[A] Gee--what faux-female commenter could be so interested in Lester Bangs books that s/he peruses Lester's Amazon entries for typos and so overawed by the Greil-Xgau cabal that s/he wants to check out their dick size? I wonder.

[A] I was certainly aware that I was generalizing swiftly and broadly in that piece, and if I owned Heartaches by the Number I would have checked it out, as I did David Cantwell's excellent Merle Haggard: The Running Kind. I was also aware that there were revised editions of Bill C. Malone's Country Music, U.S.A. to which Geoff Mann referred in his essay; I'd read the 1968 version shortly after it came out and have never seen either of the newer ones. But since I wasn't claiming to do anything but review those two essays and had plenty to say about them, with deadline approaching I went with what I had. My generalizations are obviously too vast to swear by, but as more-than-plausible argument starters I stand by them.

[A] Without committing to play till the ninth inning, I did what I could to check out most of Soto's picks and was surprised at how few of them worked for me. To choose the biggest disappointments because my tastes clearly run more r&b-let's-call-it than Soto's, neither Sly's "Sex Machine" nor JB's "Time Is Running Out Fast" made me say anything like "How the fuck did I forget that"? The Neil Young, the Bowie, even the Sugar just didn't reach deep enough. But "Tel-Star," "Frankenstein," and not quite as undeniably the Stooges' "L.A. Blues" certainly qualify, as of course does Funkadelic's indelible "Maggot Brain," which Carola and I recall first grokking while we were parking our car in an Akron driveway in 1978 and staying in our seats till it was over, enthralled. Almost as crucial is the Meters' "Cissy Strut." I'd never registered Yo La Tengo's "Spec Bebop" and loved it. I'd replace Eno's "Becalmed" with his "Sky Saw." Pink Floyd's "One of These Days" would probably place. Rush's "YYZ," which it's quite possible I'd never heard in my life, also might. But I think Soto was wrong to leave out all "jazz"--Miles Davis's 27-minute "Right Off," which leads Jack Johnson, is extraordinary and indelibly rock-derived, and not just because it builds off bassist Michael Henderson's "Honky Tonk" riff. Which brings us to the '50s, which Soto ignores altogether. As I've written more than once, it was the hour I spent as a 14-year-old playing side one of my Bill Doggett 45 "Honky Tonk" on repeat that transformed me into the person who became a rock critic. Side two was the hit, one of the best-selling instrumentals of all time, but I always insist that both sides form one composition, still one of my favorite tracks ever. One of Soto's commenters mentions that he also omitted Link Wray's equally influential "Rumble," where you can hear noise guitar being born. And from the '50s I'd add New Orleans sax man Lee Allen's "Walking with Mr. Lee"--and also, just to be contrary, Count Basie's 1956 hit version of "April in Paris," another 45 I bought, which Billboard calculated peaked at number 28 but was bigger in NYC I guess.

[A] The short answer is of course that's the distinction, although the lack of vocal identity is a meaningful parallel it's sharp to point out on your way to homing in on the formal similarities between the two bands and brands. That said, except for Zappa himself if you like the way he plays guitar, which many do more than me and not without reason, there are no musicians as personable as Bootsy Collins or Eddie Hazel or Bernie Worrell in the Mothers however formally skillful the players Zappa gathered around him. Nor were the Mothers anthemic the way P-Funk was--that wasn't how Zappa rolled, which as far as I'm concerned is one more manifestation of his stingy spirit. To me, 1972's (very early) America Eats Its Young, Clinton's most Zappaesque album, is also easily his worst. Usually there's tremendous generosity to his music, which kept on developing after his Westbound tour was over. And that sort of, well, let's call it spirituality, is one thing I respond to in musicians. The Beatles sure had it. John Prine. In their way both Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn. Damn right Peter Stampfel. But probably more Black artists: Coltrane, Rollins, and Coleman in jazz, Aretha and Otis Redding especially in soul, in hip-hop the Roots and Kendrick Lamar for starters. And hey: Louis Armstrong! Not that I don't also identify with righteous anger and sardonic wit. Which Clinton also had.

[A] That quote in toto, after an organizer foolishly claimed that "the sixties had finally come true": "'The new era Live Aid portended, though, had more to do with its many visible corporate sponsorships than any world saving, per se. It sealed pop stardom as another facet of modern celebrity--turned it, officially, into a kind of landed gentry.' To me what happened there was less neat and closed off." Certainly the landed-gentry phase of pop stardom, a nice metaphor, was inevitable without Live Aid, and plenty else wasn't portended there. Most important, Run-D.M.C. gave barely a hint of hip-hop's gigantic future, its starting point which for argument's sake I'll say was the Tupac-Biggie assassinations followed by Jay-Z's late '98 breakthrough "Hard Knock Life" and in 1999 Eminem, still more than a decade off . But in addition Matos's premonitory bows to SST, the Replacements, and the pop success of R.E.M. in particular don't in any way anticipate the way Nirvana's never-duplicated commercial success established alt-rock for a time as a mythic artistic hotbed.

[A] I'm reasonably assured this is not the algorithm per se. It's just people liking and playing the same records because they learned about those records from me. It certainly makes me happy when my fans enjoy some of the more obscure artists I favor, and I know that long-distance friendships have occasionally begun that way. But "power"?? That's not power. Power--of a sort, anyway--might be other critics latching onto the same artists and their readers streaming them too, up into the thousands of plays. How about tens of thousands? That would be cool.

[A] Not Jimmy, I assume. Or the saxophone whiz. Oh well. Even so you can say whatever you want about me as long as you keep putting in the hours with Stacey Abrams. Non-Georgians need you more than ever. Go Warnock.

[A] What a strange question even disregarding the fact that I gave Steel Wheels a B minus, not a B plus. Though I'm glad you like my work, I'm sad that some basic principles haven't gotten through. A major one is that in the end people like what they like, and that a simple way of understanding the critic's job is that critics should among other things try and explain what their opinions/responses are and where they come from. As has already come up in this space, I'm not a Queen fan even though, inspired mostly by my daughter, I've warmed to their precise, campy comic grandeur. When I find time to explore, I might listen more intensively. But if I live to 100 I'll never find time to hear much less immerse in their first six albums. Maybe my feelings will shift a little, but I'll never like them that much, and at best I'll limit myself to a best-of or two. Moreover, the Stones are inscribed a lot deeper on my sensorium than on yours--I've been a sucker for a fundamental groove I attribute mostly to Keith Richards and the great Charlie Watts since "It's All Over Now" hit the airwaves in the fall of 1964. And even though Jagger isn't my kind of guy as a human being, their sound plus his flair sparked into life longer than most aging rockers could manage. My unconventional fondness for Dirty Work remained in place last time I checked--a tremendously underrated album especially given the pass the Stones got on the 1983 Under Cover, its opprobrium based mostly on the overblown reaction to the echoey way producer Steve Lillywhite did drums, which is neither here nor there as far as I'm concerned. Replaying A Bigger Bang for the first time since 2006, my A minus seems right--the opening "Rough Justice" is a strikingly ironic/acerbic expression of both Jagger's musical gift and his romantic limitations and the songwriting strong is throughout, though "Streets of Love" is no high point. In addition to the CG review, wrote longer about A Bigger Bang for Blender in 2005 and then reviewed a 2006 show of theirs for the same mag. I stand by everything I wrote. Check it out--especially the show review.

[A] First of all, I use the word "genius" plenty--too much, probably; Google says it gets 1130 hits on my site where "talent" comes in at 1050 and "smart" at 913. Second, musical genius doesn't have much to do with IQ, certainly not, for instance, the 175 that talented non-genius Bob Mould claims in his memoir, though 120-125 would probably be a good idea just to utilize and kick-start the musical genius properly. Third, most of the musical geniuses I can think of are Black: on your list James Brown above all with Prince second, maybe Wonder, not DeBarge or Ocean, but how come you left out Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin? (And Louis Armstrong! Duke Ellington even though he's never been a favorite of mine! Thelonious Monk! Miles Davis!) The one obvious white genius who comes to mind is easy and isn't on your list: Bob Dylan. Ditto for Joni Mitchell whatever her vanities, Lennon probably, Eminem in his fucked up way conceivably, and I definitely wouldn't rule out Swift. The others less, with understandable candidate Beefheart exemplifying near-genius's limitations. Billie Eilish PLUS HER BROTHER, THAT'S DEFINITELY A PARTNERSHIP, might qualify in 10 years and might not. When I wrote my Billboard obit of George Jones I pulled out the G-word, which didn't seem preposterous, especially for someone on a death deadline. As for Randy Newman and the Clash, both come close enough to justify a good joke, Newman in particular given his soundtrack sideline. And now I declare an end to this party game.

[A] Ordinarily I skip A plus questions but this one I couldn't resist. How could I not nominate the two I put on my Rolling Stone list: Sgt. Pepper and The Beatles' Second Album, the latter of which most Beatles scholars don't believe counts if they even acknowledge it exists? But because so much of my early Beatles listening was their U.S. albums, I'm not qualified to distinguish among the "official" UK versions that preceded Sgt. Pepper. Moreover, while I feel and understand the artistic skill and historical momentousness of prime candidate Rubber Soul, in fact I only cream for three of its songs: "Norwegian Wood," "Girl," and "In My Life." A plusses have to do more than that for me.

[A] These things are so personal. I mean, I love The Nightfly and Carola adores it. But Donald Fagen "happy/upbeat"? That pathological ironist? How??? Still, I thought it might be fun to find something suitable. Two records I go to for that sort of thing are Franco & Rochereau's Omona Wapi and Manu Chao's Proxima Estacion Esperanza, but both may be too world-musicky for your tastes. Either '70s New York Dolls album? KaitO's Band Red, a recent if admittedly esoteric rediscovery around here? The New Pornographers' Whiteout Conditions? Toots and the Maytals' Funky Kingston, which another reader just excoriated me so passionately for giving it an A minus rather than a full A that I replayed it and found it was still an A minus for me. Hey wait, I've got just the thing: The Beatles' Second Album. Guaran-fucking-teed.

[A] What can I say? Popular music evolves just like any art form--Louis Armstrong and His Hot Seven were revolutionary in the late '20s and still sound amazing today, but while it's possible to imagine some historically inclined imitator reviving that sound to an extent, that's a long shot technically and an impossibility culturally--just wouldn't strike the kind of same spark, in the audience or among the musicians themselves (plus, of course, no Satchmo). It's distressed me for many years that the rock and roll of the '50s is an unmapped antiquity for most young listeners--to me the great Chuck Berry and Coasters and Buddy Holly records plus many doowop one-shots (let's hear it for, hmm, how about Johnnie and Joe's "Over the Mountain, Across the Sea") are thrilling on the face of it, but to listeners your age (assuming for the moment that your autobiographical profile is factual) that music has been aesthetically inaccessible for decades. Almost the same goes for soul stylings, although a few aging holdouts as well as some young multiformalists like (Brown University graduate) Jamila Woods continue to work in that general area. But with bands it's different. There are still plenty of bands, some even g-g-b-d or g-k-b-d, exploring that option, and still venues for them too.

[A] Forgive me for rendering it yogurt from here on--just learned that your Canadian spelling came to be because it's bilingual, correct in French as well as English as Canadian law requires. Anyway, I no longer remember the sequence, but there was an editor named John Lombardi at a short-lived Playboy-backed girlie mag dubbed Oui, a purportedly "hipper" variant as I recall, who was taken with the letter-grading thing. (He also assigned me an Al Green profile that ended up in Boston's Real Paper which changed my view of rock history after I plumbed the Joel Whitburn books and learned that many Black artists--not Green, he was too young--had been scoring minor hit singles in the lower reaches of the Billboard chart in the early '60s, when radio heads like myself were unaware they existed.) I suggested that the much more food-savvy Carola Dibbell collaborate with me on consumer guides, let's lower-case the term, to beer, which occasioned many naps as well as a search for flatulence medications, and coffee, which once had me roaring down West 8th Street in my Toyota at 45 miles an hour in pursuit of some jerk who'd cut me off. The yogurt edition, which I'm amazed got published (with a comically salacious illo of course) we researched when we undertook a four-month road trip across the U.S. in 1973 in that Toyota--stored our dairy purchases in an ice chest in the back. We took a lot of notes and came up with language on the run when we could. Most of the writing on all the food pieces was Carola's, who's terrific at physical description, and looking back I love how funny this piece is. "One of the worst yogurts in America. Smells like fresh chemicals, and the blueberry looks like extract of used typewriter ribbon. Cheap and gummy." "The best supermarket yogurt. Although most of the flavors were not special, you could spill the tart, cheesecakey orange into a sherbert glass and call it dessert." "They say the best yogurt is the yogurt you make yourself, but that's not as easy as it sounds. In Laramie, however, there are no reasonable alternatives. George Szanto's first batch melted in our mouths, something like snow. The second had some rough residue and was too sour. But it was fresh, and it sure beat Meadow Gold Viva." "One of the worst. The aftertaste penetrated its most lurid flavors, and the boysenberry was gray." Or here's the long-running Colombo, now a proven quality brand that earned its A as surely as Randy Newman: "The blueberry, with its dusky blue color, generous strewings of berries, and creamy consistency is the best in America, as is the all-natural honey vanilla. When they make it right, even the wheat germ and honey is better than you can mix yourself."

[A] A query that set me to wondering: Who the fuck is Jae Millz? A search on my site came up empty, which as a search for Tyga revealed was because I'd (mis)spelled Jae's surname as Milz. The reference that irked Fitzmaurice was a 2010 B&N piece on Lil Wayne involving LW's No Ceilings mixtape, where in seven words total their names included I adjudged onetime Kylie Jenner beau Tyga and Harlemite Millz as unworthy of such fellow guest contributors as Jay-Z, Gaga, and the Black Eyed Peas, as seems statistically probable without actually going back and checking. I've heard nothing especially doltish on the 25-30 minutes I've test-listened on JM's 2015 and 2020 solo albums, but also nothing of Wayne or Gaga caliber. But if Fitzmaurice wants to assert that Millz is much superior to Tyga, I'm so impressed by his passion that I'm inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.

[A] I find this so touching I couldn't resist reprinting the two queries in the order they were received. I mean, it's a very long time after the release of the ex- (and future) Monkee's ninth album of the decade, six of which I reviewed even though by 1979 "new wave" was all the rage (two including a comp got B plusses), and this fan, apparently of both Nesmith and Der Dean, is still not just brooding about my B minus but convinced that my lukewarm record review in a Greenwich Village weekly destroyed the sales of what he regards as Nesmith's masterwork. As it happens, I wrote about the Monkees respectfully in my very first Esqure column in 1967, and by the end of that year had singled out Nesmith as the true musician of the foursome, which soon became conventional critical wisdom. And just for the record, The Monkees' Greatest Hits has its own jewel-cased position right next to my 40 or something Thelonious Monk CDs. Also just for the record, I thought the Monkees' "revival" of the aughts was one-upping "poptimist" contrarianism pure and silly.

[A] Always glad to be handed a chance to remind readers and I hope book buyers of my 2018 Duke collection Book Reports, which includes essays on books about Jerry Lee Lewis (I'd now add to Nick Tosches's Hellfire, Rick Bragg's Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story), Lead Belly, Sam Cooke, Bob Dylan, Dave Van Ronk, Ed Sanders, Richard Hell, Carrie Brownstein, Patti Smith, Rod Stewart, James Brown, Aretha Franklin, and Bruce Springsteen. In this newsletter itself I've positively reviewed Jim DeRogatis's dogged R. Kelly book Soulless and Charles Shaar Murray's magnificent John Lee Hooker bio Boogie Man. The Louis Armstrong, Thelonious Monk, Billie Holiday, Etta James, Franco, and Bob Marley pieces in Is It Still Good to Ya? are also keyed to biographies. And in my 1998 collection Grown Up All Wrong the Elvis chapter is called "Elvis in Literature" because it's based mostly on a sliver of his endless bibliography. Both volumes of Gary Giddins's Bing Crosby are superb--with the second one especially sharp on U.S. culture during World War II. John F. Szwed's Miles Davis and Sun Ra are damned good. And I should add that although I'd recommend obtaining my collections from Duke or a local bookseller, naturally, most of those essays are findable on my site, which has a Book Reviews tab to help you track down a few more.

[A] This is something I happen to keep track of, so here's the top 10 as currently conceived only with extra books for a couple of authors: George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo. Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay I (also Telegraph Avenue). Norman Rush, Mortals (reviewed in Book Reports). Kim Stanley Robinson, Aurora (also New York City 2140). Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude (also Dissident Gardens). Carola Dibbell, The Only Ones (she used to be lower but that was a polite lie). Colson Whitehead The Underground Railroad (also The Nickel Boys and Sag Harbor). Elif Batuman, The Idiot. Akhil Sharma, An Obedient Father.

[A] Nope. As I'm always whining, lists like these, if properly prepared, are work. But it occurred to me that having just done my Rolling Stone top 50 a year ago, I at least had a good start--until a count suggested that more than half were from the '60s and '70s and only five, F-I-V-E (5), from the '90s--six if I count James Brown's Star Time, almost all of which was decades old by the time the four-CD comp was released, but of course I can't, just as I can't count the fabulous and now scarce Go-Betweens best of 1978-1990. So we'll begin with those five, alphabetized: DJ Shadow's Endtroducing DJ Shadow, Eminem's The Slim Shady Album, Guitar Paradise of East Africa, The Latin Playboys, Tom Ze's Brazil Classics 4. Then I will quickly add Arto Lindsay's Mundo Civilizado on the grounds that Carola requested it when feeling poorly at dinner one night recently and we were so entranced we instantly felt compelled to play it again right away and then yet again for our 19-year-old out-of-town grandniece the next day (she said she liked it and also left with a bunch of surplus CDs I was happy to declutter myself of). But of the other candidates I've tested out only Nirvana's Nevermind roared into certain top 10 status (and if you're keeping score, as I know a few of you are, that would seem to make both of those A plusses, end of story). Alphabetically once again, the remaining candidates are: L.L. Cool J's Mama Said Knock You Out, Stern's Africa's Senegalese The Music in My Head comp, Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville (which did seem a little thin musically first time out), Amy Rigby's Diary of a Mod Housewife, Lucinda Williams's Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.

[A] If my dream life is any indication, I'd be the leader of a postpunk rock quartet. On a number of occasions, I've had dreams in which I played such a role, although as I believe I've pointed out somewhere, I've also had dreams--long before my current semi-lameness, let me add--in which I could walk in 12-foot strides, and once it was the same dream. And then there's what I dreamed last night, after I'd read this query: that I'd somehow been hired to visit a college and play my songs, accompanying myself on an acoustic guitar. This was a terrible dream without being a nightmare: having arrived at my destination, I failed to call my contact and instead began gabbing with a woman I knew while avoiding all thoughts of a) not knowing how to play guitar and b) never having written a song. Hours passed, my appearance time neared, and the whole deal was so annoying I woke up to be out of it at 6:30, which is early for me. But at 7:45 I got back into bed and soon found myself in a slightly revised version of the same dream. None of this was fun. I blame you.

[A] Taste, obviously. But within those tremendously broad characterizations inhere countless gradations, none of which will determine in themselves my or anyone's aesthetic responses to an individual piece of music or portion of same. This means that even at the crudest levels they should generate questions like, "If I'm such a big fan of happy music how come I hate the Kars 4 Kids ad even more than you do?" or (to choose an example from this past March 17) "Shane MacGowan takes 'The Band Played Waltzing Matilda' so slow, why am I sitting there after the dishes are done doing nothing but listening six minutes in?" I go into this in some detail in the Sonic Youth piece "Rather Exhilarating" in Is It Still Good to Ya?, which includes the following slightly edited passage: "One concept the non-old have trouble getting their minds around is the difference between taste and judgment. It's fine not to like almost anything, except maybe Al Green. That's taste, yours to do with as you please, critical deployment included. By comparison, judgment requires serious psychological calisthenics. But the fact that objectivity only comes naturally in math doesn't mean it can't be approximated in art. One technique is to replace response reports--'boring' and all its self-involved pals, like 'exhilarating' or the less blatant 'dull,' with stimulus reports." Which is to say, I'll now go on, physical descriptions of the music, best accomplished for the lay reader with colloquial, non-musicological language.