[A] This seems like the perfect chance to remind readers of this monthly feature that robertchristgau.com comes equipped with a search function that makes it easy to look up my Consumer Guide reviews of any artist, all of which include links to longer pieces on the same subject such as, in this instance, "No Hope Radio"--which, I can further point out, also appears in my National Book Critics Circle finalist Is It Still Good to Ya: Fifty Years of Rock Criticism 1967-2017. Moreover, the Google Search function of the site enables you to search for other mentions of that band's distinctive name. I recommend you start with "No Hope Radio" and, if so inclined, proceed from there.

[A] Question or no question, how am I not going to reprint that? Thank you, though I would say that rather than a steel-stern separation there has to be a merger of subjective and objective that doesn't preclude separating the two rhetorically, if that makes any sense, which I'm not positive it does. You should be aware that my overseer Joe Levy burned CDs of the oud music you sent that I've played once or twice with some pleasure and interest albeit no true critical purchase. Thank you.

[A] As it happens, I just read the very strange Mingus memoir Beneath the Underdog and for the umpteenth time pulled a Mingus album--don't recall which one--out of my A shelves, where they take up several inches even though, as you note, I am not a Mingus fan. In the memoir I began to glimpse, in between the sex parts, why this was so. Simple, really, and as I like to say a taste not a judgment, many people I like and love like or love Mingus--Carola might well if I gave her the chance, though she didn't bite this time. In between sex parts, Mingus makes a great deal of both his chops on the bass and the breadth of his musical interests, which definitely run to what I'll just call classical music because I don't want to go back and check specifics. My tastes in jazz are very much small-group theme-and-variation. There are plenty of exceptions, but that's my aural wheelhouse. Mingus is plainly interested in more complex and "classically" inflected arrangements and compositions. Since I'm only 79 and in good health, I may yet develop a taste for such sounds. So far, no. As I always say about others and can therefore also say about myself: I like what I like.

[A] I never do this, but A and A plus. That's because your question made me feel as if I hadn't played either in years--Now!, Exile, and Aftermath are my normal Stones picks. My gut reaction was that Let It Bleed was superior and I thought it would be fun to play them back to back at dinner, whereupon I learned that I didn't own Let It Bleed on CD. I've ordered it, but meanwhile I played the BB CD and then Spotified Let It Bleed, which because it came out more or less simultaneous with Altamont I admired but didn't play all that much at the time, though because I wrote a lot about the Stones in the '70s I'd certainly heard it a lot. Carola and I agreed that Beggars Banquet was an A, and then could hardly believe how good Let it Bleed sounded. Just the playing is fantastic; we were so snowed we even gave "Midnight Rambler" a pass. I learned that it was one of the first (and few, she was poor) rock albums Carola had bought when she returned from England in 1969 and that she played it constantly, but that was 50 years ago. Now she's decided that "You Can't Always Get What You Want" should be one of her funeral songs (along with both Dusty Springfield's and Aretha Franklin's "A Brand New Me")--no, as indicated above she's not anything like dying, but at our age you start to think about that stuff. Nicky Hopkins is great on it, so much so that I can forgive them for downsizing Ian Stewart.

[A] I've been wracking my brains about this, but I think the answer is that I never saw him back in the day even though I did own and often play his 1960 Change of the Century, which opens with "Ramblin'," the tune I called his "beloved Diddleybeat blues" in my Billboard report on what proved to be his final live performance. There's no record I can find of his playing the Jazz Gallery or the Five Spot, which were my jazz venues after I turned 18 in 1960. But looking around I did find the extensive notes I took on his Carnegie Hall performance for my 2006 "A Month on the Town," which I'll now copy with the warning that my show notes, preserved in files I call giglogs, are rarely this polished. Ahem:

June 16, 2006, Ornette Coleman Quartet at Carnegie Hall. Billed as Ornette Coleman Quartet, meaning Denardo on drums, stand-up bassist Greg Cohen, and an arco bassist named Tony Falanga basically taking a saxophonist's part, but there was also a new electric bassist named Al MacDowell. As Stanley Crouch put it, "In the book of music, the shortest chapter is the one on melody, because nobody knows how to write one." Coleman does. On at 8:06, our seats in Row F on the right, excellent visual vantage, although Ashley Kahn warned that the acoustics might not be so good. Stanley was in the right toward the rear, and ours beat his--he couldn't hear anything but Ornette, Denardo's bass drum and cymbals, and Falanga. I could hear Cohen easily, watching his fingers helped, and all of Denardo's kit, muffled though it was behind a baffle, but not MacDowell, who I also couldn't see, Coleman being situated directly between him and me. (Will Friedwald in the Sun later reported no acoustic problems except distinguishing the bass players--wonder where he was.) At 76, Coleman looked frail in his electric-blue suit (cobalt, Carola said--it looked silk, and shone), charcoal shirt, yellow tie, porkpie hat, and shiny black patent leather shoes. He often sat on a stool, played mostly alto--trumpet adequate, violin scratchy, which I suppose is the idea. Fast ones generally alternated with ballads, with Falanga commonly stating the theme or doing an intro on the ballads. Coleman's tone on alto has just gotten smoother and sweeter, almost French horn-like, and there were moments when Falanga sounded like Ben Webster, but generally the effect was more tenor than baritone much less bass saxophone--maybe he has to play higher just to get some modicum of flexibility. Didn't know the tunes, maybe Ratliff will get them right, but he might have begun with "Ramblin'," a blues I liked a lot toward the end was "Turnaround" I was told, and the encore was of course "Lonely Woman." One ballad evoked "My One and Only Love," one fast one "Mexican Hat Dance," and there were quotes: "Do I Need You," "Blues in the Night" were two I wrote down. Off 9:23, encore till 9:31. Afterward went to Tribeca afterparty--Kahn was driving. Had met the manager and partygiver, Michaela Dreiss, at John Rockwell's 65th. Great Afropop comp on when I got there. That's where I saw Crouch--Gary, who I tried to make my plus one, wasn't around after the show. Talked to Ornette for a while, always a privilege, though his soft voice is hard to hear and he was going on about one of my least favorite subjects, music and memory. He is 76, after all.

[A] By "review" you seem to mean a full paragraph as opposed to an Honorable Mention sentence/clause. But Honorable Mentions are reviews by me. They represent at least three to five listens, often more while less is very unusual. Sometimes the writing is dashed off--if something succinct comes to me I thank the prose gods and go with it. Usually, however, I put real time into the first draft and go over it many times. In addition, at the bottom of my Costello page you'll find a full-length review of his Roots show and collab written for MSN in 2013. Have played the new one once. Thought it began strong. Will return at my own pace.

[A] No, I'm not a transphobe--see my 1997 review of John Heidenry's What Wild Ecstasy, collected in Book Reports--and am happy to employ the singular "they" when circumstances warrant. In Clover's book it was used as a default, which is not my way. Just as I value the serial comma, I value the distinction between singular and plural. It can be so clarifying.

[A] You guessed correctly--even in the '50s, when I was the right age, I wasn't big on comic books and preferred the actually comic ones. Was very interested in head comix later, and played a small role in Harvey Pekar's success that included nominating him for a Macarthur, and wrote a big piece on R. Crumb's version of the book of Genesis that's in Book Reports. My daughter, on the other hand, seldom misses one of the many Marvel movies and I've seen a few with her. I am definitely an admirer of Douglas Wolk, who's clearly done yeoman-as-genius work here, and am flattered by his footnote. We did a National Arts Journalism Program stint together, and share an agent, Sarah Lazin, who gave me a copy of the book when I saw her for the first time in way too long. I certainly intend to at least begin it, because if anyone is going to make critical sense of that world, which is plainly of tremendous cultural importance, he's the guy.

[A] Backatcha, David, who those who don't recognize the name should be aware is responsible for an amazing series of albums in which interviews with people living out their endgames in senior residences are read aloud and set to music--very much worth checking out. Your tribute to Hickey gives me the chance to opine yet again that while nothing tops Air Guitar, Hickey's 2017 collection Perfect Wave, which I reviewed in And It Don't Stop early on, is almost as good--indeed, deserves its own legend.

[A] My wife and daughter telling me they love me, or maybe a variation on the last sound my father heard, which was me murmuring "Thank you. Thank you." Not music, unless something occurs to me as the time grows near, as I suppose it might. Chuck Berry? Monk? Impossible to predict.

[A] I love Wikipedia. Use it almost every day, have learned to see through its inevitable glitches, and donate as I believe everyone who visits it regularly should. As soon as it became apparent that my Substack thingy was going to be a success that would pay me decently to work hard, I called my webmaster Tom Hull to thank him for creating my site almost single-handed, because I assume at least half of robertchristgau.com's regular visitors discovered me via Wikipedia, which cites me so often because my site is a very searchable, very reliable source of pithy reviews of thousands of artists. Do I find errors there fairly often? Yes. Are all subjects covered with equal skill and dedication? How could they be? As I'm about to say just below, there are lots of scary things about the internet. Wikipedia isn't one of them.

[A] I think things are a little different, and maybe better, in the UK, about which I know little, so will stick to the USA. I am alarmed, let's call it, although terrified is in the running even now and things seem all too likely to get worse before they get better, by the effect of let's say alt-right (so as not to resort to fascist quite yet) social media on national and especially local politics in the U.S. Election workers and school-board members, who've historically been earnest if occasionally self-important people of considerable integrity and public-spiritedness, have been under concerted attack, with the aim of denying or greatly complicating the franchise of people who for class or racial reasons are likely to vote Democratic and of expunging "liberal" ideas about race, class, gender, and sexual identity from public school curriculums--and by ideas is often meant something very much like facts, as in the recent controversy over the history of post-Civil War "Reconstruction," the 1876 abandonment of which the right seems to have forgotten greatly accelerated, among other things, the lynching fad that was all the rage as late as the 1920s. Moreover, all manner of disinformation, especially about Covid and the 2020 election, is accepted as fact by an alarmingly large proportion of U.S. citizens--10, 20, often 30 percent. In this rightwing websites have played not merely a role but the leading one. How this all reaches down to the young (who to me seem less adept than inept) I know much less about. Is TikTok, for instance, in play? I myself have been appalled by how complicit Facebook has been in the right's disinformation campaign. In addition I would note that a bitter urban-rural dichotomy has divided this spacious, widely populated nation since its very beginnings.

[A] Miles Davis desert island? Didn't remember that until my editor Joe Levy unearthed a 2019 Xgau Sez where I begrudgingly named Davis my desert island artist without specifying a desert-island disc. Miles Davis at the hospital I do remember, however--kind of the same thing. All that said, the first Miles album I ever owned was 1958's Milestones, though I almost certainly bought it later than that--probably sometime after Kind of Blue came out in 1959. I played it recently and it sounded dandy. But without question it's Kind of Blue that's Davis's greatest album just like everybody says, and it's Kind of Blue that I play the most, with Jack Johnson and In a Silent Way numbers two and three and odd '70s funk-tinged rackets after that. Its lead cut "So What" in particular is such a classic and astute piece of music that it's what I request when undergoing minor surgery or one of the fancy injections us oldies sometimes undergo--it's simultaneously super-intelligent and calming, and not only that, everyone in the room is gonna like it. Davis in general is complicated for me by the fact that not only does my upstairs brother-in-law Steven play jazz trumpet but my same-floor roommate Carola loves jazz trumpet. Recently she has reunited with Sketches of Spain even though if not because she knows it's kind of schlocky, so that one has passed through my ears two-three times in the past year and sounded pretty much OK to boot. I also play Miles's pre-Columbia birth-of-the-cool stuff occasionally. The only period I don't dig is the Wayne Shorter late-'60s, which is not a final judgment, just a quirk of taste. I should add too that a 1985 Wayne Shorter interview with Greg Tate played a major role in the Tate tribute I wrote for Bookforum. It made Shorter seem like a wonderful man, which I have no doubt he is. Will reexplore.

[A] Come up with a good line and it'll follow you around for life, which has advantages and disadvantages. In this case--"We have met the enemy and they are them"--I meant "them" to refer to Abba's European origins, which given Sweden's pop dominance in the Max Martin era was prescient except insofar as I actually enjoyed and admired Max Martin. But in fact I became surprisingly fond of Abba, who had always obviously been good at creating pop standards that are better than most pop standards, and was softened up considerably by Mamma Mia! and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, flicks whose indulgent takes on music fandom in general and Abba in particular I respected and thought pretty great. Nor do I have any problem with their comeback scheme, which strikes me as a lot more apt and earned than the grotesque shenanigans of the average or even above-average fiftysomething metal band.

[A] Your attachment to said comma is anything but twittish. It is a mark of intellectual savoir-faire. The only thing I myself don't like about the "Oxford comma" is calling it that. I greatly prefer the more descriptive and less snobby-Brit sounding "serial comma"--which I also prefer to the B.C. Dreyer variant "series comma," because I think it's better to modify a noun with an adjective than with another noun. So as I invariably wrote on the blackboard for my NYU writing students: "Use serial comma, use serial comma, and use serial comma." Why? Because it's clearer, period, to always divide the three or more elements of a series of adjectives, verbs, or especially nouns, proper names, or other substantives with the same indicator, namely a comma. One reason it's called the "Oxford comma" is that Brits use it less consistently than Americans, and those who make the wrong choice wish to indicate that the right one is snobby. Many U.S. newspapers forbid it, presumably to save the precious newsprint space that tiny quarter-pica or whatever a comma represents. Dreyer's English cites what Dreyer reports is an oft-posited example of why we need it, a sentence that goes: "Highlights of his global tour included encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector." Sans serial comma, Mandela becomes not only a dildo collector, which it's safe to assume he was not, but an 800-year-old demigod when in fact he was only an ordinary demigod, as he most certainly preferred.

[A] Were he still alive, which I'm sorry he's not, I'd say: "Top of the morning to you, sir. Have you ever heard those MC Hawking records? Bet you'd like 'em."

[A] They do indeed. Last time I talked to Josh, at the Pop Conference a few years ago, I brought Robinson up because I was newly infatuated and aware that they both resided in the same burg. Josh told me he knew Robinson, called him "Stan" the way Jonathan Lethem had when I emailed him with a similar query, and not only that--they were getting together the very next week, where Clover expected to school him some on economics. For sure there's plenty of economics in The Ministry for the Future. How much of it is marked by Clover I have no idea. And whaddaya know? At around the time this query came in The Paris Review was publishing Clover's praise of Robinson's novel. And as a bonus here's a Paris Review Q&A about Roadrunner.

[A] "Realistic"? Having spent approximately 15 minutes of my life in a major league dugout (profile of underrated Mets shortstop Rafael Santana, 1987 or '88 I think), I have no way of judging. But I can call to mind many convincing, insightful , and/or entertaining baseball movies. I guess my favorite is the hilarious but also incisive and exciting Moneyball, about assembling a winning Oakland A's team on a zero budget, based on a book by Michael Lewis, whose The Big Short inspired an even better movie about the 2008 mortgage scam crisis. And just recently Carola and I streamed and enjoyed an impertinent documentary called The Battered Bastards of Baseball, about a nutty yet winning minor-league team constructed from scraps when I forget which major league team pulled its franchise from Portland, Oregon. But there are many others: A League of Their Own about a women's baseball league; The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings, about a team of touring ex-Negro League players; Bang the Drum Slowly, starring my once-great Dartmouth downstairs neighbor Michael Moriarty and a young Robert de Niro and based on a Mark Harris novel; the only slightly watered-down Jackie Robinson biopic 42; the much older b&w Fear Strikes Out, about the great bipolar Red Sox centerfielder Jimmy Piersall; the kiddie comedy The Bad News Bears. For some reason I've never seen the renowned Field of Dreams, which I suspected and indeed still suspect of pretentious sentimentality, though I'd probably watch it were it to stream free somewhere. I've never seen the Lou Gehrig biopic The Pride of the Yankees either. Is there a Babe Ruth one I'm forgetting?

[A] I was one of the few rock critics who was a big Grateful Dead fan in the late '60s and early '70s--most crits found them too slack, too soft, too arty. I still play the early records I recommended. I think you're right that they're finally getting the respect they deserve, and I'm glad. But if you'll take a look at those CG reviews you'll find that in my opinion the Dead pretty much stopped making good records as long ago as 1972. Obviously there's a critical mass of Deadhead cultists who are content to spend their time culling the inexhaustible steamer trunks of live tapes out there, and if you'll glance at my site you'll see I've singled out a few good ones. But in my opinion those are rare, as I know in part because me and my family more than once patronized a Puerto Rico getaway called the Grateful Bed and Breakfast where Dead tapes played nonstop in the common room without ever engaging my full attention for more than the occasional minute or fondly remembered song and even took a few home on the proprietor's say-so, none of which stuck with me. Moreover, if I miss a few I still have plenty of Dead to listen to, especially since Carola will occasionally dance around to one. So I can definitely live without Dead and Company myself. I don't begrudge them their audience, far from it. But especially after that inconsequential Bob Weir album of a few years ago, I feel not the slightest need to keep up. For further reading, take a look at these two pieces, the first collected in Any Old Way You Choose It and the second in Book Reports.

[A] This is ancient history by now, history of less interest to my friend Greil than to me, just as Thomson is of less interest to me than to my friend John Rockwell, who wrote the introduction to the 1984 paperback edition of the Thomson anthology I've never found it in myself to explore. Thomson was a classical composer who was also a renowned music critic; he's thought of as openminded if not visionary for saying nice things about Gershwin and admiring jazz from a distance I'm too ignorant to estimate. The "mass culture" to which he refers was a big terminological deal in the '50s and '60s. In 1969 I spent two-three months in Room 315 of the Fifth Avenue library researching the intellectual fad called "mass culture theory" because I conceived myself as a champion of what I preferred to call "popular culture," which Ellen Willis and I had a contract to write a book about only then we broke up. Greil was an American studies visionary who didn't know much of that literature when we met; my recollection is that he was barely aware of early popular culture champion Gilbert Seldes although he knew plenty about Seldes's equally important contemporary Constance Rourke. "Mass culture theory" was so snobbish it was atrophying big-time by the mid '70s. The Thomson quote scoffs at an especially nutty iteration in which "high art" was sullied by the very fact of distribution via "mass media" to hoi polloi incapable of appreciating its ineffable spiritual superiority; in addition, it evades the musical complications by going on to specifically disdain only "base literature, obscene photographs, and trivial shows." Wonder what he thought of I Love Lucy or The Honeymooners. How about Raymond Chandler or, lordy, Grace Metalious. Don't know, but fear the worst.