[A] My records indicate that I Consumer-Guided just two albums by the man who sang Pharoah Sanders's "The Creator Has a Master Plan," neither of them Facets--The Legend of Leon Thomas. Both are from 1970: The Leon Thomas Album, an A, and Spirits Known and Unknown, a B plus. But by the time I did the '70s Consumer Guide book I had hedged Thomas over into the Subjects for Further Research addendum, where I pointed out that his solo career had disappeared by 1975 and expressed reservations about his "muddle-headedness." So I couldn't tell exactly what you were talking about. But with my memory jogged I went to Spotify, so much faster than excavating my vinyl, and streamed Spirits Known and Unknown. Not clunky by me, a B plus at the very least--the yodeling rousing, the scatting spectacular. And while the rationalist I am remains well south of agnostic about the Guy, Gal, or Both with the Master Plan, he fervently believes Thomas's "Disillusion Blues" should be brought out of retirement if there's anybody out there with the chops and spiritual wisdom to shout and yodel it.

[A] Elementary, really. When I give two consecutive albums by an artist I once liked C's, you can assume that I checked out the next one only briefly if at all, and chose not to find another way to hoist said artist on his or her own petard. In fact, said next one sounded like more of the self-important same, and I'm not sure I got all the way through the one after that, although I have a dim memory of trying briefly once. Nor has what little I've read about these albums given me any reason to believe I've missed anything. Punk is so tied up with the disillusions of growing up that punks do often age poorly.

[A] It seems to me that the answer to this and many similar questions is obvious: duh. (See Green Day directly above.) The reason I'm reprinting it here is to report that a year or two ago I received a letter that began: "Joanna Newsom is the greatest artist of the 21st century. Your misogyny is showing in your refusal to acknowledge her work." Such rhetoric is only to be expected when you're a critic because most people don't know what good criticism is, but though this correspondent was obviously only in her mid teens it was still disheartening--I am so not a misogynist. The second reason is to alert you to the superb and adulatory Erik Davis feature on Joanna Newsom in the 2007 Da Capo Best Music Writing anthology (those were the days), which I edited. Immensely long. As I explain in the book's intro, I read it in one 45-minute gulp, because I do know what good criticism is, and even though Newsom really ain't for me however much I appreciate her debut, this was clearly it. Different strokes, you know how it goes.

[A] Having had no idea there was a Judee Sill revival, if there is, my first thought is how glad I am not to feel obliged to worry overmuch about such wavelets in music's vast sea. Clearly this is a time when every moderately gifted female singer-songwriter in creation awaits rediscovery, and Sill was a distinctive one. But where I was curious about how Leon Thomas might sound today, I found I could do without hearing Sill again. An overstater, a militant if fundamentally humane Christian--life is too short, especially when you're turning 79.

[A] Expecting consistency from Todd Snider is like expecting pie in the sky when you die--this is a guy who probably changes his mind while he's tying his shoes. We listen to his albums quite a bit around here given the wealth of alternatives, and the only one over the past coupla years I thought maybe wasn't a full A was East Nashville Skyline, which I expect was because I wasn't paying attention at the right times. Can't swear we've played Agnostic Hymns, however. Did definitely play both discs of The Storyteller in recent memory, and got Nina to listen to the entirety of "KK Rider Story," which as a comedy fan she loved. But since it came out our surprise fave has been 2019's apparently ramshackle Cash Cabin Sessions--have enjoyed it so much so that we entered it in our private Rolling Stone best-of-all-time sweepstakes. In that company, true, he did admittedly fall somewhat short.

[A] I enjoy it as music merely, kind of the way I enjoy jazz--which generally entails harmonic details in musical languages I don't understand either. This means that when lyrics are prominent, as they are in a lot of non-Anglophone pop, I tune out--even when the lyrics are in French, which I can speak and understand well enough to find a restaurant or the train station, but not to follow lyrics. All of which is to generalize broadly, with numerous exceptions. But for sure what I usually respond to in non-Anglophone music is groove with a side order of vocal emotion or affect. Because I recognize and treasure the African contribution to the Anglophone rock-etc. at the center of my pleasure zone, and also because I've long been aware of how decisive African culture is in American culture generally, I've always been eager to hear what African music I could, and so paid attention to the few compilations that began to surface in the early '80s, starting with the great John Storm Roberts Africa Dances collection of the mid-'70s, which for whatever reason delighted me from the first time I heard it and prepared me for the trickle and then flood that followed; see the 1991 Rock & Roll & called "Afropop Without Guilt" for more details. But over the years many other grooves and even tune families have spoken to me. In Colombia itself it's been cumbia mostly, which didn't take long. For some reason, though the dominant horn parts are certainly part of it, I've never really gotten into Puerto Rican salsa even though I love Puerto Rico, which I've visited many times. But once in the south of the island I watched entranced for half an hour as a cumbia band entertained near the town square.

[A] To my surprise, since I never ever "crave" soul jazz or Hammond B-3, you guessed right. As I discovered by utilizing the Google Search function on my site, I've actually given positive reviews to albums by both Jimmy McGriff and Charles Earland. Stax mastermind and hidden genius of Willie Nelson's Stardust that he is, Booker T. doesn't have a horse in this race--soul jazz has never been what he's about, which is fine by me because I've always found that calling too schlocky by a factor of three. Jimmy Smith in particular I've avoided for half a century. Cornball, cornball, cornball.

[A] I've definitely softened on Queen since I started to figure out that there was camp and joy in their overstated virtuosity as well as vitality and endurance in their tunes. I have both Classic Queen and Greatest Hits in my iTunes, but not the physicals, presumably because my daughter Nina squirreled them away in her CD folders back in the pre-Spotify days. Since Nina comes over most weekends I thought I'd burn a CD of the latter just to play it at lunch and maybe come up with a grade and some wise words about music I now both enjoy and respect without loving it the way you and Nina both do. As I recall--this was just this past weekend--she observed that she would have liked to hear more of their early stuff, but that was as far as we got. Are they worth some kind of A by me? Conceivably--we'll see how it goes. But even given this query, which I only opened Sunday, it's a tossup whether I'll ever get that far. I should definitely check out the movie sometime. Nina loves it.

[A] Veronica Geng, who died of brain cancer when she was just 56, was among other things a renowned parodist, so much so that to be parodied by her was an honor. That piece, a Consumer Guide to imaginary albums spun off Nixon's impeachment, was included in a 1984 collection of hers called Partners. She invited me to the book party and give me an autographed copy: "To Robert Christgau, From a little clerk, Veronica Geng." Hmm. As I recall, she told me I was harder to get right than she'd expected, but looking back at the piece, I think she approximated my stylistic tics or shall we call them methods better than I had any reason to expect: long, grammatical sentences bursting with parentheticals and festooned with slang and wisecracks. It's a sweet memory that reminds me how sorry I was when left us so soon.

[A] First of all, although Micklin Silver did apparently write for the Voice before I started Rock & Roll & in 1969, I don't recall her byline and doubt she was ever a "staffer" there. She gave me $500 (??) to be some sort of musical consultant on Between the Lines, which I thought was cool because I loved Hester Street. I have a distinct but undetailed recollection of calling her from a pay phone in the course of a vacation road trip and advising that she include the Bobbettes' "Mr. Lee" in the film. Did she? Dunno. Insofar as it purports to depict the interior life of an alt-weekly I didn't think it had an especially penetrating feel, although it was certainly plausible. But that was a long time ago, and after attending the opening I never saw it again.

[A] You should follow me on Twitter, where I got so excited about Lovers Rock I dashed out an instant lateish-night rave that got plenty of lateish-night response, the most flattering from veteran critic Ira Robbins, who immediately sat down and watched it himself past midnight and then tweeted that he was as knocked out as I was. It's not just that it's the music sector of Small Axe, every installment of which I think is terrific. As Robbins noticed too, it's how formally audacious it is--an unprecedented masterpiece, I'd say. It has no plot in the usual sense. Instead it's structured as a documentary about a London reggae house party, from food and sound prep to individual partygoers dressing up to transportation to the shifting, organic interactions of the party itself. I find most cinematic party scenes, especially club-action ones (which this isn't because of the house setting) garish, corny, overstated, stupid. Here characters and relationships emerge, crises arise and resolve themselves. There's even an ending--several, in fact, each not exactly topping but inflecting what's gone before. Like all these five films, it's so humane; like most of them, it goes places you absolutely do not foresee. I thought what McQueen made of Twelve Years a Slave was excellent. But these films, set in a U.K. McQueen knows very well indeed, have a transcendent quality so remarkable I hope McQueen gives himself time to regroup before essaying anything too ambitious--hope he takes a few deep breaths and rests on his laurels for awhile.

[A] The reason I didn't write the book you describe--to research which I faithfully pursued immensely enlarging 1988 Guggenheim and 2002 National Arts Journalism Fellowships--is that it was too ambitious by a factor of I'll never know how much. Were I to have devoted my entire life to it I might have come up with something but also never heard most of the A albums I've scouted out for so long. As it stands, however, what I did come up with was the essays and lectures you reference--plus, less obviously, the 1992 Details piece "B.E.: A Dozen Moments in the Prehistory of Rock and Roll," the Book Reports review of Bernard Gendron's Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club for Bookforum, and many other book reviews; much of my writing on "world music," African music especially; the introductory class of my NYU course, which went back to Egypt via Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo; somewhere there's the unfinished 6000 or something words on Greece that I put together for the NAJP; and I have to be forgetting stuff.

[A] I file everything by individual artists together. Organizationally, there are two classes of CDs (and vinyl too)--the hallway and, I don't know, the permanent collection. Permanent collection albums by individual artists are filed alphabetically by artist in the living room, the part of the hall that leads from the living room to my office, and my office. How many? At a guesstimate put the CDs at 10,000, the Honorable Mention stuff mostly in skinny flexible vinyl sleeves sans slug line for space, which is fast disappearing though the ever-increasing paucity of physical promos has opened up shelving that after weeks of shifting stuff around should solve my space problems for a while; in addition I've recently invested in two sets of wire CD shelves that I believe will get pending physicals off the floor where I've lined them up since I was young enough not to worry about bending for them or tripping over them, concerns I'd better take seriously as I near 80, now just 14 months away. (Wow, was it surreal to write and then read that final clause.) Then there are the multiple-artist CDs, every one catalogued and marked by genre in my computer. The good ones are crammed into shelves in my office alphabetized by title, with B stuff out of reach sans ladder on top of the industrial shelves that hold both vinyl and CDs. I can name the titles of many multiple-artist CDs off the top of my head--Indestructible Beat of Soweto, Tea in Marrakech, American Graffiti, on and on--but some titles are hard to remember, like that great hard bop comp, so I search JA (jazz, get it?) and in a minute I find it (Roots of Jazz Funk, dumb name). And then there are . . . box sets.

[A] Doubt it. To deal with the Rhapsody playlists first, I no longer subscribe to Rhapsody-now-Napster and can locate no trace of the playlists in my computer, which is too bad because I found them so labor-intensive I'm curious and also hate to throw that work away. My man at Rhapsody--which paid me quite decently for several years to use Consumer Guide reviews on its site before it hired its own editorial peons--thought it would be a nice gesture for me to toss off a playlist periodically, but I found the work taxing: you have to listen to what you recommend so you can check out how it holds up and flows, or anyway I do, and that's very time-consuming. Those 1967 reviews were also time-consuming, though more fun--I did the first one during the year-plus when I was on salary at Rolling Stone, the second because the editor was a good friend who offered me a decent stipend. But to tackle any other '60s year would be major task, especially since the CD reissues often add diluting "bonus tracks" or simply don't exist at all and the vinyl would be much harder to do without the changer I retired many years ago. To a similar query from Indiana's Sidney C-W, I'd say that individual artist rundowns might be doable as well as more fun, although let me say right now that sorting out Aretha's Columbia box would be madness and '60s James Brown literally impossible. To a similar query from David Bjordemmen of Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, I'll say that sorting out the Grateful Dead's '70s output would involve frustrating-to-bewildering immersion in their endless live Deadhead catalogue, plus the regular-release albums weren't so hot. Maybe the '60s albums would be worth a shot, though, and there's also a box I've never had the gumption to address. The live one we play around here is Europe '72 more than the early A+ Live/Dead. Which of the three discs I don't recall.

[A] I've streamed it three-four-five times by now. Haven't deleted it from my ever-lengthening Spotify one-more-time list, some of which I'll eventually if not soon shitcan without further notice. But I definitely haven't grasped it, and when I replayed No Shape for context I began to wonder whether I admired that one more than I enjoyed it. In related news, I hadn't thought about Sophie for years preceding her death by poetic misadventure. No new product, for one thing. So I pulled her two albums out. Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides in particular sounded great.

[A] Without actually going back and checking, my guess would be that Sinatra's rerecordings suffered when he ditched Nelson Riddle to work with Don Costa, a capable but relatively anonymous schlockmeister, and Billy May, whose blaring brass renders him just about unlistenable by me. But in general this kind of rerecording is not a good idea--Lucinda Williams tried it with Sweet Old World to little if any positive effect. That said, Swift's voice retains a great deal of freshness, which can't be said of Williams or even the nonetheless masterful early Reprise-era Sinatra, who proved on many occasions there that he didn't need it (he was freshest in his twenties, but was drowned regularly by his Columbia arrangements, though not by Dorsey's RCAs earlier than that). And Swift is also very shrewd. Can't imagine even so that I'd lay out money for the re-recordings unless Rob Sheffield convinced me.

[A] Melody. Also gender.

[A] Actually, I did rub shoulders occasionally with Mekas during my 1969-1971 freelance tour with the Voice, but only because he knew me from the Popular Photography story my high school pal Lipton assigned and I interviewed him for, as I should have. He was the kingpin of that world and a genuinely remarkable man in many ways, but not one who had much use for me once my pop proclivities were on the table--he had no interest in "movies" at all. So while I was happy to help Lenny run the Eventorium's Friday-night film series up on West 100th Street, and sat through many hours of experimental cinema from Stan Brakhage (always interesting, occasionally great) to Gregory Markopoulos (horrible and subsequently withdrawn from the so-called New American Cinema canon and indeed circulation by the egomaniacal Markopoulos himself) because underground movies did continue to interest me, it was the New American Cinema's meager pop wing I wrote about: in particular the Kuchars, who remained friendly with Lenny after they all relocated to the Bay Area, and Stan VanDerBeek. My first glimpse of the Velvet Underground was at a St. Marks Place club called the Electric Circus, I believe under a Plastic Exploding Inevitable rubric that featured the whip-dancing of Gerard Malanga, who didn't impress me (at all). I think this preceded the release of their first album, which took me a while anyway; it was album three that truly converted me. I witnessed their legendary 1970 Max's run multiple times. Lenny, who became a successful inventor specializing in stereoscopic imaging, remains a friend although not a close one; a photo of me he took when I was 20 has appeared on this site. I hope to see him the next time I get to Los Angeles, which I hope is relatively soon. Knowing someone for 63 years is worth celebrating, believe me.

[A] That obviously depends on many things--how prominent the sample is, whether or not the originator of the music likes the way it sounds in its new context, and what your commercial ambitions and prospects are, to name just three. At the very least you can offer to acknowledge the sample in your packaging and agree to give him a small piece of whatever profits ensue from the recording, which these days are of course negligible much more often than not but you never know and the originator probably knows even less. Plus you should argue that sampling is a practice that has real artistic merit, recontextualizing both new music and the musical history sampling explicitly acknowledges. I miss it terribly myself--a big reason trap generally fails to reach me. I wrote a piece about sampling that's never been collected, though I regret not shoehorning it into Is It Still Good to Ya?

[A] I've asked myself this question for years, gave up on the four-CD RCA comp The Victor Sessions: Master Takes 1932-43 a while ago but still spun the single-disc Ken Burns Jazz once in a while. This I've done three-four more times since your question arrived, but still concluded that for someone of my musical education his soprano sax was not distinctive enough sonically, improvisationally, or conceptually to demand my attention. Not that I'm skeptical of his reputation; far from it. And the music sounded pleasant enough. To double-check, I made sure Bechet was also within earshot of household jazzbo Carola Dibbell, who has intensified and helped articulate my response to Coltrane, Davis, Rollins, and Reinhardt, among others. So this morning before I sat down to write I asked whether she noticed the old jazz I'd been playing and she told me she had. So why hadn't she mentioned it, as she so often does? "I thought it sounded good, but not stop the presses." So that's probably it for that.