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Q&A with director Matty Wishnow following the October 18 screening
Take another look at the photo above. Familiar? That’s Autumn Records in Winooski, featured prominently in The Last Critic, which chronicles the life and times of Robert Christgau, aka the Dean of Rock Critics. This lively documentary is a time capsule for a bygone era of print publishing as well as a valentine to good old-fashioned pithy/snarky writing. Christgau was the go-to music critic in the ’70s and ’80s, working for Creem, Rolling Stone, and of course The Village Voice in its heyday, inaugurating the seminal Pazz and Jop poll, and publishing his famed tome, Robert Christgau’s Consumer Guide. Even as he’s gone from figurehead to dinosaur in the digital era, he soldiers on via his janky Geocities-style web archive and now a Substack, And It Don’t Stop. You can see how his signature miniaturist writing style directly influenced the wasteland of social media criticism, but Christgau did it first and better and harder, flagrantly unapologetic about his opinions but always open to being flipped on his ear by something new. That open-mindedness, and an ability to make it sing on the page, is what Matty Wishnow celebrates and eulogizes in The Last Critic. Rock (criticism) is dead, they say / Long live rock (criticism). ~OO