Rock critic in the context of Criticism

The album era (sometimes, album-rock era) was a period in popular music, usually defined as the mid-1960s through the middle of the 2000s decade, in which the album—a collection of songs issued on physical media—was the dominant form of recorded music expression and consumption. It was driven primarily by three storage formats: the 33⅓ rpm long-playing record (LP), the cassette tape, and the compact disc (CD). Rock musicians from the United States and the United Kingdom were often at the forefront of the era. The term "album era" is also used to refer to the marketing and aesthetic period surrounding a recording artist's release of an album.

Long-playing record albums, first released in 1948, offered the ability to sell larger amounts of music than singles. The album era arrived in earnest in the mid-1960s, when the Beatles began to release artistically ambitious and top-selling LPs. The industry embraced albums to immense success, and burgeoning rock criticism validated their cultural value. By the 1970s, the LP had emerged as a fundamental artistic unit and a widely popular item with young people. Some were concept albums, especially by progressive musicians in rock and soul.

Robert Thomas Christgau (/ˈkrɪstɡaʊ/ KRIST-gow; born April 18, 1942) is an American music journalist and essayist. Among the most influential music critics, he began his career in the late 1960s as one of the earliest professional rock critics and later became an early proponent of musical movements such as hip hop, riot grrrl, and the import of African popular music in the West. He was the chief music critic and senior editor for The Village Voice for 37 years, during which time he created and oversaw the annual Pazz & Jop critics poll. He has also covered popular music for Esquire, Creem, Newsday, Playboy, Rolling Stone, Billboard, NPR, Blender, and MSN Music; he was a visiting arts teacher at New York University. CNN senior writer Jamie Allen has called Christgau "the E. F. Hutton of the music world—when he talks, people listen."

Christgau is best known for his terse, letter-graded capsule album reviews, composed in a concentrated, fragmented prose style featuring layered clauses, caustic wit, one-liner jokes, political digressions, and allusions ranging from common knowledge to the esoteric. His writing is often informed by leftist politics (particularly feminism and secular humanism). He has generally favored song-oriented musical forms and qualities of wit and formal rigor, as well as musicianship from uncommon sources.