[A] I've gotten a lot of questions like this--requests to evaluate specific artists or albums. And why not? By its very nature Expert Witness nee the Consumer Guide has always attracted completists and list fetishists. As I told rockcritics.com back in 2002, Greil Marcus (whose occasional Ask Greil feature on his website inspired my rabbi Joe Levy to suggest a Christgau version, and who has given me his blessing) "attracts fans who write avant-garde theater pieces based on his critical fantasies and I get guys asking for my favorite albums by knuckleballers." But I'm not going to answer many of those questions, because I believe my readers are smart enough to understand some basic parameters. Implicitly, my deal is that every week I find two-three records in the A plus down to B plus range, B plus being a liminal realm that includes only the very top of the albums the 1969-1989 Consumer Guide would have assigned that grade, the rest of which are now the ***, **, and * albums reviewed briefly as what I call Honorable Mentions. My deal also is that I struggle like mad to find all those letter-graded albums, which hardly means I never miss one. But I do not make the same promise as regards Honorable Mentions, of which there are probably thousands every year in this age of underpaid musical overproduction. So once I've written kindly about an artist--Titus Andronicus, say, or Songhoy Blues, to cite another request--it's a safe bet I've checked out their newer work and not at all unlikely that I've checked out older stuff in search of more A's (although usually only one relatively recent release back). Similarly, you can bet that I've checked out anything that's gotten an 8.5 in P4K or **** in Stone or crowds toward the top of the Metacritic cumes and isn't metal or electronica esoterica. I also check out many cult faves like Mac Demarco, who someone asked me about, and pop marginals, like Charli XCX ditto. Usually I do this via Spotify on headphones if I haven't been mailed a CD, which I usually haven't. What I don't ultimately cover is lucky to achieve any fraction of a third play, and much of it I never get through once--that Titus Andronicus monster, for instance, although I tried harder with the new one before also deleting it from my phone. So just in general, if I haven't written about something and it has a rep, chances are excellent I didn't think it was worth writing about. I'm pretty diligent, but I'm also pretty judgmental. If I wasn't I couldn't do what I do at all. And yes, there will be exceptions. This is a contingent world.

[A] Of course they've been of practical use in later life--I've made my living as a critic for half a century, and achieved a modest measure of fame at it , too. I was an English major, so I didn't read that much philosophy per se, but what I did read was probably more generative than the New Criticism I read more of. At the very least both prepared me for the philosophically inclined writing I delve into to this day. For me, college was a generative experience even if I ended up rejecting a lot of the ideology that underlay what I studied there. As with fundamentalist Christianity, I couldn't have rejected it if I didn't study it to begin with. Read all about it in my memoir Going Into the City, still available at better bookstores, libraries, and remainder outlets nationwide.

[A] A surprising number of my interrogators seem to think criticism should be "unbiased," or even that I make such a claim for my own. That's silly. Everybody's "biased." Every one of us has a different set of values. The critic's responsibility is to be explicit about those values and put them to use. I've always been more candidly and aggressively political than most critics, and by political I mean "of the left." That doesn't mean the word can't just as readily signify more moderate or conservative views, although in rock criticism the latter are still pretty rare. When I started rock criticism was counterculture-identified and therefore left-identified, although some critics tried to muffle those connections--take a look at my early essay "Rock 'n' Revolution." But I was also very aggressive about the aesthetic legitimacy of popular and mass culture, which I associated with class prejudice and still do, although that point has become far too hegemonic. But all of this has a graver weight in the Trump era, because we thought World War II defeated fascism and it didn't. Trump hasn't succeeded at fascism (yet) only because the USA's institutional structure makes that difficult to bring off--and also, I hope, because the number of citizens who would welcome a government even more racist and authoritarian than the one Trump and the revanchist, oligarchical Republican Party of today has done its damnedest to put in place is smaller than even Trump's poll numbers suggest. Take a look especially at Poland, Hungary, and Italy as well as Putin's Russia (and the China of president-for-life Xi). I don't believe there's much room for moderation in this schema, although I believe that moderates like Merkel and Schumer-Pelosi do put a kind of brake on it. So yes I'm making a special effort to write about politics when I find music that finds a way to address this crisis, which is very difficult to do without being merely preachy or worse. And damn right too I think rock critics/"music journalists" should do their best to fight this fight and hammer home these points, which is also very difficult to do effectively.

[A] Know this, Sezzers. This person was not born Elena. He was born Joseph, and has no transsexual tendencies I'm aware of. Joseph suffers from a rare psychological disorder called greatest hits fetishism and, because I'm the only rock critic who takes the compilation seriously, is always trying to get me to answer questions like this, leaving me less and less inclined to be his enabler. He's posing as a woman here because he knows something deep about me: I wish the whole enterprise I set in motion with the Consumer Guide in 1969 wasn't so Boy. I love women. I've been learning about music from women for more than half a century and have had sexual relationships with two dynamite rock critics, the latter of whom stuck at trying and ultimately succeeding as writing dynamite fiction instead (Carola Dibbell, The Only Ones, now available in French as well as English). So far, 17 of my 45 A records this year are either by women or feature them definitively (that's Wussy and Yo La Tengo). So if any of you guys can persuade the female music lovers I hope and believe are in your lives to visit here, I'd be grateful.

[A] Xgau craft nothing but sentences, and for reasons he'll get around to explaining isn't drinking with his wife as much as he used to, which was regularly but never a lot--two-drink days were the exception, no-drink days common enough. Except for the occasional late-night beer, he never drinks alone. But to return to the first person, we've definitely liked some beers in our time and in fact collaborated on a 1975 Consumer Guide to beer for Oui. I will say that after a long spell with mostly IPAs and other ales, I've returned to pilsner in the past few years--Brooklyn Lager made a good one Trader Joe's no longer stocks, and I now favor Six Point "Pilz"--"The Crisp," as it's billed--and Carola likes a Belgian ale called Fat Tire, both from Trader Joe's and often we switch off. At bars she goes for strange ales and the wheat beers I can't stand at all; I find out what pilsner they're selling. We're both big fans of something called McNeill's Firehouse Amber Ale, which isn't even easy to find in Brattleboro, Vermont, where it's brewed. Up the proof scale, we drank Jack three-four times a week for decades, but after a while she began cutting it with ginger ale and for the past two years we've switched to Maker's Mark, which for an extra buck or two a bottle is easier on the aging stomach. One hard liquor we adore: Ron de Barilito Three-Star from Puerto Rico. A great dark rum. Look for it.

[A] Funny you should ask, Bradley, because not only do I have a book coming out, one reason I began this surprisingly labor-intensive bagatelle is to publicize myself in a nondisgusting way in the weeks leading up to its October 28 pub date. It's from Duke University Press and entitled Is It Still Good to Ya: Fifty Years of Rock Criticism 1967-2017. You can read more about it here and pre-order it here. Yes, it's a collection--as the introduction explains, it was because I loved collections that I became a journalist, and this is my first in 20 years unless you count the '90s Consumer Guide book, which isn't quite the same thing. I love journalism collections. (Does anybody know that Dave Hickey just published Perfect Wave, his finest since Air Guitar, late last year? Why not?) And here's special hint for Sezzers. There may even be another before too long.