[A] O'Connor was obviously a bit of a skyrocket. She peaked early and never seemed to regain her equilibrium, insofar as she ever had any. Her voice was so remarkable it carried her, pretty much, through an uneven and occasionally unhinged career powered in part by an active and admirable but not especially consistent or persuasive social conscience. I hadn't put her on in years when she died, played Do Not Want a little, and moved on. But it's worth noting that a week ago Carola and I were visited by an intellectually ambitious grandniece with an active interest in music who'd just graduated from college. An hour or two into our colloquy she asked me what I thought of Sinead, who she'd been playing and felt like hearing again. So I dug out a CD. In that context, I thought O'Connor sounded great.

[A] Not many, and if you don't count Chinese Americans, just one: Cixin Liu and Ken Liu's The Three-Body Problem, clearly a work of genius though it didn't blow my mind to the extent others report. Counting Chinese-Americans, start of course with Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, which is more novelistic than it pretends. Liked Eugene Lim's Dear Cyborgs and even more Charles Yu's Interior Chinatown. Not crazy about Ling Ma's Severance. Highly recommend the long China section of Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt, and the Chinese protagonist of his Red Moon.

[A] C'mon, Victor, try harder. As a rock fan in a secondary market, that is your lot, a demographic inconvenience you're doomed to cope with. THIS PECULIARITY I ADDRESS AT LENGTH IN THE FULL-LENGTH COLUMN ON PLACEBO I PUBLISHED ON OR AROUND MY 64TH BIRTHDAY, WHICH YOU MISSED WHY?? It's easily finable from the Placebo page in the digitized Consumer Guide. I'm listening to Meds as I write, probably for the first time since I wrote that column, though I did keep their best-of, which inconveniently enough came out during the part of 2013 when there was no CG and which sounded excellent when I played it. Meds also sounds pretty darn good in more or less the way I describe. Tuneful, rockin', smart enough. But just for the record, for an artist to admire the artists you list is no guarantee that he, she, or they will approach the excellence of those aesthetic models. It's to Brian Molko's credit that he came as close as he did.

[A] I have both those albums on vinyl and liked them fine in their moment, bypassing them for review, as you figure, because I didn't do imports back then. Reconsidering them as CDs might be fun, although I note that Amazon is currently selling what seem to add up to 18 Johnny Thunders/Heartbreakers bootlegs-I-presume, some CD and some vinyl, a plethora that diminishes the fun potential of sorting them out considerably. In my recent David Jo appreciation I came up with the adjective "squalling" to describe Johnny's sound, and the same word popped into my mind unbidden as I considered your query. A good start descriptively.

[A] I haven't listened to the radio in any systematic way in over 40 years, which for somebody whose life was changed by Alan Freed on WINS in 1954 and who kept carefully calibrated files of Peter Tripp's Top 40 on WMGM for his entire junior year in high school is a fundamental change. The radio was very important to me in the '60s and '70s, and it's not as if I never hear it now, or that I don't sometimes discover or at least get a bead on a pop hit I might otherwise miss by overhearing it there. It used to happen in stores before they all started subscribing to streaming services. Tuning in the radio in a rental car can also be enlightening. As for my own show, I had a weekly one under Village Voice auspices 2001-2002. I insisted they pay me, I think $100, which in the end they decided wasn't worth their while, as it probably wasn't. But I earned the money--preparing playlists was WORK.

[A] What should it be? Spotify is by no means "progressive." It's a business, one that's now essential to my work. Granted, for Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and a few others to boycott Spotify may well have its "political" dimension. But note that by comparison Substack is a hotbed of rightwing argumentation, which doesn't come close to meaning I ever itch to take my wares elsewhere.

[A] When I reconnected with Steve in July he told me that he'd had a heart attack a few months before. Heart incidents are fairly common after 65 and Steve seemed pretty together if not quite hale and hearty when I walked down to St. Marks Place to pick up the clips we wanted to reprint, so I didn't give this news much thought. But then came a phone call from a friend of Steve's telling me he'd died of a heart attack--more or less instantly was the impression I got. I was shocked of course and started bellowing "oh no" into the phone, and soon I was worrying among other things that the renewed attention might have triggered the coronary. Which I suppose it might have, although I'm told by those close to him that he was delighted to be remembered. It turns out Steve had completed another novel. It's set in the Kansas of his boyhood and titled Heat, Then Rain. His wife asked if I would proofread it and I did. Liked it a lot. Will be sure to alert readers when it sees print.

[A] I was the musical advisor on that Joan Micklin Silver flick, for which I received a modest honorarium, although my recollections of exactly what I contributed are pretty dim 50 years later. Not much I don't think. I was on vacation during part of the shoot, no phone in our state park cabin, and recall dialing from a roadside pay phone to convey a few suggestions. And something tells me that I tried to get them to include the Bobbettes' "Mr. Lee," although not whether I succeeded. My one-man campaign to render "Mr. Lee" a recognized classic has never gotten very far, so I assume I failed.

[A] No joke--for maybe two years in the mid-'70s I did indeed work with a State Department committee charged with determining which nonclassical musical artists merited government support for their overseas tours. Details have faded, including who else was on the committee, whether we got an honorarium (small one I think--$200?), how frequently we convened (twice a year?), how travel was arranged, etc. But for sure I found the experience interesting. I'm pretty sure I was the only rock guy. My two memories are dim but real. One is that Pete Seeger's half-brother Mike, who I liked tremendously, got upset when I said something positive or maybe just matter-of-fact about folk music's debts to the CPUSA. The other is a battle royal over the Grateful Dead, accounted grooveless slobs by most of my jazz- and folk-oriented confreres (no women as I recall). I believe I ended up winning that one. Didn't remember the Fatback story, but am proud I had something to do with it.

[A] "Annoy you on every level" is such a silly overstatement I find it difficult to address seriously. First and most obvious, Paul was a mere quarter of the Beatles, not a half--remember those George and Ringo guys, I forget their last names it's been so long, but not that both were far more vivid figures than anyone in Wings but Paul himself--doesn't pack as big an impact as you're suggesting, although his melodicism was obviously crucial to what the other three Beatles put out there. Indeed, his whimsy in the Beatles context can be positively refreshing on occasion, and to choose the most obvious example, if he ever did anything as feral as "Long Tall Sally" in Wings, for some reason nobody noticed. I regret some of the language I used in my McCartney reviews, although it was more justifiable at the time--calling him "Paulie" especially, and "a convinced fool" no longer flies though it made some sense rhetorically in the moment. In addition, I came to admire Linda with the years and had nothing but respect for their marital commitment. Moreover, McCartney has become a much solider public figure over the years, and much less a public pothead, which I always found regrettable. Reports from his shows suggest that they're very well put together, and not only that--he's apparently taken to charging substantial admission to sound check rehearsals and donating all those proceeds to charity, a great idea for an icon. But am I gonna relisten to all those albums? Nah--life is too short. So my certainty that the songs on the superbly curated 1999 covers album Run Devil Run cut all but a few of his solo compositions could well be a judgment I die with.

[A] I've tried, and I've tried some more. But not only isn't Lukas a titan like Willie, which nobody would have expected or can deny, I just don't find him a compelling artist even though he certainly seems like an OK guy. Great talent is such a rare thing that for it to appear in successive generations is just about unheard of. Even in close cases like Johnny Cash-Rosanne Cash or Ornette Coleman-Denardo Coleman (never mind Bob Dylan-Jakob Dylan or Nat King Cole-Natalie Cole, please) there's still a discernible gap. Pops Staples-Mavis Staples maybe? Judy Garland-Liza Minnelli? But let it be said that all those examples are closer than Willie-Lukas. Which is not for a moment to suggest that Lukas doesn't have every right to pursue a musical career of his own.

[A] why do people too dull-witted to understand criticism keep wasting what little talent they have whining about it? and why do australians kiss british ass by retaining the useless extra vowel in the word "endeavor" centuries after their pioneering predecessors in america shitcanned it?

[A] It's been years since I made any concerted effort to keep up with pop/showbiz gossip/news--politics keeps me too busy, for one thing. But when my advisor Joe Levy told me Childers had conceived a gay-friendly country video I was pleased but not surprised--from the debut album that featured a Protestant-Catholic romance I've assumed he was a very shrewd yet exceptionally decent guy. But I did buy (you know I buy most of my CDs, right?) Childers's 2022 Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven? without any knowledge whatsoever of 2020's Long Violent History, an intriguing title I'd never to my knowledge encountered before deciding I should address your query. Problem was, I never got sufficiently het up about Hounds, so after multiple passes decided it was almost certainly some sort of Honorable Mention that I'd best sum up in the August CG--until I determined that Childers had a new album due in September, which the way I've long done this work meant I had to hold up my take on Hounds as well. How that will work out I'll determine at a future date. Not necessarily September, either.

[A] Though I reviewed High Fidelity kindly enough and thought the movie was OK, my respect for Hornby as a critic plunged to near zero in the early '00s when during his tour as The New Yorker's pop reviewer he either was assigned or decided to review Billboard's top 10 albums and all but bragged that he'd never heard any of them. As someone who greatly admires both Prince and Dickens and perceives not much similarity between them, I'd certainly begin a review copy of the book you describe (which to be frank I'd never heard of). There's something about the aesthetic equivalences such a book posits just by existing that I like. How far I'd get I have no idea.

[A] A very strange question I'm only answering in case any other reader is unaware that the albums my big fan Tyler asks about are all but one reviewed in full and positively at the very searchable robertchristgau.com, an excellent place to find out what I think about lots of stuff though keep reading And It Don't Stop please. Most are full A's, Lamar an A minus, Sly an A plus. A Crow Looked at Me was my number three of 2017 and Billie Eilish's debut was number one of 2019. I don't like the Bridgers much. I intend to prefer the angry to the sad, also the sardonic. I'll give the Bergman a shot and recommend you do the same for Laurie Anderson's A plus Heart of a Dog. (P.S. Started the Bergman. Couldn't get through it. Too wispy and crystalline.)

[A] It turns out that during our just-friends-except-actually-I-love-you phase I gave Carola an extra copy I had of Stage Fright, and when Robertson died that was the album she asked me give a spin. Hadn't played the Band in years so I said sure but only thought it sounded good-not-great. For me that's par. I think it's more about the singer(s) and maybe the groove than the songwriter(s), but except for The Band they've never made an album I really, as we used to say, dig--although four others were B plusses, which is no kind of pan. Also, I've always thought Robertson was more a self-important roots-pop middlebrow than the font of wisdom he was widely taken to be, including by himself. If I have time before I file this I'll try to replay Moondog Matinee--find that's the one I'm most curious about.

[A] Jazz was my main musical interest during my 1958-1962 college years, where my bebop-to-Coltrane/Coleman preferences were pretty avant-garde although not especially "free" except for Ornette. Between Beatlemania etc. and my critical and romantic partner Ellen Willis, who to put it kindly disliked jazz, I didn't hear much from 1966 to 1969, although by 1969 Sun Ra in particular was luring me back--see this rather crude report from the way-east East Village Slug's, which Willis presumably skipped. By 1970 the JCOA events were combining Sun Ra's style of "free" with more countercultural, hippie-era events on St. Marks Place where I recall Sun Ra's band participating or even starring. But ultimately I am a rock critic, which means songs with good lyrics, catchy tunes, and a propulsive beat are my meat. Sorting through the inspired and indeed visionary mess of Sun Ra's catalog would require more time, expertise, and indeed inclination than I have. That said, I clearly should play Lanquidity for Carola sometime. I bet I'd learn something.

[A] Raised born-again Christian and officially "saved" for a spell in my early teens, I've called myself an atheist since I was 17, a development I go into some detail about in Going Into the City. Needless to say, however, I could be wrong--maybe there is a God of some sort. It's also conceivable I'll be prey to existential terror as death approaches. That said, I find it very hard to believe Christian hymns, especially by Elvis Presley, will provide succor. Maybe Willie Nelson's Last Man Standing or A Beautiful Time--my mother-in-law listened to Stardust on repeat in her final weeks. Carola has long since nominated Dusty Springfield's "A Brand New Me" as a way of rethinking eternity.

[A] Before I forget, let me recommend David Cantwell's excellent Haggard biography The Running Kind, which will probably speak to your needs better than I can. Because the fact is that I never quite grokked Haggard even though I could recognize his musical skill set, historical importance, and progressive affinities. My disconnect partly but by no means entirely reflects the time I watched him vituperatively badmouth his female stagemate at the Felt Forum circa 2006 or so, which shocked both Carola and myself so much we never forgot it. But it also reflects my personal and idiosyncratic response to his singing as opposed to songwriting, which is that there are lots of country singers I'd rather hear: Jones, Williams, Parton, Frizzell, Lynn for starters. That said, of the three rather different Haggard Capitol best-ofs on my shelves, Hag: The Best of, Vintage Collection, and The Capitol Collectors Series, I figured I'd go for the first-named, which sounded quite OK at breakfast this morning but not as masterful vocally as Lefty's Look What Thoughts Will Do, which followed. Note too that my immediate response to your query was to think of Working in Tennessee, cut when Haggard was in his seventies and sounded it. Might be worth your time.

[A] Now that you mention it, nope. Weird for such a hit machine, isn't it? Out of curiosity I just replayed 1975's Rock of the Westies, which sounded all too here or there, although I liked it a lot when it first surfaced (which is how it came to pass that I wrote the Elton piece in the first Rolling Stone Illustrated History). Liked the Rocketman flick, though.