photo by Fred McDarrah

The first time I read Robert Christgau’s review, “Trying to Understand the Eagles,” I was 13 years-old, sitting on my great-grandaunt’s living room couch in Minneapolis. Originally published in Newsday in 1972 and reprinted in his first book, 1973’s Any Old Way You Choose It, the piece is essentially the reason I became a rock critic.

The essay begins as a relatively evenhanded dissection of the Eagles. It was a model for the way Christgau—credited with being one of the creators of rock criticism—would write in the decades to come. He always takes his subject’s signifiers seriously—thinking about what they really mean. He knew early on that the Eagles’ streamlined popcraft had real skill in it, and he also smelled the noticeably swollen egos of the early-’70s rock stars. The way Christgau connects their debut album to the aftermath of the ’60s dream’s fallout is instructive, too: folks who loathe the Eagles today tend to do so because the band’s tendency to be sappy and nostalgic only got worse. Which, as it turns out, is where Christgau thought they might be headed.

But the line that provided the revelation, the one that made me change my thinking to “I want to do that,” instead of, “It might be fun to do that,” is one of the greatest literary switcheroos in music criticism. It’s a sentence so elegant and simple, and so perfectly deadpan, that it inspired many of my peers in the field to become rock critics, as well. See if you can spot it.

“Trying to Understand the Eagles.”

Michaelangelo Matos is the author of Sign ‘O’ the Times Continuum, 2004) and has contributed to many magazines, newspapers, websites, and anthologies. He has a personal blog, Schmusic at http://m-matos.blogspot.com/. He lives in Seattle and is moving to New York again (for love, not money) in 2009.