the temporally immediate response, if anything-but-immediate in composition, and the end-of-year and often-substantial ‘pazz and jop’ essays as interim reflections then, finally, the introductions to the decade collections took the longest view. And what an introduction it would have been, reflecting the decade when Christgau would have had to turn critically and forensically upon the very context in which he worked, as online systematically altered and in some ways destroyed foundations he had been able to take for granted, particularly of labouring as a writer in order to be, as they say, paid.

Instead we have not one but two collections. Recalling a similar generosity on the part of Duke University Press towards Lawrence Grossberg in 1997, Christgau's double presents familiar miscellanies, book reviews and music essays. Strictly speaking, Book Reports (hereafter BR) is not entirely applicable to Popular Music, for only half of the book is concerned with music. Is it Still Good to Ya? (hereafter IG) is specifically musical and a third gathering of essays-not-record-reviews, following two other such collections by the industrious author (Christgau Reference Christgau1973, Reference Christgau1998).

As with Grossberg, song-nicked titles are de rigeur in this domain, and Is it Still Good to Ya? (Ashford and Simpson) follows Christgau's Any Old Way you Choose It (Chuck Berry) and Grown Up All Wrong (The Rolling Stones). In fact, IG opens with an introduction entitled in this regard ‘Robert Christgau's Greatest Hits Volume Three’ (Neil Diamond?). For the music collection's subtitle, Christgau explains the substitution of ‘criticism’ for ‘piece’ (p. 1), but the silent sneaking-in of ‘rock’ is interesting. Rock made it to the 1970s’ title, but not the 1980s and 1990s, and in IG is stretched until it pings by including under its capacious rubric Ornette Coleman through Luambo Franco through Willie Nelson to Jay-Z. Christgau distinguishes ‘good to ya’ from ‘good for ya’ (p. 9), but ‘ya’ I could Britishly do without, even as a song title: in fact, BR has in a fiction review ‘YA’ (p. 249), which had me stumped. Meanwhile, BR's title is delightfully rambling, its relative pronoun a titular rarity.

The books then pitch in with sub-headings. BR has sections on: minstrelsy, musicology, music biography and autobiography, fiction, Bohemia and finally politics specifically. A first section celebrates John Leonard, Jonathan Lethem and Dave Hickey, while the final section is bookended by Marshall Berman, to whose memory the collection is dedicated. The musical gathering IG ends with some obituaries, includes a section on world music, while another gathers essays arising from the Iraq War and 9/11. In addition, there are two long miscellanies, making up a good half of the book, the first seemingly on artists evocative of time, the second a lucky dip. The very first section, finally, has some theory and history, alongside a few diary-type pieces.

Taken together, the collections contain 173 pieces, 77 in BR, 96 in IG. Their publication and date are of great interest. The Village Voice in New York City accounts for 74 essays, about 40% of the total across both books, although, at 47 out of 96, it's closer to a half of IG: all told, they were published during 1977–2006, with one rogue essay from 2016 (on Lori McKenna in IG). The Barnes and Noble Review then takes over with a total of 35 essays in the eight years from 2009 to 2017 (the music collection has 18 Barnes and Nobles from 2009–2013). In BR the Book Reviews of the New York Times and Los Angeles Times supply 15, spread across the years from 1970 to 2011. IG adds five essays for Rolling Stone (1998–2007), four for Spin (1995–1998) and four for Noisey (all 2016, and three of them obituaries for Bowie, Prince and Leonard Cohen). Conference papers are next in weight: one dated 2014 for Simon Frith, and six for the Experience Music Project between 2002 and 2016. There are only two essays for The Believer, but both are long: one in BR on postmodern minstrelsy and one in IG on Eminem. That then leaves a miscellany of one-off commissions, nine per book: from Cheetah in 1967 to Spiked in 2017, from the august New Yorker to the humble Dartmouth Alumni Magazine. BR reveals three essays previously unpublished: on Jessica Hopper, 2018, a long essay on Bohemianism, 1987 (based around books by Jerrold Seigel and T.J. Clark), and an essay on Marshall Berman, 2018, 26 years after the published essay on Berman, Village Voice 1982. Be all of that as it may, Village Voice was the engine: they who published the long essay on Raymond Williams in 1985 and they who chiefly published Christgau's essays on African music.

With 320,000 words to account for (Panken, Reference Panken2019), I'll now dip in to six topics selected partly with Popular Music's readership in mind and partly in self-interest.

The single essay most effective in an academic context, or so I found, is the long piece on postmodern minstrelsy studies, ‘In search of Jim Crow’, a panoramic, voraciously read study. For a lifetime devotee of and advocate for essentially African-American music – Thelonious Monk ‘is my favourite artist’ (IG, p. 141) while the capsule review totals for James Brown and George Clinton are 46 and 42 albums respectively – the idea of minstrelsy shakes things up in the best way. In BR, the essay kicks off a section that soon heads towards world music and somehow winds up in the business of music. Meanwhile, over in IG, an essay on American expectionalism picks up on the issues involved. Sub-headed ‘are American pop (and semi-pop) still exceptional? And by the Way, does that make them Better?’, as an EMP-derived publication, the essay originally followed Simon Frith's ‘European Thoughts on American Music’. While the review (also in IG) of Terry Teachout's Louis Armstrong biography is included, a short essay from 2010 isn't, written for the National Arts Journalism Program, and usefully triangulating Teachout's criticisms of Albert Murray and Stanley Crouch, via Teachout's essay ‘The Color of Jazz’ (Christgau Reference Christgau2010). It's possibly a shame too that Christgau's review of Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen's Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip-Hop doesn't follow the minstrelsy essay, but you can't have everything (Christgau Reference Christgau2012). Listeners-plus-readers might check out Christgau's terrific, ahead-of-the-game capsule review of Michelle Shocked's 1992 Arkansas Traveler. That said, Teachout's expertise and experience as a jobbing bass player are dismissed a little too easily at p. 137 of IG: Teachout's essay on the Woody Herman band, ‘Elegy for the Woodchopper’, is a gem (Teachout, Reference Teachout2004). Be all of that as it may, ‘In search of Jim Crow’ is a superb, challenging piece.

Staying in the academic world, if you need to set students rapid, catch-up reading on ‘popular music history’, as from time to time you probably do, then the 3,500 words of IG's ‘Let's get busy in Hawaiian: a hundred years of ragged beats and cheap tunes’, composed by Christgau for Y2K are, as Tina Turner would say, simply the best. Set the essay, ‘“Hip-hop's pop reach is blackface all over again”. Discuss’. Recommend, by way of writing advice, the 11-term list about song writers at p. 40: ‘slangy or raunchy or obscene, earnest or enraged, confessional or hortatory, poetic or dissociative or obscure or totally meaningless’. Finally, tell students I've checked: like the essay's title – albeit with ‘get busy’ adapted from John Prine's ‘talk dirty’ – all 26 sentences in the final paragraph beginning ‘Let's’ (p. 42) are either song titles, including ‘Let's have a tiddly at the milk bar’ (Nellie Wallace), or song lines, including ‘Let's dress up like cops, think of what we could do’ (what Richie says in Television's ‘Venus de Milo’).

BR's newly published essay on Bohemia is a careful historical and philosophical study, including at p. 271 another great list: ‘Bikers, hobos, cultists, sectarians, uncloseted gays and lesbians, proud ethnic minorities, permanent students, crackpot inventors, media workers, drug addicts, new wave fans, ordinary failures pursuing their elusive dreams from town to town and continent to continent’. The Bohemian life is pervasive and talks to Christgau's memoir, Going into the City, which I reviewed for Popular Music (Christgau Reference Christgau2015). Like John Updike, also devoted to the plenitude, seriousness and exactitude of words, Christgau saw that a change of attitude towards sex needed immediate integration into popular culture and its discourse: Bohemia, monogamy and pornography form a fascinating ménage à trois. In addition, there's a terrific 2019 conversation between Christgau and his wife (and IG dedicatee), Carola Dibbell, to throw into the mix. (‘Robert: Why not ask whether you're sleeping together? Carola: It's none of your fucking business’; Paiella Reference Paiella2019).

The reprints seemingly involve degrees of rewrite and hacking, so it'll remain for students to cross-check Duke versions with originals. Having cited it with heroic persistence, I was pleased to see ‘Rock lyrics are poetry (maybe)’ back in print, from Cheetah 1967 but, boy oh boy, it's a thin rendition of the revised version contained in Eisen's edited collection The Age of Rock (Christgau Reference Christgau and Eisen1969). A passage at the opening about Khalil Gibran is a sorry cut: when the essay was first published, the words of The Prophet were written on the subway walls and tenement halls (maybe). Paul Simon is a misguided loser at pp. 44–5 of IG but, in the Eisen remix, had staggered up from the canvas with ‘Fakin It’, an S&G single in July 1967, and was already punching his little way to the knock-out A+ for Paul Simon, 1972. Graceland gets full 1986 treatment at IG pp. 259–66. The Eisen ‘Rock Lyrics’, finally, contains a postscript concluding with what I take to be a dismissal of the modern poetry Christgau was barely protecting elsewhere in that fascinating piece.

The ‘critical practice’ section of BR is interesting for who's in and out of Christgau's gang, including views of fellow rock critics Bangs, Landau, Meltzer, Tosches and Ellen Willis, Best Supporting Actress for Going into the City. Simon Frith one senses Christgau watched like a hawk, both contributions to each other's Festschrift high entertainment (BR pp. 129–36, while Frith's ‘An Essay on Criticism’ is in Carson et al. Reference Carson, Rachlis and Salamon2002). It was all kissy-kissy for Simon Reynolds in 1990 (‘awesome’, IG p. 143 and p. 145 ‘the upstart this old fart has been waiting for’), but by the time of Reynolds's Retromania 20 years later, Christgau strode over to the other end of the bar with barely a nod, Reynolds's book squashed between Albin Zak III and two tribute albums for Buddy Holly (Christgau Reference Christgau2011). James Miller's Flowers in the Dustbin gets the one consistent clobbering (whose Sex Pistols-derived title I knew in the UK as Chuck Berry's Almost Grown), but don't miss the critical paragraph on Peter Guralnick (on Sam Cooke) at IG p. 173. Christgau's noble generosity towards a younger generation is signalled in BR by two appreciations of Jessica Hopper (unpublished 2018) and Hanif Abdurraqib (published 2017). Wisely keeping music theorists well away from the action, and with musicology ‘an academic calling of devout insularity’ (BR 138), he was nevertheless quick and sharp to minister to Susan McClary and Robert Walser.

Finally, obituary might be the element that sets IG apart from Grown Up All Wrong: by death's ascending chronology, Frank Sinatra (d. 1998), Joey Ramone (d. 2001), Ray Charles (d. 2004), Grant McLennan (d. 2006), the run of d. 2016 (David Bowie, Prince, Leonard Cohen) and Chuck Berry (d. 2017). A lot of writerly black suit and tie, they don't read like Christgau's natural mode, reminiscent perhaps of John Peel's sense that what was really miserable about death was missing out on a new album by The Fall. Bowie is all well and good in six crisp numbered points, but one prefers Christgau's own constructive wrangles and tussles with the oeuvre, a stingy A grade only for Station to Station and Cs galore. ‘Bowie also broke the authenticity barrier’ (IG, p. 412) would be bad enough in a popular-music-studies textbook, but disappointing from the wind-up merchant who said, ‘personally, I think authenticity is a crock’ (Christgau Reference Christgau., Szanto, Levy and Tyndall2003, p. 142). The corpses might have been pepped up by some oldies: born around the same time as them, Christgau was wonderfully attentive to the ageing of, for example, Leonard Cohen, Paul McCartney, Lou Reed, Paul Simon and Steely Dan (although some of those were capsule reviews, and you can't have everything).

You may ask: how will Christgau be studied? The Nordic team (Lindberg et al. Reference Lindberg, Guđmundsson, Michelsen and Weisethaunet2005) provided the best model to date: Bourdieu for methodology, considerable research in the mags, collaboration. Barely related to Christgau's culture-critic heroes – George Orwell, Raymond Williams, Marshall Berman and Terry Eagleton – the airwaves are controlled by the academic cultural studies for which Christgau's blend of music and being ‘nosy about politics’ (IG p. 294) is irresistible: the fertile challenge of hip-hop is a running feature of IG, including a gripping, troubling memoir about listening to the rapper Lil’ Wayne at the time of his father's funeral (pp. 13–4). Christgau is still alive and – both graciously and as a born blabberer – ever ready to answer questions directly put. However, where writing on rock journalism turns naturally outwards, and even pace Christgau, I go in the other direction. The reason I was attracted to Christgau in the first place was that his writing was better than that of any other music critic: Steven Wells in Britain might have been his only consistent competition. The pleasures in Christgau are first in the writing, secondly in his ear's reliability and, matching writing to the records, the final pleasure, to concur or to dissent. I knew he was good because when he mentioned specific tracks – usually en passant in an album review – he was correct: ‘All the Young Dudes’, ‘Behind Closed Doors’, ‘I got a Line on You’, ‘Soft Weed Factor’, ‘You Make me Feel (Mighty Real)’, ‘The Door’. Chock-full of ideas as these collections are, the deal hinges on close listening to records, the close reading of exact writing.

The final point to celebrate is Christgau's sense of and commitment to humour. Exercising a premise different from and even opposed to Updike's New Yorker wit, Christgau is always inside the sentence and up for messing about with words for effect [‘toughness – call it tuffness’ (IG, p. 193), ‘synfesis’ (for Poly Styrene, IG, p. 59), ‘toot sweet’ (BR, p. 238) ‘satirical zing and laff relief’ (BR, p. 247), the awful ‘fungu’ (IG, p. 9)]; expertly sensing the quotable phrase or passage, the sentence extracted from Richard Meltzer at IG p. 128, for example, not to be missed; and then, where possible, simply going for the gags. Because it's more about music – writing about which ought always to be partly a matter of time-occupying fun – IG has more jokes, but they're also there in BR alongside the torrent of ideas. Knowing full well that a good way to kill a joke is to lose context, I'll choose only four: his advice to Grant McLennan to ‘find himself a nice librarian’ (IG, p. 203), Andrea Dworkin as a ‘tireless PR rep’ for Hustler magazine (BR, p. 226), the stunt claims ‘I hate opera’ (BR, p. 105) and ‘I hate the rich more than you do’ (BR, p. 197), and the patient detail of an outfit worn by Tangara Speed Ghȏda at a festival in Abidjan: ‘shades, yellow snowhood over full dreads, purple robe over red jumpsuit, high brown combat boots, pigskin gloves, two books he never put down, and a bow and arrow’ (IG, p. 273).

‘A fucking tour de force’, Christgau concluded of a 1974 Earth, Wind and Fire album, and the same punchy summary could be applied to these absorbing collections.