Wikinerds Not Convinced That Robert Christgau Is An Effective Consumer Guide

noah | November 5, 2007 3:20 am

So over the weekend, a (false!) rumor that rock critic heavy Robert Christgau died made its way around the Internet, with Christgau’s Wikipedia entry being one of the chief culprits in spreading the news. I figured that the entry’s talk page–on which the nerdier denizens of the people-edited online guide dispute the finer points of others’ edits–would provide at least a minute or so of vaguely amusing obituary-dispute reading, but what I came across was even better: a section titled “How legit is this guy?”

What’s under the entry is a discussion of Christgau’s Wiki-worthiness among officially recognized review sources, kicked off by this comment from an anonymous college football/Millard Fillmore fan:

I don’t see how we link to reviews by this guy for music wikis. The guy writes two sentences, often having nothing to do with the music, about a couple albums, and people link to them on the album page. I think anybody could do that, and including all his ten-word reviews is a farce. You might as well link to random blog posts on the page.

“Random blog posts”! And the debate continues from there, including this post from “Blobchin,” whose name sounds like a “random” blog post itself:

The reviews on his site often contain insufficient details on the music he is supposedly critiquing. These reviews are frequently laden with errors and nonsensical phrases. His allegedly esteemed position should not make his meagre writing sacrosanct; if people want to read his views, they can follow the link from his article.

In response to one Wikiuser citing Christgau as “the most famous rock critic in the world,” another anonymous spittler unleashes this comment:

So, just because he’s supposedly the “most famous,” that makes it okay for him to blather on about nothing and pass off as a legit review? If your job is to properly review and critique music, then you do just that. It doesn’t matter how “famous” you are, you can’t use your clout to half-ass it. Roger Ebert is a famous movie critic, but his website isn’t littered with one sentence throwaways about movies. He writes well thought-out essays, complete with short summaries of the movies, their strong and weak points, and his thoughts on them. You see the difference? And so what if there’s a template [attack removed*]? That’s what we’re trying to fix, by eliminating it! At least the links to nonsensical ramblings passed off as “reviews.” (And how did christgau get so damn “famous,” anyway?)

It goes on from there, with no real resolution (although one passionate commenter does defend the fact that his reviews are actually compressed with information instead of using quotes from lyrics to placate the idiots provide context) and people basically arguing over what supposedly citable rock critics should and shouldn’t do with the review space allocated them if they want to be worth remembering in the coming decades. Those of you with aims toward music writing, take note! As soon as you’ve finished crying, that is.

How legit is this guy? [Wikipedia]

* Apparently “attack removed” means “we had to remove someone calling him a hack.”