ANY OLD WAY YOU CHOOSE IT: Rock and Other Pop Music, 1967-1973

By RobertChristgau '62. Baltimore: Penguin Books,1973. 330 pp. $2.50.

Robert Christgau has been a media journalist most of his professional life, which hasn't really been that long - about ten years. Those ten years, however, mark a significant period in the development of what we children of the - '60s - raised on Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy and King assassinations, civil rights, Viet Nam. the burned out cities, men on the moon, Kent State - have come to know and love as "rock."

Rock, in case you are not a child of the '6os, for rock and roll music. But it also means much more, and this nicely balanced anthology Musical criticism and cultural essays on the habits of said devotées - Beatle maniacs, flower children, hippies, freaks - will fill you in on just what has happened since those early days of pop Flower Music.

As Christgau defines it, "rock" is "a term that signifies something like "all music deriving primarily from the energy and influence of the Beatles - and maybe Bob Dylan, and maybe you should stick pretensions in there someplace. ...' In fact, maybe what distinguishes rock from rock and roll is that you write criticism about it." Voila. The rock (sic) on which the of his writing is built.

Christgau has written pieces of aesthetically didactic" rock criticism for numerous periodicals, among them Esquire, to which he contributed eight "Secular Music" columns (six of them appear in the book); The Village Voice,where he wrote as a music critic (five pieces included); and Newsday, where he currently reports on rock as a regular columnist. This book is primarily a collection of his previous reportage, salted with some contextual perspective in the form of introductory chapter notes intended to bring the material into focus.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it don't.

Because the sequence of collected pieces is chronologic, taken as a whole the book makes for a better picture of Christgau's personal growth as a critic than a history of rock. There are eight chapters, each assembled from observations and criticism from a particular perspective: aesthetic ("A Counter in Search of a Culture"), historical ("Secular Music"), commercial ("Consumer Guide" - three of them), political ("Rock & Roll &"), and personal ("Leaders and Parking Meters" and "Weird Scenes After the Gold Rush"). Each stands alone, devoid of relation to the others.

The "Consumer Guides" aren't at all relevant unless you care to know what Christgau thought of a particular single or album when it came out, rated from A to E. The chapter of aesthetic explanation does define some parameters of evaluation for a phenomenon greater than its music, but much of it is merely a critic posturing.

The historical is worthwhile for its journalistic tone - you get some feel for a few events and people, and what it was like to be at the Monterey Pop Festival - yet the critic's own subjectivity at being what he considers an insider is often unbearably flip.

However, the book is worthwhile and recommended, in spite of these shortcomings, for its many exceptionally well written personal glimpses at the accepted pillars of rock and its Promising newcomers. People like Smokey Robinson, Bill Graham, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, Joni Mitchell, Bette Midler, Stevie Wonder, Warly Simon, and the Beatles.

Make no mistake - Robert Christgau has contributed a substantial and serious critical panorama of an art form just past its infancy. Much of what he has written is interpretive, but all of it is cogently presented, expressed with a highly defined and sophisticated precision. Rock and roll is here to stay, and so is Robert Christgau.

Mr, Stuart is an associate in the Office of thesecetary of the college and the director of Alumni College.