Robert Christgau didn’t set out to become a rock critic, because, when he began his career, a rock critic was not something one could become. Photograph by Michael Ip / Redux

Fifteen years ago, the rock critic Robert Christgau published a survey-of-the-literature essay called “In Search of Jim Crow: Why Postmodern Minstrelsy Studies Matter,” in The Believer. The essay, which is collected in “Book Reports: A Music Critic on His First Love, Which Was Reading,” gleans findings and arguments from academic sources and translates a takeaway for a hip general audience. Minstrelsy was a horrifically racist enterprise, founded upon white-from-black appropriation; it also stands as a launching pad for the entire tangled, rotten, potentially liberating history of American popular music, from the blues through rock and roll, hip-hop, and whatever other composite style comes next—for all of the pop music any of us have ever loved. “Somewhere in that cross-racial nexus lurked a uniquely American sensibility whose decisive attraction was that it was no respecter of propriety,” Christgau writes. In one of the essay’s most striking passages, he argues that “the signal term” for this sensibility “is an elusive one: ‘fun.’ ” The word “fun,” he notes, began gathering Oxford English Dictionary citations in the same early nineteenth-century moment that minstrelsy was emerging as our founding national popular culture—and was routinely pegged to that racist entertainment’s dances, performers, and songs. This brand of “fun,” Christgau observes, made “a role model of the unkempt rebel” and emphasized pop values that have never gone out of favor: simplicity, energy, sentiment, and “unencumbered beat.”

“Book Reports” features reviews of not only the pop-music tomes you’d predict but also literary fiction, Marxist-adjacent cultural commentary, feminist debates over pornography, and even books about the past decade’s financial crisis. It follows a collection that Christgau published last year, “Is It Still Good to Ya? Fifty Years of Rock Criticism, 1967-2017,” which includes Christgau’s takes on, among many other things, classic rock, Kanye West, the music of Desert Storm, Lollapalooza, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, and so-called guilty pleasures—a category that Christgau rejects, since, for rock critics, as he puts it, “pleasure is where meaning begins.” Together, these collections make the sneaky case that Christgau is not just the Dean of American Rock Critics, his self-awarded and perhaps slightly off-putting nickname (he has insisted that he was a little bit drunk and a little bit joking when he coined it), but one of America’s sharper public intellectuals of the past half century, and certainly one of its most influential—not to mention one of the better stylists in that cohort. Fun is a big part of why.

“Even among rock critics, who ought to know better, fun doesn’t have much of a rep,” Christgau wrote, back in 1972, in a Newsday essay about Chuck Berry. That assessment is less true now than it was then, and this is at least partly a testament to how successfully Christgau has spread the gospel of fun ever since, not only in the pages of the Voice but in rock magazines, such as Rolling Stone and Creem, and general-interest outlets, such as Newsday and Esquire. Along with his fellow-pioneer rock critic Greil Marcus, at Rolling Stone, and Ellen Willis, at The New Yorker, Christgau developed a pop-with-politics aesthetic that, not unlike rock and roll itself, foregrounded freedom and democracy. Christgau and Willis began dating in the mid-sixties and lived together for three years—“except for my wife, no one has influenced me more,” he writes, of Willis, in a review, from 2011, that is collected in “Book Reports.” The couple’s working premise, that popular music would reward those devoted to thinking and writing well about it, was an idea on the fringes of respectability when Christgau began writing his Esquire column, “Secular Music,” in 1967. At the time, there were more Beatles than there were mainstream popular music critics. (Willis debuted her “Rock, Etc.” column in The New Yorker the following year.) Introducing his new column, Christgau offered a lighthearted warning: “I am one of the barbarians—I love rock and roll.” We’re all barbarians now.

Christgau didn’t set out to become a rock critic for the simple reason that, when he began his career, a rock critic was not something one could become. He was born in 1942 and raised in Queens, by a Catholic mom and a firefighter dad; in his memoir, “Going Into the City: Portrait of a Critic as a Young Man,” Christgau describes how his life was redirected when he was awarded a scholarship to Dartmouth. His breakthrough as a professional writer was the article “Beth Ann and Microbioticism,” about the death of a young woman who was fanatically devoted to an extreme diet. It was published in the New York Herald Tribune, in 1965, and was later included, alongside pieces by Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and Joan Didion, in Tom Wolfe’s anthology “The New Journalism.” Christgau’s contribution, Wolfe wrote, “seemed to be written so effortlessly that one is likely to overlook the tightness of its structure, which has a classic American short-story quality.”

Christgau soon abandoned narrative journalism, but that tightness of structure remained a notable strength of his writing. For critical models, he turned to essayists who were able to wrestle ideas big and small from all varieties of American popular culture. In the introduction to “Book Reports,” he name-checks A. J. Liebling’s “The Sweet Science” and Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” and writes a full-on mash note to the film critic Pauline Kael, particularly her collection of pre-New Yorker work, “I Lost It at the Movies.” “Her secular intellect and honed prose, her brassy candor and democratic gusto, her nose for the laugh line and love affair with American English, her ideas as juicy as her descriptions, and her enthusiasm for artworks from The Grand Illusion to The Sugarland Express all rendered her an earthshaking critic,” he gushes. “I’m no Kael—nobody is,” he adds, though, of course, this still-thrilled description of his hero’s work doubles as an on-point portrait of his own.

The beginning of Christgau’s career as a full-time music critic, with the Esquire column, could not have been more perfectly timed—the Monterey Pop Festival and the release of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” were both just weeks away. For the next year and a half, “Secular Music” provided Christgau a platform to write, at length, about that moment’s musical revolution, taking on not only the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan but also bubblegum pop, soul music, and country rock—whole burgeoning musical worlds. In late 1968, according to “Going Into the City,” an editor assigned him a rock-is-dead piece, and he responded by turning in an essay arguing why it was very much alive. That was the end of his stint at Esquire. He soon began to write essays for the Village Voice, in a column called “Rock & Roll &.” But it was another Voice column, “Consumer Guide,” made up of seventy-five- to a-hundred-word album reviews, for which Christgau would become best known. (The zinger that ends his 1980 review of Prince’s “Dirty Mind”—“Mick Jagger should fold up his penis and go home”—is often quoted as the epitome of the approach.)