Email Author Robert Christgau

2002 Stories by Robert Christgau

• Don't Call It a Comeback

  published December 24, 2002

  As several e-mailers have noted, I did indeed spend three months listening a lot more than I wrote. Here's where I start catching up. More >>

• Re-make/Re-model

  published December 17, 2002

  In this heyday of the re-repackage, if you don't own Smokey Robinson & the Miracles' 1995 two-CD Anthology, skip everything in this annual... More >>

• Hail Fellow Well Set

  published October 15, 2002

  Preemptive readers of article tags know that I have a temporary gig, which limits my writing if not my listening. I'm unreasonably pleased to note... More >>

• Attack of the Chickenshits

  published September 17, 2002

  Extry, extry: "Nashville Ex-Junkie Makes Nice to Traitor, Is Picked On by Nashville Talk Show Host!" That's what I call dog bites man. And also... More >>

• A Very Good Year

  published September 3, 2002

  Want to know why I do this, over and above it's a living? Because as of August 14 or so I thought it was a lousy year—until the grading... More >>

• Striving for Ease

  published August 20, 2002

  Randy Travis is so much not an original that even his new traditionalism was a copy. Although many claim he saved country music from Urban... More >>

• Their Time

  published August 13, 2002

  Forget talent, which is cheap no matter how many bands don't have it. Imperial Teen always projected like a party because they were excited. Gay... More >>

• Home of the Brave

  published July 23, 2002

  Insofar as it uses electric instruments or horns, all African popular music is, to use the strange Orientalist term, Westernized. Afrobeat,... More >>

• Spreading the Net

  published July 9, 2002

  When the pickings get thin, roam. Find below old music from South Africa, Zimbabwe, Colombia, and Brazil. Three of these albums are imports, the... More >>

• Effective but Defective

  published July 2, 2002

  Tom Waits, who has just become the first major artist to release two new albums simultaneously since Bruce Springsteen back in mesozoic 1992, is a... More >>

• Down and Alt

  published June 11, 2002

  Duty impels me to note that one of the alt-rock albums selected below retains a major-label connection—as does the alt-rock album toward the... More >>

• White American

  published June 4, 2002

  The Eminem song of the year is now and will forever remain the Pet Shop Boys' "The Night I Fell in Love," where a certainly fictional, probably... More >>

• Nothing Major

  published May 14, 2002

  I leave it to Consumer Guide scholars more diligent than I to ascertain whether any previous edition has been totally devoid of major-label... More >>

• Planet Rock

  published May 7, 2002

  Paradoxically, or maybe not, hip-hop is at once the fastest spreading and most local pop music in the world. The media-saturated, electronically... More >>

• Music

  published April 16, 2002

  Several protopunks and many reggae collections are scattered below, the reggae representing a long investigation that left such eminences as U-Roy... More >>

• Ramone

  published April 2, 2002

  I remember the early releases as hand-written, but on the one in my files only the gig dates are, in large, legible script: "Appearing at... More >>

• Room for the Occasion

  published March 19, 2002

  Musically, benefit compilations are doomed at conception. Up against the same triple threat as every other collection of new material by multiple... More >>

• 2001 Gets Better

  published March 5, 2002

  Ryan Adams got 80 Pazz & Jop mentions, Amy Allison one. So I investigated in that order. If I hadn't, the Dean's List would have been one album... More >>

• Teach Yourself Fugging

  published February 19, 2002

  The thing you have to accept about the Fugs is that they'll never sound as good as you hope. You assume the Lower East Side's first true... More >>

• Throw Your Hands in the Air

  published January 29, 2002

  Pazz & Jop handicappers often look to this prepoll CG for clues to previously ungraded finishers, and a few do sneak in below. Mostly, however,... More >>

• Popstakes

  published January 8, 2002

  Insofar as popular music improves when something is "at stake," to cite the existentialist cliché, it was structurally foreordained that in... More >>