[A] I don't know enough young people to comment on how much therapy they do except to wonder how they pay for it. Maybe things are different in socialized Canada, but here in NYC it can cost plenty. That said, I know plenty of people who've done therapy, count one therapist an old friend, and have written about my own experiences with therapy in Going Into the City. One shrink played a minor but key role in my decision to set my sights on a relationship with none other than Carola Dibbell, while another was in our lives when Carola and I had a crisis in 1980 and certainly did me more good than the marriage counselor we consulted did the two of us. Then again, the NYU-linked therapist Carola consulted for free in the early '70s was such a key figure in her life that he's the focus of her strange, poignant, funny, highly recommended short story "Surviving Death." Carola gets free counseling as part of her so far successful treatment for multiple myeloma and also consults a therapist who specializes in counseling writers who gets a thank you she deserves in the acknowledgments to The Only Ones.

[A] I do not own The Definitive Collection but wasn't wildly impressed by the not-all-that-extended "Heat Wave" when I found it on Spotify, which is too bad because Carola adores "Heat Wave," which appeared around when she was beginning her sophomore year in college and--along with the Beatles, natch--reconverted her to rock and roll. (She had a jazz phase that has served her well for decades without cutting into her rock and roll fandom. When I asked whether it wasn't maybe "Dancing in the Streets" that so impressed her she stuck with "Heat Wave." "It's my favorite song," she said indignantly. "It's everybody's favorite song.") Me, I'm not such a big Reeves fan, partly because while finally purchasing a couple of LPs I adore to this day I also bought her Dance Party, which definitely didn't hold up against The Beatles' Second Album or The Rolling Stones Now. Not only that, but my fave '60s ur-Motown album is The Marvelettes' Greatest Hits, purchased in 1969 or maybe 1971, I still remember finding it in a bin in Berkeley. Motownwise, Reeves got the shaft as the Supremes took over the label, not least because she was bizwise enough to nurture big ambitions that sat poorly with Berry Gordy, who was more bizwise by a considerable margin. In my view her voice was just big enough to justify dreams of taking her pop legit. By the time I was getting records in the mail I recall getting a solo debut from here, maybe the Richard Perry production Nelson George references in his Motown book Where Did Our Love Go? For sure she had a bigger voice than Diana Ross or Gladys Horton of the Marvelettes, but that's never enough. The album was a dog.

[A] One of the more depressing things about spending your life as a critic is haters who should probably avoid criticism because disagreement sits so poorly with them. Many of these people are just stupid, but Petersen doesn't seem to be--his syntax is fine, and sometimes he thinks I'm "interesting." He just loves Wilco so much that the fact that a name critic doesn't share his full-bore enthusiasm drives him mad. You'd think to read this aggrieved fan's hate mail that I'd panned all of Wilco's albums when in fact only one of my nine repeat nine reviews is negative. The problem with the others, presumably, is that they're not positive enough--one A minus, two B plusses, three three-star Honorable Mentions, one two-star, one one-star. In addition they collaborated on an album I love, the Billy Bragg-enhanced not to say -dominated Woody Guthrie tribute Mermaid Avenue. But going back to Uncle Tupelo I've always thought Tweedy was overrated as both a singer and a songwriter and explained why in prose I can guarantee wasn't "lazy" because I know how hard it is for me to put sentences together.

[A] My basic method is the one I've used since I started listening to the radio in my own room when I was 12: have music playing all the time and see what attracts your attention. By "all the time" I mean something less absolute, of course--only when I've lived alone has it been literal, and from the beginning there was often baseball vying for my attention, and seldom did I do both at once. But all the preceding assumes I'm living alone when for the past half century I've cohabited with a woman who I'm forever milking for offhand opinions. If she likes it I almost certainly do or will. But that only happens when she's not working herself--more often we have to negotiate so she's not distracted by my sounds, and for years she got to rent her own work space in a friend's apartment upstairs (which she still misses). All that said, absolutely once I've determined that a record pleases me on a casual basis I hone in on it, generally playing it five or 10 times and making sure I catch every lyric. I don't think the kind of listening many fans do requires that kind of attention. But if the music is to your taste it will repay it.

[A] JFK became president by barely defeating Richard Nixon, who even in 1960 seemed like the amoral menace his eventual presidency proved him to be. Kennedy's never fully explicated assassination suggested that despite the Bay of Pigs disaster he was regarded as a dangerous agent of change by the forces of evil, plus he projected a youthful vigor and gathered an impressive liberal brain trust around him. Hence his legend, which while it wasn't justified by his actual achievements as of November 1963 is rightly associated with what LBJ soon accomplished as his de facto political heir, in particular the Civil Rights Act and then Medicare. True, Vietnam took root on JFK's watch as well, and while I suspect he would have done better with it than LBJ, how much better cannot be known. That said, though, RFK did become genuinely antiwar, which to me indicates that JFK would probably have taken a less hawkish path though who can know for sure? What is clear is that RFK's own antiwar feelings were genuine. Without having the expertise to vouch for its unconventional details, I recommend the "investigative poetry" of Ed Sanders's Broken Glory: The Final Years of Robert F. Kennedy (which also has plenty of alarming stuff on the MLK assassination). RFK Jr., however is clearly a menace and has been since he went on the Covid-period anti-vax crusade many other Kennedys have condemned.

[A] My main motivation was to establish a critical consensus like any other critics' poll. Not that such a consensus is definitive, but it's certainly informative as regards both the critics and the art form they cover, plus it was a standard journalistic circulation-booster that filled a gap left by the departure of a mag called Jazz & Pop, and clearly that gap needed filling. In addition I thought that, as with "Dean of American Rock Critics," Pazz & Jop was a handle that might attract some attention on its own. A hook, we call that in the music biz. Like the blatantly obvious "Consumer Guide," this one definitely worked.

[A] O'Connor was obviously a bit of a skyrocket. She peaked early and never seemed to regain her equilibrium, insofar as she ever had any. Her voice was so remarkable it carried her, pretty much, through an uneven and occasionally unhinged career powered in part by an active and admirable but not especially consistent or persuasive social conscience. I hadn't put her on in years when she died, played Do Not Want a little, and moved on. But it's worth noting that a week ago Carola and I were visited by an intellectually ambitious grandniece with an active interest in music who'd just graduated from college. An hour or two into our colloquy she asked me what I thought of Sinead, who she'd been playing and felt like hearing again. So I dug out a CD. In that context, I thought O'Connor sounded great.

[A] Not many, and if you don't count Chinese Americans, just one: Cixin Liu and Ken Liu's The Three-Body Problem, clearly a work of genius though it didn't blow my mind to the extent others report. Counting Chinese-Americans, start of course with Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, which is more novelistic than it pretends. Liked Eugene Lim's Dear Cyborgs and even more Charles Yu's Interior Chinatown. Not crazy about Ling Ma's Severance. Highly recommend the long China section of Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt, and the Chinese protagonist of his Red Moon.

[A] C'mon, Victor, try harder. As a rock fan in a secondary market, that is your lot, a demographic inconvenience you're doomed to cope with. THIS PECULIARITY I ADDRESS AT LENGTH IN THE FULL-LENGTH COLUMN ON PLACEBO I PUBLISHED ON OR AROUND MY 64TH BIRTHDAY, WHICH YOU MISSED WHY?? It's easily finable from the Placebo page in the digitized Consumer Guide. I'm listening to Meds as I write, probably for the first time since I wrote that column, though I did keep their best-of, which inconveniently enough came out during the part of 2013 when there was no CG and which sounded excellent when I played it. Meds also sounds pretty darn good in more or less the way I describe. Tuneful, rockin', smart enough. But just for the record, for an artist to admire the artists you list is no guarantee that he, she, or they will approach the excellence of those aesthetic models. It's to Brian Molko's credit that he came as close as he did.

[A] I have both those albums on vinyl and liked them fine in their moment, bypassing them for review, as you figure, because I didn't do imports back then. Reconsidering them as CDs might be fun, although I note that Amazon is currently selling what seem to add up to 18 Johnny Thunders/Heartbreakers bootlegs-I-presume, some CD and some vinyl, a plethora that diminishes the fun potential of sorting them out considerably. In my recent David Jo appreciation I came up with the adjective "squalling" to describe Johnny's sound, and the same word popped into my mind unbidden as I considered your query. A good start descriptively.

[A] I haven't listened to the radio in any systematic way in over 40 years, which for somebody whose life was changed by Alan Freed on WINS in 1954 and who kept carefully calibrated files of Peter Tripp's Top 40 on WMGM for his entire junior year in high school is a fundamental change. The radio was very important to me in the '60s and '70s, and it's not as if I never hear it now, or that I don't sometimes discover or at least get a bead on a pop hit I might otherwise miss by overhearing it there. It used to happen in stores before they all started subscribing to streaming services. Tuning in the radio in a rental car can also be enlightening. As for my own show, I had a weekly one under Village Voice auspices 2001-2002. I insisted they pay me, I think $100, which in the end they decided wasn't worth their while, as it probably wasn't. But I earned the money--preparing playlists was WORK.

[A] What should it be? Spotify is by no means "progressive." It's a business, one that's now essential to my work. Granted, for Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and a few others to boycott Spotify may well have its "political" dimension. But note that by comparison Substack is a hotbed of rightwing argumentation, which doesn't come close to meaning I ever itch to take my wares elsewhere.

[A] When I reconnected with Steve in July he told me that he'd had a heart attack a few months before. Heart incidents are fairly common after 65 and Steve seemed pretty together if not quite hale and hearty when I walked down to St. Marks Place to pick up the clips we wanted to reprint, so I didn't give this news much thought. But then came a phone call from a friend of Steve's telling me he'd died of a heart attack--more or less instantly was the impression I got. I was shocked of course and started bellowing "oh no" into the phone, and soon I was worrying among other things that the renewed attention might have triggered the coronary. Which I suppose it might have, although I'm told by those close to him that he was delighted to be remembered. It turns out Steve had completed another novel. It's set in the Kansas of his boyhood and titled Heat, Then Rain. His wife asked if I would proofread it and I did. Liked it a lot. Will be sure to alert readers when it sees print.

[A] I was the musical advisor on that Joan Micklin Silver flick, for which I received a modest honorarium, although my recollections of exactly what I contributed are pretty dim 50 years later. Not much I don't think. I was on vacation during part of the shoot, no phone in our state park cabin, and recall dialing from a roadside pay phone to convey a few suggestions. And something tells me that I tried to get them to include the Bobbettes' "Mr. Lee," although not whether I succeeded. My one-man campaign to render "Mr. Lee" a recognized classic has never gotten very far, so I assume I failed.

[A] No joke--for maybe two years in the mid-'70s I did indeed work with a State Department committee charged with determining which nonclassical musical artists merited government support for their overseas tours. Details have faded, including who else was on the committee, whether we got an honorarium (small one I think--$200?), how frequently we convened (twice a year?), how travel was arranged, etc. But for sure I found the experience interesting. I'm pretty sure I was the only rock guy. My two memories are dim but real. One is that Pete Seeger's half-brother Mike, who I liked tremendously, got upset when I said something positive or maybe just matter-of-fact about folk music's debts to the CPUSA. The other is a battle royal over the Grateful Dead, accounted grooveless slobs by most of my jazz- and folk-oriented confreres (no women as I recall). I believe I ended up winning that one. Didn't remember the Fatback story, but am proud I had something to do with it.

[A] "Annoy you on every level" is such a silly overstatement I find it difficult to address seriously. First and most obvious, Paul was a mere quarter of the Beatles, not a half--remember those George and Ringo guys, I forget their last names it's been so long, but not that both were far more vivid figures than anyone in Wings but Paul himself--doesn't pack as big an impact as you're suggesting, although his melodicism was obviously crucial to what the other three Beatles put out there. Indeed, his whimsy in the Beatles context can be positively refreshing on occasion, and to choose the most obvious example, if he ever did anything as feral as "Long Tall Sally" in Wings, for some reason nobody noticed. I regret some of the language I used in my McCartney reviews, although it was more justifiable at the time--calling him "Paulie" especially, and "a convinced fool" no longer flies though it made some sense rhetorically in the moment. In addition, I came to admire Linda with the years and had nothing but respect for their marital commitment. Moreover, McCartney has become a much solider public figure over the years, and much less a public pothead, which I always found regrettable. Reports from his shows suggest that they're very well put together, and not only that--he's apparently taken to charging substantial admission to sound check rehearsals and donating all those proceeds to charity, a great idea for an icon. But am I gonna relisten to all those albums? Nah--life is too short. So my certainty that the songs on the superbly curated 1999 covers album Run Devil Run cut all but a few of his solo compositions could well be a judgment I die with.

[A] I've tried, and I've tried some more. But not only isn't Lukas a titan like Willie, which nobody would have expected or can deny, I just don't find him a compelling artist even though he certainly seems like an OK guy. Great talent is such a rare thing that for it to appear in successive generations is just about unheard of. Even in close cases like Johnny Cash-Rosanne Cash or Ornette Coleman-Denardo Coleman (never mind Bob Dylan-Jakob Dylan or Nat King Cole-Natalie Cole, please) there's still a discernible gap. Pops Staples-Mavis Staples maybe? Judy Garland-Liza Minnelli? But let it be said that all those examples are closer than Willie-Lukas. Which is not for a moment to suggest that Lukas doesn't have every right to pursue a musical career of his own.

[A] why do people too dull-witted to understand criticism keep wasting what little talent they have whining about it? and why do australians kiss british ass by retaining the useless extra vowel in the word "endeavor" centuries after their pioneering predecessors in america shitcanned it?

[A] It's been years since I made any concerted effort to keep up with pop/showbiz gossip/news--politics keeps me too busy, for one thing. But when my advisor Joe Levy told me Childers had conceived a gay-friendly country video I was pleased but not surprised--from the debut album that featured a Protestant-Catholic romance I've assumed he was a very shrewd yet exceptionally decent guy. But I did buy (you know I buy most of my CDs, right?) Childers's 2022 Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven? without any knowledge whatsoever of 2020's Long Violent History, an intriguing title I'd never to my knowledge encountered before deciding I should address your query. Problem was, I never got sufficiently het up about Hounds, so after multiple passes decided it was almost certainly some sort of Honorable Mention that I'd best sum up in the August CG--until I determined that Childers had a new album due in September, which the way I've long done this work meant I had to hold up my take on Hounds as well. How that will work out I'll determine at a future date. Not necessarily September, either.

[A] Though I reviewed High Fidelity kindly enough and thought the movie was OK, my respect for Hornby as a critic plunged to near zero in the early '00s when during his tour as The New Yorker's pop reviewer he either was assigned or decided to review Billboard's top 10 albums and all but bragged that he'd never heard any of them. As someone who greatly admires both Prince and Dickens and perceives not much similarity between them, I'd certainly begin a review copy of the book you describe (which to be frank I'd never heard of). There's something about the aesthetic equivalences such a book posits just by existing that I like. How far I'd get I have no idea.