One of the challenges in reading Christgau is figuring out what he means. Christgau writes long, complicated sentences, full of clauses within clauses and loaded with allusions to things that may or may not be common knowledge. He makes jokes both obvious and personal. He packs a feature's worth of ideas and concepts into an average paragraph. There's no point in pretending otherwise.
Some people find it forbidding or daunting for that reason.
My first professional writing job was for a crummy encyclopedia company in Chicago. I had just turned 21. I had to write the article on Isaac Babel in 10 lines and the article on baseball in 221 lines. It really instilled habits of compression in me that I've never lost. Combine habits of compression with a desire to cover music to an absurd degree of comprehensiveness, and you get Robert Christgau's oeuvre .