[A] Not high. Martin was a gifted comedian whose admitted mastery of what we'll call the relaxed tone has its contrarian admirers, but I've never warmed to his simulation of warmth, and I've tried; Darin aimed so hard to please he had nothing to say even when he covered Dylan and went political for a while, and I never believed a word he sang after "Splish Splash." Comparisons to Sinatra are silly. Technically, Sinatra was the greatest pop singer of the 20th century--feeling little attraction to the persona he projects, I'm awed anyway by his purely musical subtlety and power. There are other male pop singers I actively enjoy in a more than campy way, Bing Crosby especially, but note most of them are black, starting with Nat King Cole. A compilation I admire in this vein is Rhino's Closer Than a Kiss.

[A] I see you haven't read my memoir, Going Into the City, where on pages 168-171 a reader can find an essay on Aftermath, which for a while in the '60s was my favorite album of all time and my partner Ellen Willis's too. (The American version, of course; the essay accounts for both.) By what I think of the lyrics I assume you mean "Look at That Stupid Girl," a title I stole for a 1970 Voice piece reprinted in Any Old Way You Choose It and credited by several female readers who wrote me about it back then as the first feminist essay on rock and roll, and "Under My Thumb," off which Willis spun what some call the Willis test for sexism in rock and roll--"Under My Thumb" passed, Cat Stevens's "Wild World" did not, on the grounds that in "Under My Thumb" you can switch genders and the song still makes sense and in "Wild World" you can't. As I explain, I'm not so sure that argument holds water--Ellen loved the Stones, and always had a knack for transmuting her personal preferences into universals. My favorite track on the album is "Going Home." These days I prefer Exile, The Rolling Stones Now!, Beggars Banquet, and others.

[A] Many years ago Kelefa Sanneh, who has since moved on to grander things, made me an early Bright Eyes mixtape. I played it a few times and still have it in my A shelves just in case--it was certainly OK. But it never grabbed and held. Unless an artist deeply moves me--Professor Longhair comes to mind--going back to catch up with the early stuff is seldom time-efficient. So much good pop has a historical specificity to it, especially if you want it to last longer than a sure-shot single you somehow missed.

[A] As I've said before here, I believe that streaming dematerializes music as well as depriving it of economic reality. It makes music harder to perceive as work and also as something with an existence outside of the listener's head. I suspect that's one reason why I find it difficult to write more than a few dozen words about a streamed album. For me streaming is preliminary processing; psychologically, to listen deep I need an object I can see and handle. Plus packaging does often add dimension to the experience and comparison listening, in which I use a changer to sneak up on my ears with a related album, is much easier to manage with physical product.

[A] I can't think of any except for The New Yorker's David Remnick, who on 11/9/16, while the rest of us reeled in the 24 hours after Trumpnacht, wrote a cogently impassioned attack on the president-elect his mag has lived by ever since and has also written definitive profiles of Springsteen and Leonard Cohen. I've read Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo daily since Bush II won in 2004--policywise he's a little to my right, but his command of the possible is unmatched and he's been not only superb but politically effective on such matters as social security privatization and voter suppression. I also love Esquire's Charles Pierce, a waggish old rad of the younger part of my generation who recently observed with some glee that "Senator Professor Warren," as he's always fondly called her, was finally beginning to act like she thought politics was fun and that this was a very good thing. But while both these guys really care about music, neither makes any visible attempt to keep up. Marshall is a Dylan nut who was so moved by the boxed set or whatever it was of his Xian phase that he wrote an unconvincing screed about it. Pierce is a real fan, deeply into New Orleans and the likes of Derek and the Dominoes. But while Remnick has spruced up The New Yorker's music coverage considerably with the likes of Carrie Battan, Amanda Petrusich and Hua Hsu, neither Marshall nor Pierce has ever shown any discernible hip-hop consciousness or sense of movement in the alt-rock world. Kind of sad.

[A] First of all, I have little interest in motivic relationships among rock and roll songs. Such matters as flow, pace, mood, and groove are far more important to the success of good song collections, which is what most good albums are. Hence, rock operas come to us from behind the eight ball at best. That said, I think I overrated Tommy slightly when it came out--was somewhat hornswoggled by Townshend's tremendous intelligence and ambition, actually. I don't think Tommy's plot is compelling or coherent enough to merit the adulation it continues to inspire. An A minus, sure--a pretty good one. Masterpiece, ridiculous. In 2012 I wrote a review of Townshend's autobiography that didn't quite make the Book Reports cut. Check it out if you're so inclined. I stand by it.

[A] Artists run out of steam, good ones included. It's natural--they start with a good angle or three only then the ideas themselves lose pizzazz for them or they run out of the song material that's a slightly different part of their vision. I've stuck with Williams longer than most--many feel she started repeating if not parodying herself early in this century. But for me her last A was West in 2007. Rerecording classic albums is usually a desperate measure, and though I gave This Sweet Old World a play or two found the differentiation from the excellent Sweet Old World all too marginal--re-recording great albums is a perilous ploy (and please please please don't do them in concert). As for Vanished Gardens, ah man. Her famed collaborator is flower jazzer and rock pickup artist Charles Lloyd, who I had marked as a lightweight 50 years ago.

[A] It was a present from the lovely aunt of my daughter Nina's dear friend Val, who was visiting for Christmas from the Philippines and bought it for me at fashion hot spot Old Navy. In truth, it's a little scratchier than I prefer my T-shirts--which should never be scratchy at all, right?

[A] I don't believe in reading things out of the canon; distorting history is counterproductive in the long and usually medium run. You've probably never read George Eliot's philo-Semitic Daniel Deronda, which among other things is way long, but in fact the portrait of the Jewish character there can be intensely embarrassing even though Eliot was doing sincere albeit her rather awkward best to undermine British anti-Semitism in that novel. I do find certain songs offensive in retrospect--"Brown Sugar" in the Stones' original always had an ironic anti-racist edge to it, but that edge disappears in a much changed historical context and I don't think it should be performed today (an opinion I formed when I heard Dylan do it in 2002 and continued to hold when the Stones themselves closed a generally excellent 2005 show with it). But "Bad Detective"? I think that's silly. Do you know the Coasters' original? Classic Leiber-Stoller pop-culture burlesque. So naturally the Dolls ran with it. To me it seems much healthier to remember and mock the longstanding and in some respects quite healthy American tradition of ethnic humor than to act like it was never there. Listen to Bing Crosby's "McNamara's Band" sometime and try to pretend that wasn't there either. There is such a thing as affectionate and even celebratory satire, and what exactly that can mean is crucial to our understanding.

[A] I've always written about politics--take a look at the Rock & Roll & section of my first collection, Any Old Way You Choose It. I was on Bush II's Iraq war a lot, too. But politics have been a constant of my work throughout. More to the point is why people keep saying critics should be "unbiased." Of course we're biased--everyone is, and should be. Aesthetic judgment is idealist bullshit unless it's spiked with emotional commitment and moral passion, yet on the other hand sometimes a strong or beautiful expression will shift or even overwhelm your values, even move you to change your mind or adjust your feelings about something in a relatively enduring way. But at another level is that this is the age of Trump, which even in Australia you should be able to see is a crisis by definition. I've said many times that my aesthetics are those of a small-D democrat, and Trumpism's fetishization of cruelty and fealty to the superrich puts that kind democratic values are under an attack so sustained and extreme it could put them out of reach not just for the few years I've got left but for much longer. As I said in that recent Hendrix at Woodstock piece, the threat of F-A-S-C-I-S-M is real and present. For all of us, politics are no longer discretionary. That doesn't mean we can't continue to take delight in musical passion, pleasure, and silliness. Those things help keep us human. But any critic who pretends politics have nothing to do with his or her work is a coward or a fool.

[A] It's Greil, actually.

[A] Nah. A) It's still work I'm not getting paid for, so why? B) The writing and the grading are organic to each other, so that the grade will occasionally change and often firm up as I write. Writing is the final phase of grading. C) For me it would be interesting to find out how giving up grading might change the way I hear.

[A] Werner, as a longtime fellow toiler in the rock-critical oilfields as well as a longtime supporter of mine, you know very well that "right" is a contingent concept. The reason you're a fan and supporter is that, like many of my more devoted readers, you happen to hear music and relate to artistic expression the way I do. It's somewhat subjective. That said, I think I'm unusually good at hearing beyond the kind of timebound stylistic prejudices that cause Greg Kot in the fourth Rolling Stone Album Guide--who, be fair now, does acknowledge that the booming, echoey production on Marshall Crenshaw's Field Day is "divisive," meaning that there's another school of opinion, by which he may well be thinking of mine--to give that album only two stars out of five. But "right"--that's too grand and absolute a concept for tastes that you and I share. As for what was tough to settle on, I don't know anymore. I just scrolled through the A's on my site and couldn't find one I remembered agonizing over, except maybe for a few I expect I overrated: Spoek Mathambo's Father Creeper, almost certainly an A minus, and the utterly disrespected white-women rap trio Northern State, whose first three releases all got full A's from me. That particular judgment has proven so déclassé that I've been afraid to replay for years. But doing so right now I can say that although their flow is probably too stiff for a full A I still think the songs are first-rate.

[A] Robert Hilburn keeps harping on this piece of misleading math on Twitter as well. And while I'd agree that, as the "Rotten Tomatoes" tag indicates, there's a long-running tradition of the blatant pan in movie criticism that surfaces only seldom in music criticism, to me it's obvious that the principal reason for that is structural: there are more albums released than films by a factor of . . . what? In the old days, make it 10 or 20, but in the Soundcloud era it's even larger. So where almost every film released to theaters is reviewed, by a staff of one at many publications, often a frustrated aesthete who regards "good entertainment" as B plus at best--cineastes tend more pretentious than rock critics (who themselves often don't respect pure fun the way they should, either) --and other time someone who cares for nothing else. In contrast, most albums aren't even covered, and when they are it's by someone with an affinity for the subgenre the album represents assigned by an editor who's already decided the album is good enough to cover, where in film the same person ranges far and wide. I would add that Rolling Stone's standard three to three-and-a-half star review reads like B minus to B plus to me, and B minus ain't B, and the same goes for P4K's usual 70-80 range, where I personally take below 70 as a C plus. And I'd add as a onetime music editor that, given the paucity of review space, I was always ready to hear a critic I respected pitch me on something he or she loved and I wasn't especially impressed with.

[A] As it happens, I did an Al Green roundup for Blender in 2007, when I found that I agreed with you: I'm Still in Love With You, the conventional choice, is even better than Call Me. Find said roundup here. You should also be aware that there's a great albeit discomfiting Al Green bio available from Jimmy McDonough, very much worth reading even though McDonough is an arrogantly and also tediously contrarian anti-intellectual who thinks yours truly is a wonk--the stuff on Green's musicians is terrific, the sad biographical saga worth coming to terms with. And btw: Green's supposed autobiography is so empty I decided not even to mention it in my roundup. As for the Rounders, sure I like their early 1 & 2 stuff. But not as much as Have Moicy!, which is probably in my all-time top 10.

[A] Just for the record, I did mention Rostam once, in the big VW essay collected in Is It Still Good to Ya? But not at length. Did his split with Koenig bode ill for the band? Of course. But que sera sera. Koenig remains VW's face, voice, and lyrical soul, and I doubt that Rostam's influence would have materially improved the new album, which I like a smidgen less than most. I have indeed followed his solo work and found it one more variation on the usual synthmaster texturetronics.

[A] Still haven't decided what I'm doing, but if I decide on a subscription model I will announce it on my site and on Twitter. As someone who's proud to have stayed off Facebook for all these years, I don't want to sell anybody on Twitter, which has many drawbacks although I've managed to render it useful by holding my fire and delimiting how many people I follow. But it is an easy way to keep up with my doings., which I always announce there.

[A] I missed Shame initially, which happens a lot when you're off the gossip networks, especially with music whose critical base is British. Songs of Praise finished toward the bottom of the 2018 Pazz & Jop top 100, after which I presumably listened to once as I generally do and moved on. But on your say-so I put it in the Spotify file on my phone, listened several times, decided it had a certain knack, bought the CD, stuck it in the changer a bunch more times, continued to feel it had a knack without ever getting to where I actively wanted to play it again, and decided to buckle down to a dedicated listen. Got through six tracks and put it away for a lost cause. It's not terrible, obviously, but without feeling obliged to expend more brain time and comparison listening, I'd say that although they know how to assemble a fast rock song--I see where the honorific "punk" comes up in their reviews of praise, but this music just isn't intense enough to merit it--their affect is devoid of any species of uplift: humor, empathy, solidarity, lyrics with a twist, all that corny stuff I retain a yen for. Formally anthemic, spiritually not is another way to put it. True enough, this has turned into a white male mindset, affliction, what have you. Part of the problem not part of the solution. Might they lift themselves out of it sometime? Hope so.

[A] Another album that never entered my recall memory if it entered my brain at all--checking back, I see it got its 7.5 from Pitchfork at just the time Carola's cancer diagnosis was materializing. So upon receiving this I took the same route as with Shame above, only when I bought it I was already pretty sure it was an A, and although I haven't written it yet or nailed any kind of cut-by-cut, by now I'm positive it's worth more than a 7.5. Thinking about Shame I was wondering why PQ were the only youngish all-male band I've gotten behind in what seems like this entire decade (and by the way, their biggest fan around here is female punk stalwart Carola Dibbell, although I was on them first). How readily they mesh with Karen O on Milano may suggest an answer.

[A] I don't think "Heartbreak Hotel" was a "novelty," though I have nothing whatsoever against novelties and in fact prefer both of the classic novelties you name to Elvis's breakthrough. On the contrary, it was a rather unorthodox pop song rendered more unorthodox by Presley's performance and legendary by its standing as the first pop hit by the most culturally and commercially momentous of the original rock and roll greats, whose third single made a believer out of me--not "Hound Dog," which was more a "novelty" than "Heartbreak Hotel," but "Don't Be Cruel," a flip side turned A side that presaged the follow-up "All Shook Up," which between them established rockabilly as a pop style even though they were presaged stylistically by several of Elvis's Sun recordings. To me both seem far more durable and classic than "Heartbreak Hotel." Which, don't get me wrong, ain't bad.