[A] Come up with a good line and it'll follow you around for life, which has advantages and disadvantages. In this case--"We have met the enemy and they are them"--I meant "them" to refer to Abba's European origins, which given Sweden's pop dominance in the Max Martin era was prescient except insofar as I actually enjoyed and admired Max Martin. But in fact I became surprisingly fond of Abba, who had always obviously been good at creating pop standards that are better than most pop standards, and was softened up considerably by Mamma Mia! and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, flicks whose indulgent takes on music fandom in general and Abba in particular I respected and thought pretty great. Nor do I have any problem with their comeback scheme, which strikes me as a lot more apt and earned than the grotesque shenanigans of the average or even above-average fiftysomething metal band.

[A] Your attachment to said comma is anything but twittish. It is a mark of intellectual savoir-faire. The only thing I myself don't like about the "Oxford comma" is calling it that. I greatly prefer the more descriptive and less snobby-Brit sounding "serial comma"--which I also prefer to the B.C. Dreyer variant "series comma," because I think it's better to modify a noun with an adjective than with another noun. So as I invariably wrote on the blackboard for my NYU writing students: "Use serial comma, use serial comma, and use serial comma." Why? Because it's clearer, period, to always divide the three or more elements of a series of adjectives, verbs, or especially nouns, proper names, or other substantives with the same indicator, namely a comma. One reason it's called the "Oxford comma" is that Brits use it less consistently than Americans, and those who make the wrong choice wish to indicate that the right one is snobby. Many U.S. newspapers forbid it, presumably to save the precious newsprint space that tiny quarter-pica or whatever a comma represents. Dreyer's English cites what Dreyer reports is an oft-posited example of why we need it, a sentence that goes: "Highlights of his global tour included encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector." Sans serial comma, Mandela becomes not only a dildo collector, which it's safe to assume he was not, but an 800-year-old demigod when in fact he was only an ordinary demigod, as he most certainly preferred.

[A] Were he still alive, which I'm sorry he's not, I'd say: "Top of the morning to you, sir. Have you ever heard those MC Hawking records? Bet you'd like 'em."

[A] They do indeed. Last time I talked to Josh, at the Pop Conference a few years ago, I brought Robinson up because I was newly infatuated and aware that they both resided in the same burg. Josh told me he knew Robinson, called him "Stan" the way Jonathan Lethem had when I emailed him with a similar query, and not only that--they were getting together the very next week, where Clover expected to school him some on economics. For sure there's plenty of economics in The Ministry for the Future. How much of it is marked by Clover I have no idea. And whaddaya know? At around the time this query came in The Paris Review was publishing Clover's praise of Robinson's novel. And as a bonus here's a Paris Review Q&A about Roadrunner.

[A] "Realistic"? Having spent approximately 15 minutes of my life in a major league dugout (profile of underrated Mets shortstop Rafael Santana, 1987 or '88 I think), I have no way of judging. But I can call to mind many convincing, insightful , and/or entertaining baseball movies. I guess my favorite is the hilarious but also incisive and exciting Moneyball, about assembling a winning Oakland A's team on a zero budget, based on a book by Michael Lewis, whose The Big Short inspired an even better movie about the 2008 mortgage scam crisis. And just recently Carola and I streamed and enjoyed an impertinent documentary called The Battered Bastards of Baseball, about a nutty yet winning minor-league team constructed from scraps when I forget which major league team pulled its franchise from Portland, Oregon. But there are many others: A League of Their Own about a women's baseball league; The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings, about a team of touring ex-Negro League players; Bang the Drum Slowly, starring my once-great Dartmouth downstairs neighbor Michael Moriarty and a young Robert de Niro and based on a Mark Harris novel; the only slightly watered-down Jackie Robinson biopic 42; the much older b&w Fear Strikes Out, about the great bipolar Red Sox centerfielder Jimmy Piersall; the kiddie comedy The Bad News Bears. For some reason I've never seen the renowned Field of Dreams, which I suspected and indeed still suspect of pretentious sentimentality, though I'd probably watch it were it to stream free somewhere. I've never seen the Lou Gehrig biopic The Pride of the Yankees either. Is there a Babe Ruth one I'm forgetting?

[A] I was one of the few rock critics who was a big Grateful Dead fan in the late '60s and early '70s--most crits found them too slack, too soft, too arty. I still play the early records I recommended. I think you're right that they're finally getting the respect they deserve, and I'm glad. But if you'll take a look at those CG reviews you'll find that in my opinion the Dead pretty much stopped making good records as long ago as 1972. Obviously there's a critical mass of Deadhead cultists who are content to spend their time culling the inexhaustible steamer trunks of live tapes out there, and if you'll glance at my site you'll see I've singled out a few good ones. But in my opinion those are rare, as I know in part because me and my family more than once patronized a Puerto Rico getaway called the Grateful Bed and Breakfast where Dead tapes played nonstop in the common room without ever engaging my full attention for more than the occasional minute or fondly remembered song and even took a few home on the proprietor's say-so, none of which stuck with me. Moreover, if I miss a few I still have plenty of Dead to listen to, especially since Carola will occasionally dance around to one. So I can definitely live without Dead and Company myself. I don't begrudge them their audience, far from it. But especially after that inconsequential Bob Weir album of a few years ago, I feel not the slightest need to keep up. For further reading, take a look at these two pieces, the first collected in Any Old Way You Choose It and the second in Book Reports.

[A] This is ancient history by now, history of less interest to my friend Greil than to me, just as Thomson is of less interest to me than to my friend John Rockwell, who wrote the introduction to the 1984 paperback edition of the Thomson anthology I've never found it in myself to explore. Thomson was a classical composer who was also a renowned music critic; he's thought of as openminded if not visionary for saying nice things about Gershwin and admiring jazz from a distance I'm too ignorant to estimate. The "mass culture" to which he refers was a big terminological deal in the '50s and '60s. In 1969 I spent two-three months in Room 315 of the Fifth Avenue library researching the intellectual fad called "mass culture theory" because I conceived myself as a champion of what I preferred to call "popular culture," which Ellen Willis and I had a contract to write a book about only then we broke up. Greil was an American studies visionary who didn't know much of that literature when we met; my recollection is that he was barely aware of early popular culture champion Gilbert Seldes although he knew plenty about Seldes's equally important contemporary Constance Rourke. "Mass culture theory" was so snobbish it was atrophying big-time by the mid '70s. The Thomson quote scoffs at an especially nutty iteration in which "high art" was sullied by the very fact of distribution via "mass media" to hoi polloi incapable of appreciating its ineffable spiritual superiority; in addition, it evades the musical complications by going on to specifically disdain only "base literature, obscene photographs, and trivial shows." Wonder what he thought of I Love Lucy or The Honeymooners. How about Raymond Chandler or, lordy, Grace Metalious. Don't know, but fear the worst.

[A] I wouldn't apply the same philosophy to music because I think it's utter horseshit applied to books. I've never read Harry Potter and probably never will, but only because it's long and I'd rather read/reread Dickens and not because anything I know about it indicates that it dumbed society down whatever her deplorable prejudices against transgender people. I wouldn't think of describing the many smart people I know who have read it, some intellectuals but others not, as "dumbed down" or whatever fancier way Bloom would have put it. On the contrary, my guess would be that it made people smarter whether or not they went on to Flaubert or Yeats or some postmodernist I can't even name--did so just by persuading them to live vicariously in a world they couldn't see, smell, or touch. One way I explain the breakdown of American democracy is that my opposite numbers on the right are resistant to abstraction. But I regard that as at least as much a spiritual as an intellectual dilemma. Evangelical Christianity, the intellectual locus of many of today's fascists-in-training (with a big fat boost from protofascist social media, of course) teaches or tries to teach its adherents to extend their charity--by which I mean feelings of love and compassion rather than the donations that may ensue as well--not just to human beings within their literal physical ambit but human beings they're aware of at an insuperable physical distance. When I read about gays bashed or women forced to bear children they're not ready to raise or people of color subject to all manner of concrete physical, social, and economic abuse, I feel for them as imagined individuals, and one institution that taught me to do that was the born-again church I attended with ever-increasing skepticism into my teens. Over the years I've heard many stories of individual Christian conservatives helping alien others and as an impecunious young man hitchhiking America in the early '60s experienced such acts myself. The disappearance or cooptation of that impulse on a societal level dismays and frightens me.

[A] I think you're wrong in several respects. First, I don't think the "Let's go Brandon" thing--which I should make clear to those who don't know, as I'm sure some readers don't and why should they, has become alt-right code for "Fuck Joe Biden"--is pathetic. It's a self-evidently effective ploy, one among many, to cheapen political discourse, a fundamental alt-right ploy from Steve Bannon down to Trumpers as stupid as you believe all of them to be, which I do not. Mean, cruel, sometimes purely evil--I'll take those pejoratives, but only if it's understood that not all apply in many and maybe even most instances. Some are stupid for sure--there's stupidity everywhere. But don't kid yourself, because many are far from it. They mean to subvert electoral democracy, sometimes out of ignorant resentment of often better-educated people like you and me for whom tolerance and compassion are bedrock values, but at least as often out of a well-calculated self-interest that too often includes white supremacist hegemony--which, and this is crucial, does not mean they themselves are devoid of tolerance and compassion in their own day-to-day behavior, as is clear to any honest person who, as I just noted I did, grew up among the born-again Christians who make up a major component of this demographic. They have an all too real chance of getting what they want. Dismissing them as stupid is counter-productive.

[A] Why should I trust you? On the evidence you're a jerkola with attitude. True, appearances can be deceiving--maybe moving to New York would tone up your brain a little. Having argued that not all Trumpers are therefore evil I will now assert without the slightest hesitation that Donald Trump is. I hope I live to see him die, the sooner the better, and on that day I'll go out on the streets and whoop and holler. But for the record I don't like Peter Stuyvesant either. He was worse than many although by no means all of the so-called founding fathers. But at least his heirs planted some gorgeous pre-revolutionary trees my wife and I live close enough to his old homestead to enjoy on a regular basis. Stuyvesant Park surrounds Second Avenue twixt 15th and 17th Streets. Check them out if you're in the nabe. Our fave is the big elm-I-think in the southwest corner of the eastern park.

[A] Oxford's "If you take hyphens seriously you will surely go mad" is one of my favorite stylistic and grammatical maxims, although I've always thought "take the hyphen" would be a sharper way to put it. Anyway, that's what happened here--I obviously should have searched my site without the hyphen, although "monger" comes up without "meaning" much more often than with it--those two "ng"s are infelicitous and the main reason I declared "meaning-monger" "not exactly a witty term." For the record, "monger" itself is thrown around very loosely in English. The three most common usages are "fishmonger," where it means "seller," "warmonger," where it means "advocator" or really "stirrer-upper," and "whoremonger," where it means "user" or perhaps even "exploiter." In "meaning-monger," it means some cross of either the first two or all three. As regards Tool, the explanatory and somewhat condescending "for the fantasy-fiction set" narrows it down to what I'm really getting at: a posited crossover between fantasy fiction and the more pretentious strains of metal, neither of which I have much use for. In the early Randy Newman review where it comes up, the "straightforward" meaning-mongers I compare unfavorably to him are probably--though that review was probably written way back in 1980 when I wrote a good chunk of the first Consumer Guide book and so I have to guess a little--the strophic folkies who were still kings of the literaryish-songwriter hill back then, when they were still far from my favorite musical breed though I'd grown to admire and even love a good many of them: the not all that strophic Joni Mitchell and the we-now-know amazingly durable John Prine, for instance.

[A] My last Stones concert was 2005 in Hartford--with my daughter Nina, who's very glad she got to see them that night and at all, as was I, though by then I'd caught them well over half a dozen times, in DC and Toronto as well as NYC/NJ. Mick concluded the show by sprinting back and forth across a huge stage for some 65 yards. But that was enough--I intend to sit out this tour with no regrets. Note however that a younger friend, American Epic auteur Bernard MacMahon, told me recently that he was chuffed to have tickets for their L.A. show and I told him not to miss it--of course you want to see them at least once. So if you have the money I say the same to you if it's a first and maybe not if you've been there done that. I loved and love Charlie, easily my favorite Stone, but he was already off this tour when he died, and Steve Jordan is an accomplished drummer who knows whose shoes it's his j-o-b to fill.

[A] I was reading sabermetrics pioneer Bill James as early as the '70s, I think--long ago, anyway. Thought all of his analysis was fascinating and a lot of it worth incorporating into the game. It really changed pitching, although not as much as the revised strength training stratagems that have generated so many near-100 fast balls. But if I remember correctly, even then I didn't like how down he was on stolen bases--they're too much fun (I loved how much the Yankees stole late in the past season). And when I watch the game with its radical shifts these days I sometimes get nostalgic for the old days, as well as wishing more players would settle for singles by exploiting shifts. In particular I still prefer human umpires calling balls and strikes even though what was clearly a bad call on a held-up swing prematurely ended the Dodgers-Giants championship game.

[A] I don't know exactly what you mean by search, but Googling my site I found the following sentence in the Lou Reed obit I crushed out for Spin one bleak Sunday afternoon in 2013. "What's most remarkable about the Velvet Underground & Nico to White Light/White Heat to The Velvet Underground to Loaded sequence is how drastically these unfashionable New York minimalists changed up their arrantly simplistic sound, getting warmer all the way as they shed Nico and then John Cale and then the pregnant Mo Tucker while picking up the essential albeit much-mocked wimp Doug Yule." And in my big 1978 Voice "Avant-Punk" manifesto there's this: "Detractors labeled [the Velvets'] basic approach monotonous, but the distance within what was a relatively unexplored musical territory proved vast; Emmylou Harris will satisfy your yen for Linda Ronstadt a lot better than--to choose the closest pair I can think of--the Velvets' 'White Light/White Heat' will satisfy your need for the Modern Lovers' 'Roadrunner.'" Harder to find except for owners of my 1998 Harvard collection Grown Up All Wrong is this sentence in "Lou Reed, Average Guy": "We were sophisticated enough to forgive White Light/White Heat the literally sophomoric survival 'The Gift' even if we weren't astute enough to hear that 'Sister Ray' portended more than the Stones' 'Goin' Home' as well as Iron Butterfly's 'In-a-Gadda-Da Vida.'" So as you might have figured anyway, probably an A minus. And although I like the debut more, "Venus in Furs" has aged poorly and was something we tried to rationalize away even at the time.

[A] I wouldn't touch that one for anything less than big bucks--it's a landmine requiring broad research, deep thought, many words, and loads of time. But I appreciate your implicit point, which I take to be that the two concepts, one pejorative and one not, are intimately related. And I would go so far as to say that I've been a supporter of hybridity in culture for as long as I've been a critic not to mention alive and seriously doubt I could be talked out of it.

[A] I dig her too, but this is monumentally silly. She's 19 for Chrissake.

[A] This is flabby reasoning at best. Just as record royalties have shrunk to near-naught because recording artists sign label contracts without which they cannot capitalize their recordings and the labels then license those recordings to streaming platforms and pass but a pittance to the artists, journalists' word rates have shrunk to nearly nothing because the advertising dollars that used to prop up print media are now scooped up by Google etc. This is a relatively recent development. When I got fired by the Voice in 2006, Microsoft, which still imagined there was money plus prestige to be gained in the verbal content business, offered me a generous word rate that in 2010, after corporate concluded that verbal content was actually a loser, cut by 80 percent and four years later offed me altogether. Then the fledgling Medium picked up the prestigious Consumer Guide for an excellent rate only to look at its balance sheets a year later and let me go. A few months later I was hired by Vice's Noisey music "vertical" at a measly word rate informed advisors thought I'd never get though in retrospect I could probably have upped it a bit--and in June 2019, increasingly strapped, decided to expend its pittance elsewhere. Whereupon up popped Substack, about which I was exceedingly skeptical. But Joe Levy convinced me to give it a shot, and subscribers chipped in at a much greater rate than I thought possible. As I've said many times, I'm flattered and gratified by this. But I'm also inspired to put in something approaching full-time hours--I am not a fast writer--so as to give paying fans I didn't know were there content I believe is something like what they want. I see no reason to believe any other writer could provide that particular content. Nor is there any economic model I can conceive that might transfer any meaningful proportion of my take to the shared journalistic weal. And of course, it is inventing new and different economic models, something I have no gift for at all, that might somehow change this inequity if that's what it is--which I'm far too proud of how good a critic I am to believe.

[A] Graeme Ewens's Franco biography Congo Colossus is an excellent start. And in Is It Still Good to Ya? there's a piece called "Forty Years of History, Thirty Seconds of Joy" based partly on Bob W. White's more academic Rumba Rules, which is quite terrific even though it was researched in the '90s, after soukous's various golden ages. That piece also recommends several other books about Zaire worth checking out. Most useful is Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost, which has no music in it and should but is damn good anyway--better, I should add, than documentary of the same title, which is nonetheless a properly grueling experience any soukous fan owes the music and was available on Amazon Prime when we watched it a few months ago.

[A] As it happens, I not long ago published here an old PopCon lecture that addressed this very question with special emphasis on Peter Stampfel and Willie Nelson. Right behind Stampfel and Nelson, I'd single out the 2018 Blue Lu Barker tribute Maria Muldaur did at 75--and except for the less remarkable Tuba Skinny collab that came out in 2021 also the only album she's released in her seventies.

[A] Ever read Barney Hoskyns's excellent Small Town Talk, about the Woodstock "scene"? Van's not a major player there, but he gets what I presume is his due, which left me with no doubt that he's long if not always been a major prick. When I read it back in 2018 this did not stop me from listening to Moondance or Into the Music or "Jackie Wilson Said." Nor has the ignorant, reactionary, racist-to-anti-Semitic blather he and his homeboy Clapton have been spewing during the pandemic turned me off their music (though the only Clapton I actively like is half a century old) because, yes, the music has its own reality. You could even say that the guy who's making the music is not the prick--that he inhabits or creates some other reality when he sings and plays. So my boycott is about Morrison's current Latest Record Project, which Greil Marcus did review and thought sounded pretty good until it approached the Protocols of the Elders of Zion part. But Greil's a big big Van fan, where I've merely found some value in his ceaseless recent output. So it's easy enough for me to say fuck that shit.