Rock & roll cage match

Sometimes great things just don’t get along. Cats and dogs. Bacon and ice cream. Musicians and music critics.

In the late 1970s, Kim Gordon left her California childhood behind for New York, where she spent nearly three decades as a founding member of Sonic Youth, her proto-alternative band that practically mapped the leading edge of music until their 2011 split. A New Yorker from birth, Robert Christgau spent over three decades as music editor for The Village Voice, and over 40 years producing his Consumer Guide capsule reviews of almost 14,000 albums by over 7,000 artists. And like a good critic, his reviews occasionally rankled those whose work he rated. Such as Sonic Youth, who responded to some early disdain with some terse words of their own. Bacon and ice cream.

Coincidentally, they both have books out this month: Gordon’s Girl in a Band, a memoir that goes well beyond Sonic Youth to reflect on her life in visual arts, the men in her life, and motherhood. Christgau’s Going into the City: Portrait of a Critic as a Young Man is a love song to not only to music and his family, but also to the city that defined his life.

We took the opportunity to collect their thoughts (via email) on their experiences, their heroes, and the relationship between musician and critic.

Who were your greatest influences, or whose work do you admire most?

Kim Gordon: Sid Vicious. The Runaways. And Neil Young. I really like the space in Neil’s music and in his melodies. His voice never seems to change, and it still has a very authentic sound about it. I remember Neil telling me once that in rock it really doesn’t matter how good your voice is –what matters is how authentic it is. Neil’s one of the few people who has an authentic voice and also a great one. As for people today – I can’t think of anyone off the bat.

Robert Christgau: As an English major at Dartmouth I read a lot of criticism, some of which I admired enormously -Walter Jackson Bate on Samuel Johnson, Richard Ellman on Yeats, Edmund Wilson’s Axel’s Castle, Wordsworth’s “Preface to The Lyrical Ballads.” But due to the English department’s New Critical bias, most of what I read annoyed me a little or a lot, and even when I ran into someone simpatico like Kazin or Trilling it didn’t stick. I was good enough at writing critical papers that my chief mentor there advised me to become a critic, but I was having none of it. Once I got out of college, however, all kinds of critics I read on my own moved me -to stick to the years before I took up the trade myself, Leslie Fiedler, Pauline Kael, Susan Sontag, Pop Art theorist Lawrence Alloway, sportswriter Red Smith if I can include him (which I can), and above all A.J. Liebling on boxing and journalism. Mostly pop subjects, of course. But what’s more important is that except for Sontag, all dealt principally in American subjects.

Are there critics/musicians that you admire or respect, or do you keep a professional distance?

KG: Greil Marcus – his book Mystery Train was very influential to me. He writes about music in the context of American cultural contexts and archetypes, and makes you think about certain aspects of music in entirely different ways. If it had a subtitle, it would be Greil Marcus’s How to Read Music. Byron Coley is another great music critic and commentator as well.

RC: I admire and respect most of the musicians whose creative output I enjoy. A few I’m awed by. But you can admire and respect from a distance, and what I’ve learned about artists tells me friendship is complicated for them, especially when fame is involved. That’s one reason I’m not friendly with many musicians. Seems a little sad when I think about it.

Do you consider personality to be part of the performance?

KG: Sure. Even if you’re not intentionally trying to create some kind of persona or outsized personality, people project things onto you, even if sometimes they’re not true, not who you really are. The thing is, even if you’re not trying to create an onstage personality, your persona then becomes “anti-persona” – as if it were some kind of strategy, which it never was in the first place.

RC: A core belief of mine is that all artists create personas -not just Madonna’s parade of public identities, say, but, in one of countless subtler instances, the grumpy drawl Randy Newman affects when he sings. I care about personas a lot -relate to them emotionally sometimes, as listeners are supposed to. But as a critic I can disconnect from those personas when necessary, and while personas generally refract what’s called “personality,” I never forget that the two things aren’t the same. Do I think bad people can make good art? Of course I do -some of my favorite music is made by people I figure aren’t so hot. But I’m not naming any names.

Who did you write this book for, and what would you like readers to take from it?

KG: Basically, I wrote it for myself at a time in my life where I was facing a kind of reckoning moment. I guess in retrospect, I thought it could be interesting for my daughter, Coco. Over the years we’ve had a few moments, or she’s read things about me online and reacted with that “Who ARE you?” – not in a celebrity way, more in a “I can’t believe you did that” way. I never think about being a role model, but a lot of people treat me that way, which is flattering, so I guess my book is also a way of taking responsibility and owning up to that. I hope it leaves readers with the message that I’m not all that special, that the same sorts of things can happen to them, too.

RC: I wrote this book for myself above all. It was my chance to write an extended narrative and reflect at length on my own life, quite possibly my only chance at either, and I wasn’t about to compromise that chance by worrying what anyone else would think (which isn’t to say I didn’t worry). Insofar as the story has clarity and movement, and I worked hard to make it so, that’s because those are literary values that mean a lot to me in a book-length work. It’s the story of a bright but otherwise fairly ordinary person who closely observed some crucial strands of cultural history without making them happen except as a foot solider. From junior high school, a turning point I describe in detail, I was an observer. But I did create two things I’m proud of. One is the Village Voice music section, which remains influential conceptually even in these click-mad times. The other, a cooperative venture, is my marriage. I don’t believe there’s anywhere near enough hard-headed true-life writing about romantic marriage. Going Into the City means to correct that.

What is your quintessential New York City moment?

KG: It hasn’t happened yet. It might, it might not.

RC: Two come to mind -listening to Thelonious Monk through the open windows of the Five Spot in the sweet late summer of 1964 and following my wife as we bicycled around the half-built South Street Seaport and repaired our marriage in the brutal August of 1980.

What would you do if you could swap places, Freaky Friday-style, with a critic?

KG: Why would I want to do that?

RC: Beat myself about the head and shoulders until I woke up.