[A] Of course a schlocky band can come up with a first-rate song. I love that soundtrack--it's among my most-played albums even though it never came out as a physical. So I hereby recommend it to anyone who's never heard it, and yes, the movie is also terrific. Lady Antebellum benefited enormously in this context by providing the soundtrack with its title song. They also distinguished themselves by changing their name to Lady A in 2020 after being bombarded with criticism for the pro-Civil War implications of their name. Shortly thereafter (Wikipedia's is a good source on the details) they found themselves in a lengthy dispute with a Black blues singer yclept Lady A, legal name Anita White. Sampling White's top five blues/bluesy songs on Spotify, she's actually damn good--in my opinion better by far than Lady Antebellum/Lady A the country warhorses.

[A] I'd need to listen to a lot of blues records before working out a position on that conundrum, but as to "bitch" in hip-hop I'm basically against it without boycotting it--the word's tone does fluctuate radically in that context plus don't expect me to forget much less dismiss Roxanne Shante's great lost The Bitch Is Back. In addition let me note that my brief review of the Stones' 2015 Brussels Affair suggests that it's time to remove "Midnight Rambler" as well as "Brown Sugar" from their canon.

[A] I have no doubt that my Christian upbringing played an active role in shaping my humanism. "Love thy neighbor" was definitely a watchword at First Pres even if not all the parishioners lived by it. Also, my church library was one of the first places I found books about ideas, and I read several of them, which helped make me an intellectual, though I always preferred both fIction and books about baseball. But given the extent to which the leftist humanism of dozens upon dozens of my Jewish friends moved me in that direction, I identify more with that strain of secular humanism. As for the name "Christgau," there's a Danish brand of coffee called Christgau--an empty bag of it hangs from my office door. Then again, so does the remains of an envelope addressed to Rabbi Robert T. Christgau. In either German or Danish or maybe both the suffix "gau" seems to mean something like region or county, and I seem to recall that under Hitler certain states or geopolitical entities were called "gaus."

[A] An entire chapter of my memoir, Going Into the City, is about Dartmouth, and I assume you would find it enlightening. In NYC I was only allowed to apply to three colleges plus a CUNY, and I no longer remember whether Cornell and Hamilton wanted me, but Dartmouth gave me a scholarship, maybe because I had a great-uncle who attended on a football scholarship, didn't graduate (blew a knee, for one thing), then became an alumni association heavy of some sort; he was also a drunk who was run over by a bus in Cooper Square a few blocks from where I've resided for half a century. So he might have helped. In addition my College Boards were off the charts though my high school grades weren't, and math chairman although not-yet-prexy John Kemeny called me in to bawl me out for choosing the "gut' Math 3-6 option instead of Math 1-2 because it was the easiest "science" "sequence" and all I wanted to do was study literature and philosophy, which I then did for four years. My grade average was good-not-great because I have no knack for foreign languages--cum laude and Phi Bet but not by much. But I absorbed a lot of literature and philosophy there and made a few lifelong friends in English Honors and on the fringes of what passed as the undergraduate bohemia. I was the youngest member of my class.

[A] What can I say? It's the rare artist who has any feel for criticism as a craft or calling and I'm even better at mine than he is at his, about which I've often written positively plus there's a big piece about his band in Is It Still Good to Ya? Maybe you should buy yourself a copy and Xerox the VW piece and send it to him even if you don't like it, which I'd make a 50-50 proposition.

[A] We have similar tastes. Doing a best of '68 list would be a week's work I am reluctant to undertake, but I can say that the only album on the list I think of as way overrated is Cream's Wheels of Fire and a replay might conceivably change that (and I'm not a big fan of Jefferson Airplane's Crown of Creation either). But the only ones I'm pretty sure I've played for pleasure or something like it--usually what I'll call unnecessary research comparison--since say 2015 are, in guesswork descending order: Cheap Thrills, Beggars Banquet, Electric Ladyland, The White Album, At Folsom Prison, and conceivably Songs of Leonard Cohen. Not sure I own or therefore know In the Groove. (Motown didn't mail out review copies back then.)