[A] Sorry, but I'm not going back there. Retrospectively, I figure the War on Drugs to be in a class with the 1975, an even more admired band I have no use for either. And Vile I've tried and tried with--as with Guided by Voices, that's the seminal example, he's a revered songsmith whose oeuvre has never made the slightest dent on my auriculum. Both may well be great live bands and scene stalwarts, but as a stalwart of that scene yourself you're more prejudiced than I am, because those songs have had a very different kind of chance to dent your auriculum. Enjoy if you like, more power to you--people like what they like, that's fundamental. Courtney Barnett obviously did, and must have helped in some way you're better equipped to suss out than I am:

Courtney Barnett and Kurt Vile: Lotta Sea Lice [Matador, 2017]
Fetching guitars, nice goofy vibe, songwriting dominated by spaced-out drip Vile rather than Barnett's distracted depressive ("Over Everything," "Continental Breakfast") **

As for the War on Drugs, here's my scholarly commentary in an interview I did with Dan Weiss at Spin to promote Going Into the City. I'm the first speaker:

What do we make of the War on Drugs? What the fuck is going on? Why do people adore this? I'm asking you here.

I'm thinking now that I have the time [to replay it], we'll see how that goes, maybe it'll go well, it might really be tough. But I was thinking of doing a week where I just do the War on Drugs and then, what's her name, FKA twigs. I'm not actually convinced that those records are as . . .

Bad as they seem?

Skimpy as I think they are. I mean, I haven't gone to that level yet. War on Drugs sounds like, I mean, has anybody else said it's blanded out U2? That's what it is. Has it been compared to U2?

It's been compared to Springsteen and Tom Petty a lot.

That's ridiculous! That's fucking ridiculous! I mean, Tom Petty writes real lyrics. And so does Bono, don't get me wrong, but not the way that Springsteen and Petty do. This guy, whatever his name is, can't write lyrics at all. He can't write fuckin' lyrics! You know that's a very important part of a musical gestalt. It's like if Springsteen or Petty buries his lyrics . . . boy, that's nutty.

[A] As I believe (and hope) most critics do, I almost invariably play whatever I'm writing about as I'm writing. You never know when some error will reveal itself or some new idea pop up--plus it makes it easier to use the remote to pin down or double-check a crucial detail.

[A] Politically and every other way, I find "Sweet Black Angel" far more attractive in retrospect than "Brown Sugar," which I decided should be put out to pasture after I saw Bob Dylan cover it in 2003 and (less problematically, I admit) the Stones themselves roll it out at a 2005 concert. Irony be damned, its representation of cross-racial master-to-slave lust is far too realistic--too easy to interpret one-dimensionally as an explicit and unembarrassed articulation of a specific variety of lust. N-word or no n-word, "Sweet Black Angel" can't be misprised that way even if you're not fully aware that this "angel" is in fact a historical personage: the crucial Black feminist radical and indeed Communist Angela Davis. As the song presents her, this woman isn't in anybody's bed. She's in a court of law even if you're not hip enough to know every detail--a star-level celebrity whose picture is worth hanging on your wall whose freedom is in jeopardy as a result of the peril her Black brothers still suffer. The Genius transcription is a mite sloppy, but the Genius commentary isn't: "one of the few overtly political Stones tunes."

[A] I must say that I don't think of Dylan or Cohen as storytellers however many narrative and putatively autobiographical elements enter their songs, though obviously there are exceptions--Dylan's "Ballad of Hattie Carroll" leaps to mind, Cohen's "Chelsea Hotel." I think of them as songwriters--just listening as I write to my beloved "Brownsville Girl," and even that's on the cusp at best. And while there are obviously plenty of exceptions in hip-hop--Ghostface Killah's "260" has always been a favorite of mine, though when I relistened while following along on Genius I realized I'd never fully figured the story out--it's generally rappers' rhetoric and diction and sheer musicality that pull me in. But on the other hand there are great storytellers you don't mention--try the Drive-By Truckers' "Two Daughters and a Beautiful Wife," for instance. The very best are two artists who've actually put out albums with "storyteller" in the title. One is a flat-out comp, Tom T. Hall's The Essential Tom T. Hall: The Storyteller (start with "Salute to a Switchblade," then "Homecoming"). The other's a live best-of of sorts, Todd Snider's ("KK Rider Story" we were just enjoying for the umpteenth time last week), although "You Got Away With It" on The Devil You Know is the greatest of all. And hey, ever listen to Woody's Guthrie's "1913 Massacre"? Killer, as they say. Even "Ludlow Massacre" is a distinct runner-up.

[A] Backatcha, Jeff--still recall proudly how impressed you were when I biked something like nine miles on no sleep after getting lost at Roskilde in 2012, when I was 70. Thousands of books addressing questions like yours have been written, and I'm not about to start one here. But having affirmed that of course addiction is a disease, I'll begin by pointing out that you misread the Taylor review: the addiction is to the road and the Holiday Inn. At the time I wrote it (I suspect retrospectively in 1980 for the first Consumer Guide book rather than in 1971 when the album came out), I had no inkling of Taylor's weakness for heroin. Then I'll point out that while all diseases are arguably subject to interventions of the human will and/or spirit, this is much truer of addiction than, for instance, cancer, which Norman Mailer used to preach had a psychosomatic dimension, not to mention Covid 19. It's clearly too bad for Skip Spence and particularly his four kids that he just couldn't kick, and hard not to suspect because it's easy enough to recall that portions of Spence's fanbase actively admired how wasted he was. It's the romanticization of addiction that I abhor, and that has been all too common since the bebop days. But let me add that from Charlie Parker to Kurt Cobain, I've actively admired the music of many addicts, and add that one of these is John Coltrane, who kicked heroin cold turkey circa 1957 and became a much greater musician thereafter.

[A] As someone who isn't a Jack White anything, I couldn't even get through the sessions album--don't recall the details anymore, just said enuf. Nor do I much remember the sessions episode of the documentary. I think the sharp-eared musical curation and cinematic historical digging of that project are both extraordinary. The John Hurt and Memphis Jag Band stuff knocked my socks off, and the blues CD Bernard MacMahon assembled is my favorite such comp--starts with the ahistorical (because late rather than early '30s) Robert Johnson, what a stroke. The "commercial" gestures of the session stuff, on the other hand, did nothing for me--less interpretation than exploitation, as I recall with no intention of checking. And one more thing: the documentary itself can be streamed at Amazon Prime. Very highly recommended.

[A] I don't think there's any harm in such enterprises, but given that I don't even credit Metacritic scores that much, it shouldn't surprise either of us that I don't expect to be going there often. For you I would assume it's different, since one reason you're here is almost certainly my half century of grading albums and this is an alternative. Thing is, for me grading is by now an ingrained skill--I've learned how to recognize, analyze, and describe in words my own aesthetic responses and also know how to build into such articulations a quantum of "objectivity." These raters are amateurs. Were I to learn that something had, I don't know, a 4.5 on RateYourMusic (and wasn't metal or some other genre I just don't care about) I'd probably check it out, although when I gave the site a glance I didn't even run into any 4.0s. So two pieces of advice. One, Metacritic is probably a more useful consensus meter. Two, I'd bet without checking back that RateYourMusic is 95 percent male if not higher. All this rating stuff is very boy in a time when women are nearing parity in musical quality-quantity even though men still dominate every phase of the industry. Only P.S.: there are now many more women critics than there were just five years ago, another reason to check Metacritic first.

[A] I agree that covers matter--even the digital-only albums that have proliferated in this era almost always come with a square illo that will print out for the downloader who burns (in color if that's how the downloader rolls, as most presumably do and I unfortunately do not). How well most are remembered is another matter. Forty-five years after the fact I had no idea what Wish You Were Here looked like, and when I pulled the vinyl LP out of my shelves also had no idea what I was talking about musically in that review--not an A minus I don't think for those anal-retentives who are keeping score. Maybe the heads were agog about the cover--it was still a pot-smoking era and Floyd was of that cultural persuasion. But by then I'd pretty much quit and was never much of a head to begin with, though I do recall a special fascination with the cover of the first Asylum Choir album, good luck finding that one--psychedelic toilet paper as I recall. (Sez an Amazon commentator: "When this album came out, nobody had heard of Leon Russell or Mark Benno, and thye original cover was a toilet paper roll." (Misspelled "the" in original.) In general I think the answer for me, as someone who probably owns 50 times as many albums as you do, is a simple no. That doesn't mean it isn't different for those whose collections are smaller, who have certain records they handle all the time. It also doesn't mean I can't see the covers of Ramones, Misterioso, and The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan in my mind's eye. Great covers all, and very different.

[A] Sorry to say my dissatisfaction remains in place. Unless I'm misremembering, in fact, neither Hamell nor Superchunk, gratifyingly political though they've been, has contributed anything specific to Trump unless Hamell's commander-in-chief-assassinating "Too High" counts. To Oberg's "Nothing Rhymes With Orange" I'd add "Care" even though it doesn't name names either. YG's "FDT" remains relevantly cathartic more than four years after it was released; Public Enemy's "State of the Union" is just as explicit and more detailed even though it doesn't utter his cursed name; A Tribe Called Quest finished off We Got It From Here with the otherwise inexplicit "The Donald." And after that I'm reduced to comedy albums, first Tim Heidecker's Too Dumb for Suicide (my two favorites both involve shitting: "Imperial Bathroom" and "Sentencing Day') and then Harry Shearer's better researched The Many Moods of Donald Trump ("Covid 180," "I Never Knew Him," "Very Stable Genius"). As an alternative you can go to Spotify and search for Joe Levy's "Uprising 2020" playlist. For me racism remains primary. Even more than the long-term economic devastation wreaked by the greed of the superrich and their legislative minions, the legacy of chattel slavery remains my nation's crippling original sin and hasn't been so great for Britain either. The songs Levy put together in June hit that truth from as many angles as there are artists to calibrate them. [Eeek--PS. Because this Q&A was inadvertently deleted during the editing process and had to be quickly recreated, I failed to finish with the first and still greatest of the anti-Trump songs: YG's "FDT," released March, 2016 and killer to this day.]

[A] Well, this is cool. I don't know if you're aware that in 1985 I spent two months in Honduras with my wife adopting our daughter Nina, who we met when she was precisely two weeks old. Mostly we were in San Pedro Sula, and every afternoon after the rain stopped I'd walk around with her in my arms while my wife napped. I also walked further into the city by myself, and we left Nina with a sitter to take day trips up to Copan and over to the Miskito Coast. Our hostess was a Palestinian immigrant who owned a small clothing factory, and I understood that despite the cocks crowing and the iguanas darting about this was a genteel and protected neighborhood. But I never felt unsafe anywhere in the city. The last four days we spent speeding around Tegucigalpa with our lawyer to finalize the adoption. That was different. As you know, Teguce is the capital and also where the US anti-Sandinista operation was run from. It was cooler due to its elevation and where we were staying most houses were gated behind walls and armed guards were not uncommon. As you also know, I assume, sleepy San Pedro Sula turned into a cocaine hub, which was only one reason it also turned into a city controlled block by block by individual gangs, a city that by some metrics was the murder capital of the world. That's why so many of the migrants Donald Trump and his racist henchman Stephen Miller stopped at the Mexican border came from Honduras and San Pedro Sula specifically. God knows what Biden will be able to do about it given the other devastations Trump left on his plate, but undoing the work of Stephen Miller will be a fine start.

[A] I love Elizabeth Cook, adore that song, and wish I could agree with you. But the couplet in question, which goes "A feather down place to hide/For your dream genocide," seems all too opaque to me, and when it comes to addressing racism--if that's the intention, which I doubt--opacity is a sin. Fuck subtlety--the more explicit the better. Yet though I must be forgetting something--is there nothing of use in the vast catalogues of the manifestly good-hearted Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton?--I can think of only one explicitly anti-racist song in all of mainstream country music: Brad Paisley's much-mocked "Accidental Racist," where "caught between Southern pride and Southern blame" and especially "They called it Reconstruction, fixed the buildings, dried some tears/We're still sifting through the rubble after 150 years" seem like the right direction to me even though the LL Cool J cameo remains an embarrassment. No longer mainstream is Jason Isbell, whose concise, powerful 2017 "White Man's World" addresses many varieties of systematic oppression with a clarity that near as I can tell shut him out of Music Row, perhaps permanently. Kudos too to Mickey Guyton's "Black Like Me," which is a lot more explicit than any of the other exceedingly scarce Black country artists--Charley Pride, Kane Brown, anybody remember Stoney Edwards?--have dared. I hope the reason is fear of the base rather than fear of Black Lives Matter, though both are distressing. But I wouldn't bet on it.

[A] There's a difference between deluxe editions and the boxes you name. I often didn't bother to check out boxes even when I got them in the mail, although I still wonder about that Grateful Dead one. But though I'm told I should check out the Jack Johnson and may some day, these expanded editions don't really interest me. I'd much rather go dig out a Kirby Heard or Martin Creed album few know exists, or pay close attention to a Malian artist's first U.S. release, than differentiate marginally between/among already established classics and registering the existence of previously unreleased alternates and arcana. True deluxe editions, on the other hand, are worth a listen-hear. Since I buy most of my reviewables after streaming them on Spotify, it saves me bucks to check those out the bonus cuts, which are seldom worth the time or money but in the two cases you cite transform good albums into great ones. Often, however--a relatively recent example I examined carefully is Madonna's Madame X--they have a diluting effect.

[A] When I'm working, which is most of the time, I am indeed working, sifting through new stuff. But I play a lot of older music at mealtimes when Carola and sometimes Nina will be hearing it too. Looking over the permanent-collection CDs I need to reshelve at the moment, I see Albert Ammons, the Asylum Street Spankers, One Nation Under a Groove, Astor Piazzolla, the Ramones' debut, Pretzel Logic, Billy Swan, Djelimady Tounkara, and Howlin' Wolf. But that's all post-World War II. From the '20s and '30s these days it's less likely to be early Armstrong or Ellington, which I played a lot pre-2000, or Billie Holiday, an inexhaustible perennial, than country blues, particularly Skip James, who Carola's really gotten into, the eternal Mississippi John Hurt (sometimes '60s stuff with him), or the superbly conceived and sequenced compilation Bernard MacMahon assembled for his American Epic project.

[A] I certainly don't see myself as an aesthetician. That's a branch of philosophy, and while I took a few relevant philosophy courses in college and have dabbled around in aesthetics a little as any serious critic should, I'd rather immerse in art than in theory about it. But I have dabbled enough to know that in one respect your prof was setting you up for a fall. The key is that 2500-year crack. That puts us back with the Greeks, right? The Greeks had their Dionysian fling, as I discuss in the now finally unembargoed Dionysus essay that began its life with my long-ago Guggenheim world-history-of-pop project and took form as an EMP lecture prominently displayed up front in Is It Still Good to Ya?--but not as far up front as another repurposed essay from that collection, another EMP presentation that serves as a prologue: "Good to Ya, Not for Ya: Rock Criticism vs. the Guilty Pleasure." Without going into any detail and thus steamrollering many relevant cavils and objections, just say this: the rise of Romanticism really put a crimp in the hegemony of classical aesthetics. One way of describing that crimp is to say that ultimately it valorized as beautiful various usages most classicists would believe were, like Monk says, ugly, thus reminding us that most of the Greeks who invented democracy were in fact snobs who denied citizenship to the lower orders. Without identifying with Romanticism except in the most general way, just say I've devoted my career and indeed my life to fucking that shit up. "Exactly where it was 2500 years ago"? Bushwa. (Most recent relevant book read is a tough one: Johann Gottfried Herder's Song Loves the Masses. See also the Terry Eagleton and Marshall Berman essays that close Book Reports. The Raymond Williams too, why not? Go crazy. You asked for it.)

[A] I did not know any of these things, although as we are aware and my readers aren't, I have known you yourself, the former Judy Rosenberg, since 1962. I'm also well aware that you became an expert on swing-era dancing in your forties and from the late '80s until his death a month short of his 95th birthday in 2009 were the companion and manager of the great lindy hopper Frankie Manning, who with your help I taught at NYU a few years back after deciding that my music history course was shortchanging the swing era (stuck the Boswell Sisters in there too). Here's the Gaillard-Manning sequence you cite:

And here's some more subdued Manning-Pritchett stepping in 1992, when Manning was 78:

[A] I am not a Zoom guy to say the least. Are you, really? EMP has been major for me both socially and professionally, a kind of lifeline almost. Presentations I did there for an audience of my peers, usually requiring weeks of work no journalistic outlet would publish much less pay for, now bedeck both Book Reports and Is It Still Good to Ya?: Charlie Gillett and Henry Pleasants, Dionysus and Lil Wayne. But I cherish the social aspects even more, the mixing and mingling and walking around, the chance to say hello to people I see seldom or nowhere else like Carl Wilson, Josh Clover, Michaelangelo Matos, the Powers-Weisbard combo, and for that matter yourself--great teaching-music presentation on that bill with my sister a few years ago. I also valued the chance to migrate from one set of talks to another. I sent in a December proposal for the later Covid-cancelled EMP but bowed out long before the pandemic because it was clear my aching thigh would make travel onerous and walking around impossible. (Thigh's been much better since I had lumbar fusion in June but still not necessarily EMP-ready.) And continuing disability has cut into my time. In addition, however, streamed lectures just aren't live lectures the way streamed music just isn't live music, a major reason I'm chagrined but not ashamed to admit I've watched very few livestreamed concerts. Also, I'm such a fuddy-duddy that I haven't mastered Zoom as a technology--one funeral, one baby shower, that's been about it. (Carola keeps up with her women's group on Zoom. Many glitches.) We'll see what happens on multiple fronts, and I can't imagine disengaging from EMP altogether--it's meant too much to me. But how I age remains to be seen.

[A] I kept jazz albums off the Rolling Stone list because I'm a rock critic and fRolling Stone is a rock magazine. Carola made her own call and included Kind of Blue, but I just didn't want to get involved in an apples-and-oranges problem--first Misterioso, then Portrait of the Artist (which I thought had gone out of print but am delighted to report is still buyable, go for it if you have the cash, folks), then Kind of Blue or should it be Jack Johnson, then Ellington's Flaming Youth or maybe I should dig out Sonny Rollins's A plus G-Man or who knows what-all. As for Star Time, well, fuck it: James Brown is one of the two or three greatest artists in rock or if you insist rock-era history and Star Time is the only album like object available to prove it, including Sex Machine and The Big Payback. Strictly following rules in such vast and theoretically murky enterprise as the Stone 500 is the path of absurdity.

[A] Oy, Oar. Yet for some perverse reason I clicked over to Spotify and found a version that seemed to include 20 or so tracks, I didn't count. This is a cult record so beloved that if they left the tape running while Spence used the shitter with the door open the plops and gurgles would probably show up on a deluxe collectors edition. On Spotify I got to track four or five while I pruned my email and moved on. What can I say--as I hope you've figured out by now, slow records by depressive and/or drug-addled space cases just ain't my thing. Still love the first Moby Grape album, where Spence's "Omaha" is a peak. Very little else--hopeless druggie for most of his life. I read that he left four kids behind when he died of lung cancer at 53. Hope they're at least OK.

[A] I love her "Black Parade" enough to have bought a copy, but in general I seem to be turning into some kind of weird Beyonce truther or something--recognize her preeminence and mostly appreciate her public presence but just don't dig her music the way many will feel I should. Tuning in on Spotify at your behest, I found the Lion King music so cutesy, disjointed, and plot-specific that I only got through six or seven tracks (and yes, I went back and checked just to make sure I hadn't just been in a bad mood the first time). Far as I'm concerned, comparing it to the carefully sequenced Black Panther soundtrack is almost incomprehensibly silly. And let me also say that I am very much disinclined to check out her or anyone else's music-you-can-only understand-when-watching-the-visuals. I don't review videos, period, and am old and established enough to remain quite the crank about it.

[A] What's not to like? I'm definitely a Cardi B fan, and while I've always found Megan a little macho, her recent assault experience has focused her mind considerably. So if these two established female rappers, a welcome and uncommon thing in itself, want to turn generations of big-dick mythos inside out, I say both yum and more power to them. As for media reaction, I don't know what's happening in the U.K. but nobody I take seriously over here has complained enough to get my attention (although it's true that I ignore ignoramuses so steadfastly that "media reaction" often escapes my attention altogether). Your question did, however, remind me to watch the video, which I did with pleasure four-five times: witty, visually deft, and definitely sexy despite and sometimes because of its inevitable exaggerations--loved the big cats. I must add, however, that logocentric as I am I continue to find City Girls' "Pussy Talk" sexier. Should no doubt check out the video on that one too. (P.S. Just did--waste of time.)