[A] How about 11? Most longish, two quite brief, several I've written about including three in Going Into the City, one you've seen the movie of (which ain't bad), three by writers I've reviewed in the Voice, three by writers of color, a few particularly the all too unsung Drabble read like butter and a few don't come close.

• Alejo Carpentier, Reasons of State
• Roddy Doyle, The Commitments
• Margaret Drabble, The Millstone
• Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie
• V.S. Naipaul, A House for Mr. Biswas
• Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo
• Kim Stanley Robinson, 2312
• Henry Roth, Call It Sleep
• Norman Rush, Mating
• Ousmane Sembene, God's Bits of Wood
• Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children

[A] It's nice to have a new reader, as I assume you are because I've complained about the overrated What's Going On many times, although note that the mag didn't "choose" it as number one, it ran a poll in which it was voted number one. Moreover, I wrote a piece about the Stone list for And It Don't Stop that ran in September 2020, and filed another about Stone's much later singles list. As for the greatest singers thing the mag recently put on the newsstands, which several readers have inquired about, the truth is that I've yet to read it bottom to top but would probably lead off any such list of my own, which at the moment I have no interest in concocting, with Frank Sinatra and Billie Holiday, both high on the Stone list but not high enough.

[A] This seems wrong to me. For sure many bands and solo artists come off the blocks young and never quite equal that pitch of intensity again--many would say Dylan though I wouldn't, Ramones, Stooges, Beatles too although Lennon's Plastic Ono Band came when he was 29 and I'm a big fan of Double Fantasy 10 years later. But 27 is way young for an "average peak age" even though Joplin and Hendrix died at 27 and Kurt Cobain later joined what his mother called "that stupid club" (and Otis Redding went down in a plane crash at 26 and Buddy Holly at just 22, which renders neither any kind of burnout). A minute or two of brainstorming reminded me of Exile on Main Street and Some Girls, post-30 Stones masterpieces both. For my money Sonic Youth and Yo La Tengo were better past 30 than they were before. Neil Young did his best work in his thirties and then kept going, and note too that even Chuck Berry's "Maybellene" broke when he was just shy of 29 and a bunch of his greatest songs were written in prison when he was pushing 40. General conclusion: especially for individuals but often for whole bands, the pop music labeled "rock" generally turns into a career, and while the excitement may well wane, craft and wisdom often compensate.

[A] If by "know" you mean personally please be advised that this is a silly question. I meet very few musicians, and though usually I like them when I do, the only one I know well is Peter Stampfel, a friendship that began well after his professional peak such as it was. True, in recent years I've developed warm acquaintanceships with a few artists whose careers I helped boost early, notably Adam Weiner of Low Cut Connie and the Wussy karass. But even so that's just not how my life works. That said, Pride was a worth mourning when he died two years ago, and musically I stand by the best-of review you'll find just below, although I'd amend it to say that racially Nashville has opened up a little in the two decades since I wrote it.

Charley Pride: RCA Country Legends [Buddha, 2000]
Voicewise, as brilliant as Vernon Dalhart, Ray Price, George Jones. Contentwise, as wan as Red Foley, Ronnie Milsap, Eddie Rabbitt. Only for Pride, wan was perverse. A deeply ambitious sharecropper's son who moved up to Montana to pursue his first love, baseball, and settled for a job smelting zinc, Pride didn't stand out because he could dip from tenor to bass in well-enunciated middle-American smeared with drawl and flanged with vibrato. He stood out because he wasn't white. Although it wasn't easy becoming the only black country star ever, once he got over the hump he was the perfect token for Southern traditionalists eager to find safe common ground with the civil rights movement. Stylistically honky-tonk when Nashville was trying to be modern, he was never thematically honky-tonk--no drinking songs, God knows no catting songs. Yet his skin color was inescapable. From this Mississippi emigre the pro forma can't-go-home-again of "Wonder Could I Live There Anymore" was an indictment, "voice of Uncle Ben" and all. And how to read the cornball complacency of "I'm Just Me": "I was just born to be/Exactly what you see/Nothing more or less/I'm not the worst or the best/I just try to be/Exactly what you see"? Early on some well-wisher suggested he bill himself George Washington Carver III. But that would have been taking on airs, he'd stick with his own name thankee, and look what it was. Belated Country Music Hall of Famer Pride no longer tours regularly. He doesn't have to. He owns a bank. A−

[A] I liked both of Sophie's albums quite a lot, their playfulness especially, and was quite saddened to read of her accidental death two years ago. That said, I can't claim to have put them on since--her cultural frame of reference isn't mine, which makes her playfulness educational and even enlightening but less personally compelling than it might be. That said, I listened to both twice with pleasure upon receipt of this question, although I continued to find the clotted "Pretending" a waste of time.

[A] I read 40-50 books a year, but that requires discipline, and throw an 1100-pager into the mix and it becomes pretty much impossible. Longest of 2022 was my continued-from-2021 third read of the 800-plus-page The Brothers Karamazov, the first two when I was in my teens so that like Crime and Punishment it played an enormous role in my spiritual development that I thought it would be enlightening to revisit, which it was. I also got through David Graebner's 500-plus and rather less fast-moving Debt: The First 5,000 Years. In 2009 I read Bolano's 648-page The Savage Detectives and came away impressed and enlightened, particularly as regards Mexico. But 2666 I left to my fiction-oriented novelist wife Carola, who's imbibed a lot more Bolano than I have and recalls that after the long and harrowing rape section toward the end, which she admired and admires tremendously, she was too spiritually exhausted to continue and never went back. So the pleasure you suggest if that's the right word will probably remain beyond my ken. Although not as far beyond my ken as Jethro Tull.

[A] If those are my only choices, socialism of course. But as you seem suspiciously unaware in your anonymous way, perhaps because you think capitalism is the only right answer and want to provoke me, they're not. I refer you to "Dark Night of the Quants," a 2011 Barnes & Noble Review column conveniently collected in my 2018 Duke University Press Book Reports, where I report on 10 books about the 2008 financial crisis, one of them summed up thusly: "Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism. South Korean-born British economist loves Swedish capitalism and hates the free-market kind. Like most liberal economists, not much use on political implementation of his sane proposals. A−" Which is to respond, there is a middle ground, and Chang explains it very well.

[A] I don't find lyrics distracting except when they are, which is usually a sign of quality, although not necessarily a decisive one. For over 50 years I've run music through my head at every opportunity while almost never finding it a distraction, lyrics or no lyrics. Professionally and going back to when I was a teenager with the radio on, the whole point of nonstop music for me is to find out what insists on closer attention, on being consciously heard, which needn't be lyrics by any means but when it is matters big-time, so that I often go back to concentrate harder on a second pass at a verse or chorus. Admittedly, however, this happens more often when I'm cleaning up the kitchen than when I'm trying to eke out my next sentence.

[A] I've barely listened to Kanye since determining that My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy belonged in my best-of-decade list a few years ago, which was before he lost his musical mojo whilst shoving his cruel and clueless current politics in our collective face. Couldn't get through Donda, by which time I felt no obligation to. The early records remain great; I'm not even sure they'd hint at his madness were I to try to go back and find it there, which I won't because fuck him. His presidential run appalled me even before one of his electoral votaries ruined the lives of two hard-working black and female south Georgia election officials on top of everything else. Delusory Trumpy paranoia with anti-Semitism on top is not a forgivable personality quirk--as it's often said in his defense, it's a sign of mental illness. There are those who believe this illness deserves our attentive compassion in part because he was and in some respects may still remain a genius. Not me. Having lost interest in his "personality" at least a decade ago, I suppose it's possible he'll become sane or anyway saner again. But I never identified personally with his genius--just enjoyed the musical consequences and hoped he'd make something socially useful of it, which he never did. And Jesus is in no position to help him now because Jesus never was.

[A] I don't know what you're talking about. What "hip critics"? Do "hip" people even say "hip" anymore? For that matter, do they say "rock"? I count maybe seven what I'd call "rock" records among my provisional 2022 A albums so far: Gogol Bordello, Drive-By Truckers, Superchunk, Derek Senn, Terry Klein, Amyl and the Sniffers, Paranoid Style, arguably Emperor X, how about Craig Finn or Bonnie Raitt, maybe Wet Leg or the Beths or the Mammoth Penguins although perhaps you think the last three are too femme and/or "pop" to make the cut, although how anyone could think Paranoid Style much less Amyl and the Sniffers aren't "rock" I can't imagine. So right, Archers of Loaf was a disappointment. Then what? Did the lamentable Foo Fighters put out a record I forgot about in 2022? The even duller 1975 did, right? Do "hip" people really apply the so self-evident they verge on stupid racial points to newer bands? Do they now disallow let's say the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin altogether on those grounds, which in those cases and many others have been explicitly understood for half a century without meaningfully diminishing their aesthetic originality or bohemian-progressive stature in a history that has of all things moved on with the years? If "the kids" can't hear that originality am I supposed to waste my time explaining it for the umpteenth time, almost certainly to no avail? Like what you like and don't worry about being "hip." Hip is a snake pit.

[A] Though I can't find it in myself to blame Nelson for trying his hand at that immemorial American folksong subgenre the murder ballad, a mode I've never had much use for myself, I will note that "Time of the Preacher" is the lead track of what I long ago called Nelson's most overrated album, Red Headed Stranger. If I ever noticed that "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" was about a bad boy bashing people with an expensive toy, I'd forgotten, though I admit McCartney does fairly well with an inscrutably mock-ironic tone that renders the song a one-shot in his vast if oft lightweight catalogue. As for Type O Negative, if you're telling some version of the truth about your deep love for this band I urge you to seek psychiatric counsel at your earliest convenience.

[A] I grew my hair out only in late 1967, which means I wasn't much of a pathfinder, only then stubbornly not to say perversely refused to cut it in the punk years. As a Clash groupie pointed out to me in French after their amazing late-'77 Leeds concert: "Tu as les cheveux longues." Two-and-a-half years later, however, Carola and I underwent a marital crisis in the wake of five years of infertility trauma, and as often happens to people in such fraught moments I decided to cut my hair. Felt good. Have been patronizing the same barber ever since.

[A] As I keep saying, people like what they like, and if one of them happens to be the most winsome woman you've ever met and the appropriate memorabilia comes your way, you give it to her to let her know she's both entitled to her own opinion and on your mind. That's just Courtship 101. Wrapping that promotional Quicksikver kite up for the mail was actually kind of tricky. But the effort I made to send it to Carola was one of the smartest things I've ever done. I've since introduced her to years of music she likes way more than she ever liked Quicksilver.

[A] Oddly enough, a history of '50s rock and roll--please not '60s rock, a far vaster and less coherent subject--went on my agenda around the time I began teaching at NYU in 2005, because it quickly became clear that my students knew next to nothing about it. I even wrote a Barnes & Noble piece musing about this lacuna, and designed a '50s course that I taught at NYU in 2015. If I didn't have my Substack gig I might even be working on it, though later I came up with another book idea I might also have pursued. But I do have my Substack gig, and it's very nearly a full-time job, and I'm 80, and the love of my life thinks I work too hard. So don't hold your breath.

[A] Since I'm old enough to own both Bo's great Robert Palmer-curated/annotated Chess Box and Bo's The Definitive Collection, which I recommended to Blender readers 15 year ago ago after Chess Box went out of print and which are now both collectors' items, those are what I play. But note too that early Bo is old enough to be available in one of those cheap multi-album gray market European packages that as copyrights expire are now surfacing on a lot of Black music from the '50s, and I bet all that music is pretty good. Nonetheless, I'm happy with what I've got, so I'll leave my Bo advice there and if you prefer to mine Discogs be my guest. As for Chuck, I'm old enough to own his Chess Box too, but generally I go to either the great The Definitive Collection or else something post-Chess: Chuck, the 2021 Live from Blueberry Hill, recently 1979's Rockit too. Since you ask, The Definitive Collection includes everything I find worthwhile from Chuck Berry Is on Top. St. Louis to Liverpool is several shades better. But given how much other great music is out in the world, in my opinion life is too short, and not just if you're 80, to devote too much time to these fine distinctions. a

[A] If you say so. Having just isolated a Canadian act I like a lot that you did not mention, Mama's Broke, as well as discovered that Buck 65 had returned, I'll wait and see if anyone on that inconveniently long list makes an impression.

[A] As these silly mind games go, this strikes me as a good one, which is why I've agreed to play. In terms of schooled skill and raw talent, your > isn't a crazy notion at all, at least by me, because I happen to be both a longtime admirer of Swift, who in 2008 started getting nothing but A's save one B plus, and a Joni skeptic, with little if any use for the vast preponderance of albums that followed her extraordinary 1970-74 run of Ladies of the Canyon, Blue, For the Roses, and Court and Spark: The Hissing of Summer Lawns, Don Juan's Reckless Daughter, and the misbegotten Mingus seemed half-assed at best and much of what followed was worse than that. Many people I like and mightily respect have loved that post-Court and Spark music, especially the first three--Eric Lott and the late great Karin Berg come to mind. But for me the records kept getting worse except for the superb 2000 covers album Both Sides Now, few worse than 2007's Shine, which I panned brutally for Rolling Stone. Swift's popcraft is so consistent that she's never sunk nearly that low. And yet, and yet, as I hear it Swift has also never recorded anything remotely in the same league as that 1970-74 run, where not only are the songs and singing nonpareil (and in different, evolving ways at that) but the musical conception is nonpareil as well--the ethereal folkie of Mitchell's debut Joni Mitchell and follow-up Clouds braves the harmonic complexities of the jazz that as I hear it will then contribute to her artistic undoing in the late '70s. This is music that has few equals as music anywhere--not just in Swift's sizable catalogue but in the entire rock canon. Blue and For the Roses are albums I find myself wanting to hear again. Fine though they are, Red and Evermore aren't.

[A] The source of this calumny is my pan of the 2008 covers album Lewis did on U.K. punk anarchists the Crass, a more-rad-than-thou band I heartily disliked due to their barely concealed contempt for the working stiffs and ordinary yobs they supposedly wanted to remake the economy for without ever beginning to specify how this noble goal might be achieved. The relevant passage read as follows: "Historically, people in this economy [meaning the one that failed the working class] have taken what they can get and had some fun in their spare time. They like Sarah Palin because they know she's as smart as Jeffrey Lewis and suspect they're not all that far behind themselves." Not long thereafter, Lewis formed a working alliance with Peter Stampfel that continues to this day, and as a friend of Stampfel I got to know him, where he proved much smarter than his misbegotten Crass project as did many of his solo albums, most memorably 2015's Manhattan. A fine artist and an ace guy, I've come to think. But as to whether Palin is as smart as he is, I wouldn't rule that out. For sure she's shrewder than she looks or she wouldn't have survived this long, though she did get swamped on election night, splitting the vote with another Republican and thus it seems enabling Democrat and native Alaskan Mary Peltola to continue to represent her largely Republican state in the House.

[A] Thank you!!!

[A] I was raised in a born-again Christian family in Queens, Republicans though never true conservatives who like most Americans came to think the Vietnam War was a mistake. I started moving away from Christianity in my early teens, explicitly espousing atheism at 17. Influenced by several women I cared for, prominently including the two referred to in the Canada question below, I became a leftist in the '60s and would now label myself a "left Democrat" because I believe the word "progressive" has lost most of its mojo. I thank you for giving me an excuse to remind And It Don't Stop readers that there are crucial elections taking place November 8, perhaps as crucial as any we've known, and to urge them to vote as soon as possible as well as donate to favored candidates, as I have to over a dozen since March or so. Never since World War II has democracy been in so much peril.