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Filmmaker Matty Wishnow<\/p>\nMatty Wishnow wasn\u2019t planning on becoming a documentarian. Even as a fan of what the Austin filmmaker called \u201c\u2018old master in sunset\u2019 documentaries,\u201d like many serial entrepreneurs he was all set to write a business book. It was to center on startups \u2013 why they succeed, why they fail, and most importantly the value of listening. \u201cSo I went down this wormhole of asking who are some of modernity\u2019s great listeners,\u201d Wishnow said, and that took him to \u201cthe person who has almost inarguably listened to more music than any person ever.\u201d<\/p>\n
He still finished the book, which was published by Lioncrest as Listening for Growth. But the wormhole also led him to The Last Critic, his accidental documentary about NYC rock writer Robert Christgau, which premiered Saturday at South by Southwest.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s most amazing is that, six decades on, Christgau is still dedicated to rock. Even now, Wishnow said, he shows \u201cthe act of physical stamina of every single day listening to music for 14 hours. And it\u2019s not like Bob goes, \u2018I\u2019m going to review this new album.\u2019 He doesn\u2019t do that. He listens to music until the album talks to him, and then he leans in and listens to the album five, six, seven, ten more times, and then he has to distill that into 150 words. It\u2019s an astounding feat of intellect and journalism.\u201d<\/p>\n
By sheer luck, Wishnow manages to chronicle that whole six decades of Wishnow\u2019s career due to a remarkable archive of footage dropping into his lap. Wishnow explained that, when he first conceived of the film, he talked it over with another Austin filmmaker, Ben Woo, who mentioned it to his creative partner, Paul Lovelace, \u201cand Paul immediately said, \u2018Not only am I aware of Bob, but I interned for Bob when I was at NYU, and made a college thesis movie about Bob, and therefore have 50 or 60 hours of archival footage from the Nineties.\u2019 That was like lightning striking.\u201d<\/p>\n
Filmmaker Matty Wishnow<\/p>\n
The title of The Last Critic is a little ironic, since there\u2019s actually a strong argument that Christgau was the first real rock critic. There were others who wrote about rock and pop \u201cbut a lot of them came out of the mold of jazz or classical music critics, where they were writing as though they were writing about high art.\u201d By contrast, Christgau\u2019s reviews were filled with a pop sensibility that \u201cbalanced quality of writing with a depth of coverage,\u201d and became a forum for his belief that \u201csome popular music being important, of rap being popular, of non-Western music being important and worthy of the same consideration.\u201d Christgau wasn\u2019t alone in those beliefs \u201cbut Bob distilled it and had the platform.\u201d<\/p>\n
Take the very idea of his Consumer Guide, which he continues to pen to this day. \u201cHe was looking at it the way Andy Warhol was looking at fine art, which is to say elevating a commercial product and treating Chuck Berry or Bob Dylan or the Beatles the way an art critic might treat Matisse or Picasso.\u201d<\/p>\n
Christagu may not have the immediate name recognition of peers like Greil Marcus and Lester Bangs, but his work has been just as impactful, if not more. As music editor of the Village Voice, he was hanging off the walls of CBGBs before it was CBGBs, and was one of the first \u201cmainstream\u201d music critics to treat hip hop with the respect it deserved. But for Wishnow what\u2019s important about Christgau is that he defined the conventions of modern rock criticism. The capsule reviews of his Consumer Guide are constantly replicated, rarely equaled. \u201cSome of them are so epigramatic that you read one sentence and you know everything you need to know about this album,\u201d Wishnow said. \u201cIt\u2019s like getting Pauline Kael\u2019s ideas into Leonard Maltin\u2019s real estate.\u201d<\/p>\n
While Christgau\u2019s influence is undeniable, and his heirs are everywhere, there is still a bitter truth to the title. \u201cThe idea that being a rock critic is a vocation or a job, that they could actually be incisive and critical, is clearly a dying art,\u201d Wishnow said. \u201cWhen Bob stops writing, it will represent the end of something.\u201d<\/p>\n
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