[A] As my Clapton piece in Grown Up All Wrong explains, I respect Clapton's facility as a player but have warmed to him only intermittently. Not a big Yardbirds fan though they were certainly OK, not a big Cream fan ditto--Disraeli Gears is my favorite in their rather tiny catalogue, and always there's Jack Bruce's portentous proto-art-rock vocals to get past. The first Derek and the Dominoes album I love and still play occasionally because it fills a special need, and I also still go for 461 Ocean Boulevard. But except for one story that's where it ends and that's all I'm writing. The story is about seeing Derek and the Dominos in Pasadena in November 1970. Great show--that truly was a terrific band. But what I always recall is what my date had to say about it. She was a very intelligent and openminded colleague of mine at Cal Arts and we had a good time together even though she wasn't much into music. But this concert she loved loved loved, and in the course of telling her about the band I mentioned the silly way fans had of calling Clapton God. Judy didn't think it was silly at all. "I can see why," she said. So maybe there was something there I missed.

[A] Aretha on Atlantic. The first Ramones album for sure. Multiple hip-hop moments--Sugarhill Gang, Bambaataa, "That's the Joint," "The Message," Public Enemy too. Bikini Kill more than Sleater-Kinney, better though S-K were. Maybe the Backstreet Boys, who got that ball rolling. As much earlier did Sunny Ade, who I'd argue made Youssou possible. Arguably electric Miles. And Bob Dylan oughtn't be left off this list even though he slightly preceded "Brand New Bag." Indeed, ditto for the Beatles. "Brand New Bag" is musically fundamental. But culturally fundamental has to be in the mix.

[A] I've always liked standup but don't listen to or watch much of it--couldn't even get through the recent George Carlin doc though I dug him back in the '70s. We did enjoy and admire the recent documentary The Real Charlie Chaplin, which does justice to Chaplin's physical genius and conceptual daring while also establishing that superstar egomania long preceded Led Zeppelin. We also devoured Richard Pryor's Live in Concert on Netflix, where we both were struck by how physical as well as verbal-aural he was. I gave Pryor's nine-CD 2000 Rhino box And It's Deep, Too! an A plus. Answering you I pulled out Volume 1 of Fantasy's Lenny Bruce Originals and it sounds great though I don't think I ever reviewed it. And above all there's the Firesign Theater, a late-'60s-rooted made-for-the-recording-studio LA comedy troupe whose brilliant Shoes for Industry best-of is still at Amazon. Greil Marcus reported that he used them--and also Monty Python--as background music when he was writing Lipstick Traces. Perhaps overly trippy in retrospect. But terrific.

[A] I've put in a lot of ear time on what I think of as "Afrobeats" and its cousins, Burna Boy especially, with little to show for it. The main exception seems to be in the general vicinity of South African amapiano, which as I think about it now for the umpteenth time is the one recent Afropop genre that's beat-based rather than song-based. Which to bring it one step further is the only new African subgenre if that's even the term that's rhythm-based--whereas, to follow this line of thought, most of the many postcolonial African genres that have given me so much pleasure not to mention column inches over the years are rhythm-first albeit often with deeply pleasurable singers like Rochereau and Sunny Ade attached. That's way too simplistic with a profusion of exceptions--where does it leave the likes of Thomas Mapfumo, Oumou Sangare, the titanic Youssou N'Dour just for starters? But conceptually it's a start. I eagerly await an "Afrobeats" type who's a substantial as opposed to merely facile pop songwriter.

[A] I've played it at least twice in the past two-three years and it sounded fine--although not, of course, as musically revelatory as it did in 1986, when my Afropop explorations were still just beginning, although they preceded Graceland by several years--there are four African albums on the 1982 Dean's List, for instance. The Africa section of Is It Still Good to Ya? includes a long essay initially inspired by Graceland, which is on my site although condensed and revised for the book.

[A] Assuming anyone would actually do such a thing, I find it hard to imagine why I'd object while reserving the right to change my mind should said miracle, endeavor, or stab in the dark ensue. While we're both waiting, pick up The Only Ones. Some literary wannabes found the prose Carola invented there daunting, but for rock and rollers it reads like butter, and if you insist there's also an audiobook.

[A] Artists run out of gas, that's all. They have an idea or an angle or just a bunch of stuff to say--musically, verbally, or both. They're making a good living at it, enjoying the road although that seldom lasts, bonding with their bandmates. Conflicts arise, but at the very least they find themselves with a job they like. Only those artistic and interpersonal materials generally get stale even if replacement bandmates are easier to come by than replacement spouses. An impressive exception is Neil Young, who despite his affable demeanor there's little evidence is actually all that nice a guy, his certifiable genius enhanced by endurance alone. In pop/rock/whatever that's truly unusual. In jazz, where hard-earned technical skill counts for more and lasts better, lifers are far more common, and let's pause a moment to recall Wayne Shorter. But in pop, even when commercial success endures, the aesthetic excitement often seems staler and staler even for listeners who engage with the innovations or if you like fads pop records have somehow been generating for over a century.

[A] I've found that turning 80 had the effect of putting questions like this one--which Carola found touching and thanks you for--in the forefront of my mind. It definitely sharpens one's interest in mortality, as did, for that matter, Carola's 2017 cancer diagnosis, especially before we learned that while multiple myeloma can be fatal, it seldom kills quickly and doesn't necessarily kill at all. When we began that journey, each of us came to realize separately that he or she wanted to die first. That was clarifying and in a way gratifying. The problem with living let's not say forever so how about till 100 is that infirmity keeps creeping. What's passed off as "aches and pains" always hurts and often cripples, and if you have Alzheimer's in your family, as I do--my mom died of it at 89 and her father had some sort of dementia when he died at 83 in 1971--there's that worry whenever you can't remember who produced the Stones' Dirty Work, which at the moment I can't though I remember he boomed too much for the purists. I could go on, but I have work to do.

[A] The late Charlie Gillett's The Sound of the City was the seminal text. A lecture I gave on it is in Book Reports. The first volume of the late Ed Ward's The History of Rock & Roll is almost as good in its own way and benefits from hindsight. The back end of my first Consumer Guide book has two discographies, the album one way out of date but the singles one guaranteed dynamite. See also my Barnes & Noble piece "Ain't That a Shame," collected in Book Reports and on my site too.

[A] Absolutely I do. In a singer-songwriter like Swift, I as a listener am always most attracted to stories and turns of insight relevant to my own emotional life, which even as someone fortunate enough to have been happily married for half a century I nonetheless still reflect on quite a bit as I think about the joys and travails of friends, family, and humanity in general. Because I'm a popular music fan as well as critic, the megastar pop life also interests me and has inspired excellent music from the Beatles to Beyoncé. But although pure musicality is always crucial and sometimes decisive, the megastars who can reflect meaningfully or for that matter exuberantly or for that matter humorously on more generally relevant matters--friendship, pleasure, conflict, contradiction, loss, politics, social unrest, stuff I'm not clever enough to isolate off the top of my head here--are the ones who move me most and matter most to me. And musicality or no musicality, the travails of fame are usually a bore by me.

[A] It really doesn't work that way for me except insofar as giving any album an A plus is such risky business that I've done so less and less over the years. I've been grading records for so long that the 80 or so A records I find each year get there by kicking off a part of my brain that starts saying to me "Oh yeah, that's an A." Sometime that album will dip to B plus, other times it starts registering full A. But A plus is someplace else altogether. The reason I gave Beyoncé's Renaissance one last summer is that it had begun its life for me getting Bob-Carola-thanks-Nina through a traffic jam and remained our go-to car music for a week of driving around the Connecticut shore. As someone who stopped owning cars in 2006, that's not liable to happen to me again anytime soon. Though maybe I should have given that Selo i Ludi record one now that I think on it--to me it seems that resonant historically. Only, well, there were those two Rammstein covers.

[A] Kim is smarter if all too aware of it and her only solo rock record was way better than any of Thurston's, plus she didn't break up the marriage. But Thurston was the rock and roll heart of that great band, which badly needed one though Steve Shelley played a similar role. So by me they're equals--bandwise, anyway.

[A] It's on my site. Made my career well before Tom Wolfe included it in his The New Journalism collection. Never wrote anything else quite like it--it's so sparely Hemingwayesque, with an undeniable built-in ending.

[A] How about 11? Most longish, two quite brief, several I've written about including three in Going Into the City, one you've seen the movie of (which ain't bad), three by writers I've reviewed in the Voice, three by writers of color, a few particularly the all too unsung Drabble read like butter and a few don't come close.

• Alejo Carpentier, Reasons of State
• Roddy Doyle, The Commitments
• Margaret Drabble, The Millstone
• Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie
• V.S. Naipaul, A House for Mr. Biswas
• Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo
• Kim Stanley Robinson, 2312
• Henry Roth, Call It Sleep
• Norman Rush, Mating
• Ousmane Sembene, God's Bits of Wood
• Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children

[A] It's nice to have a new reader, as I assume you are because I've complained about the overrated What's Going On many times, although note that the mag didn't "choose" it as number one, it ran a poll in which it was voted number one. Moreover, I wrote a piece about the Stone list for And It Don't Stop that ran in September 2020, and filed another about Stone's much later singles list. As for the greatest singers thing the mag recently put on the newsstands, which several readers have inquired about, the truth is that I've yet to read it bottom to top but would probably lead off any such list of my own, which at the moment I have no interest in concocting, with Frank Sinatra and Billie Holiday, both high on the Stone list but not high enough.

[A] This seems wrong to me. For sure many bands and solo artists come off the blocks young and never quite equal that pitch of intensity again--many would say Dylan though I wouldn't, Ramones, Stooges, Beatles too although Lennon's Plastic Ono Band came when he was 29 and I'm a big fan of Double Fantasy 10 years later. But 27 is way young for an "average peak age" even though Joplin and Hendrix died at 27 and Kurt Cobain later joined what his mother called "that stupid club" (and Otis Redding went down in a plane crash at 26 and Buddy Holly at just 22, which renders neither any kind of burnout). A minute or two of brainstorming reminded me of Exile on Main Street and Some Girls, post-30 Stones masterpieces both. For my money Sonic Youth and Yo La Tengo were better past 30 than they were before. Neil Young did his best work in his thirties and then kept going, and note too that even Chuck Berry's "Maybellene" broke when he was just shy of 29 and a bunch of his greatest songs were written in prison when he was pushing 40. General conclusion: especially for individuals but often for whole bands, the pop music labeled "rock" generally turns into a career, and while the excitement may well wane, craft and wisdom often compensate.

[A] If by "know" you mean personally please be advised that this is a silly question. I meet very few musicians, and though usually I like them when I do, the only one I know well is Peter Stampfel, a friendship that began well after his professional peak such as it was. True, in recent years I've developed warm acquaintanceships with a few artists whose careers I helped boost early, notably Adam Weiner of Low Cut Connie and the Wussy karass. But even so that's just not how my life works. That said, Pride was a worth mourning when he died two years ago, and musically I stand by the best-of review you'll find just below, although I'd amend it to say that racially Nashville has opened up a little in the two decades since I wrote it.

Charley Pride: RCA Country Legends [Buddha, 2000]
Voicewise, as brilliant as Vernon Dalhart, Ray Price, George Jones. Contentwise, as wan as Red Foley, Ronnie Milsap, Eddie Rabbitt. Only for Pride, wan was perverse. A deeply ambitious sharecropper's son who moved up to Montana to pursue his first love, baseball, and settled for a job smelting zinc, Pride didn't stand out because he could dip from tenor to bass in well-enunciated middle-American smeared with drawl and flanged with vibrato. He stood out because he wasn't white. Although it wasn't easy becoming the only black country star ever, once he got over the hump he was the perfect token for Southern traditionalists eager to find safe common ground with the civil rights movement. Stylistically honky-tonk when Nashville was trying to be modern, he was never thematically honky-tonk--no drinking songs, God knows no catting songs. Yet his skin color was inescapable. From this Mississippi emigre the pro forma can't-go-home-again of "Wonder Could I Live There Anymore" was an indictment, "voice of Uncle Ben" and all. And how to read the cornball complacency of "I'm Just Me": "I was just born to be/Exactly what you see/Nothing more or less/I'm not the worst or the best/I just try to be/Exactly what you see"? Early on some well-wisher suggested he bill himself George Washington Carver III. But that would have been taking on airs, he'd stick with his own name thankee, and look what it was. Belated Country Music Hall of Famer Pride no longer tours regularly. He doesn't have to. He owns a bank. A−

[A] I liked both of Sophie's albums quite a lot, their playfulness especially, and was quite saddened to read of her accidental death two years ago. That said, I can't claim to have put them on since--her cultural frame of reference isn't mine, which makes her playfulness educational and even enlightening but less personally compelling than it might be. That said, I listened to both twice with pleasure upon receipt of this question, although I continued to find the clotted "Pretending" a waste of time.

[A] I read 40-50 books a year, but that requires discipline, and throw an 1100-pager into the mix and it becomes pretty much impossible. Longest of 2022 was my continued-from-2021 third read of the 800-plus-page The Brothers Karamazov, the first two when I was in my teens so that like Crime and Punishment it played an enormous role in my spiritual development that I thought it would be enlightening to revisit, which it was. I also got through David Graebner's 500-plus and rather less fast-moving Debt: The First 5,000 Years. In 2009 I read Bolano's 648-page The Savage Detectives and came away impressed and enlightened, particularly as regards Mexico. But 2666 I left to my fiction-oriented novelist wife Carola, who's imbibed a lot more Bolano than I have and recalls that after the long and harrowing rape section toward the end, which she admired and admires tremendously, she was too spiritually exhausted to continue and never went back. So the pleasure you suggest if that's the right word will probably remain beyond my ken. Although not as far beyond my ken as Jethro Tull.

[A] If those are my only choices, socialism of course. But as you seem suspiciously unaware in your anonymous way, perhaps because you think capitalism is the only right answer and want to provoke me, they're not. I refer you to "Dark Night of the Quants," a 2011 Barnes & Noble Review column conveniently collected in my 2018 Duke University Press Book Reports, where I report on 10 books about the 2008 financial crisis, one of them summed up thusly: "Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism. South Korean-born British economist loves Swedish capitalism and hates the free-market kind. Like most liberal economists, not much use on political implementation of his sane proposals. A−" Which is to respond, there is a middle ground, and Chang explains it very well.