[A] A query that set me to wondering: Who the fuck is Jae Millz? A search on my site came up empty, which as a search for Tyga revealed was because I'd (mis)spelled Jae's surname as Milz. The reference that irked Fitzmaurice was a 2010 B&N piece on Lil Wayne involving LW's No Ceilings mixtape, where in seven words total their names included I adjudged onetime Kylie Jenner beau Tyga and Harlemite Millz as unworthy of such fellow guest contributors as Jay-Z, Gaga, and the Black Eyed Peas, as seems statistically probable without actually going back and checking. I've heard nothing especially doltish on the 25-30 minutes I've test-listened on JM's 2015 and 2020 solo albums, but also nothing of Wayne or Gaga caliber. But if Fitzmaurice wants to assert that Millz is much superior to Tyga, I'm so impressed by his passion that I'm inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.

[A] I find this so touching I couldn't resist reprinting the two queries in the order they were received. I mean, it's a very long time after the release of the ex- (and future) Monkee's ninth album of the decade, six of which I reviewed even though by 1979 "new wave" was all the rage (two including a comp got B plusses), and this fan, apparently of both Nesmith and Der Dean, is still not just brooding about my B minus but convinced that my lukewarm record review in a Greenwich Village weekly destroyed the sales of what he regards as Nesmith's masterwork. As it happens, I wrote about the Monkees respectfully in my very first Esqure column in 1967, and by the end of that year had singled out Nesmith as the true musician of the foursome, which soon became conventional critical wisdom. And just for the record, The Monkees' Greatest Hits has its own jewel-cased position right next to my 40 or something Thelonious Monk CDs. Also just for the record, I thought the Monkees' "revival" of the aughts was one-upping "poptimist" contrarianism pure and silly.

[A] Always glad to be handed a chance to remind readers and I hope book buyers of my 2018 Duke collection Book Reports, which includes essays on books about Jerry Lee Lewis (I'd now add to Nick Tosches's Hellfire, Rick Bragg's Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story), Lead Belly, Sam Cooke, Bob Dylan, Dave Van Ronk, Ed Sanders, Richard Hell, Carrie Brownstein, Patti Smith, Rod Stewart, James Brown, Aretha Franklin, and Bruce Springsteen. In this newsletter itself I've positively reviewed Jim DeRogatis's dogged R. Kelly book Soulless and Charles Shaar Murray's magnificent John Lee Hooker bio Boogie Man. The Louis Armstrong, Thelonious Monk, Billie Holiday, Etta James, Franco, and Bob Marley pieces in Is It Still Good to Ya? are also keyed to biographies. And in my 1998 collection Grown Up All Wrong the Elvis chapter is called "Elvis in Literature" because it's based mostly on a sliver of his endless bibliography. Both volumes of Gary Giddins's Bing Crosby are superb--with the second one especially sharp on U.S. culture during World War II. John F. Szwed's Miles Davis and Sun Ra are damned good. And I should add that although I'd recommend obtaining my collections from Duke or a local bookseller, naturally, most of those essays are findable on my site, which has a Book Reviews tab to help you track down a few more.

[A] This is something I happen to keep track of, so here's the top 10 as currently conceived only with extra books for a couple of authors: George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo. Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay I (also Telegraph Avenue). Norman Rush, Mortals (reviewed in Book Reports). Kim Stanley Robinson, Aurora (also New York City 2140). Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude (also Dissident Gardens). Carola Dibbell, The Only Ones (she used to be lower but that was a polite lie). Colson Whitehead The Underground Railroad (also The Nickel Boys and Sag Harbor). Elif Batuman, The Idiot. Akhil Sharma, An Obedient Father.

[A] Nope. As I'm always whining, lists like these, if properly prepared, are work. But it occurred to me that having just done my Rolling Stone top 50 a year ago, I at least had a good start--until a count suggested that more than half were from the '60s and '70s and only five, F-I-V-E (5), from the '90s--six if I count James Brown's Star Time, almost all of which was decades old by the time the four-CD comp was released, but of course I can't, just as I can't count the fabulous and now scarce Go-Betweens best of 1978-1990. So we'll begin with those five, alphabetized: DJ Shadow's Endtroducing DJ Shadow, Eminem's The Slim Shady Album, Guitar Paradise of East Africa, The Latin Playboys, Tom Ze's Brazil Classics 4. Then I will quickly add Arto Lindsay's Mundo Civilizado on the grounds that Carola requested it when feeling poorly at dinner one night recently and we were so entranced we instantly felt compelled to play it again right away and then yet again for our 19-year-old out-of-town grandniece the next day (she said she liked it and also left with a bunch of surplus CDs I was happy to declutter myself of). But of the other candidates I've tested out only Nirvana's Nevermind roared into certain top 10 status (and if you're keeping score, as I know a few of you are, that would seem to make both of those A plusses, end of story). Alphabetically once again, the remaining candidates are: L.L. Cool J's Mama Said Knock You Out, Stern's Africa's Senegalese The Music in My Head comp, Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville (which did seem a little thin musically first time out), Amy Rigby's Diary of a Mod Housewife, Lucinda Williams's Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.

[A] If my dream life is any indication, I'd be the leader of a postpunk rock quartet. On a number of occasions, I've had dreams in which I played such a role, although as I believe I've pointed out somewhere, I've also had dreams--long before my current semi-lameness, let me add--in which I could walk in 12-foot strides, and once it was the same dream. And then there's what I dreamed last night, after I'd read this query: that I'd somehow been hired to visit a college and play my songs, accompanying myself on an acoustic guitar. This was a terrible dream without being a nightmare: having arrived at my destination, I failed to call my contact and instead began gabbing with a woman I knew while avoiding all thoughts of a) not knowing how to play guitar and b) never having written a song. Hours passed, my appearance time neared, and the whole deal was so annoying I woke up to be out of it at 6:30, which is early for me. But at 7:45 I got back into bed and soon found myself in a slightly revised version of the same dream. None of this was fun. I blame you.

[A] Taste, obviously. But within those tremendously broad characterizations inhere countless gradations, none of which will determine in themselves my or anyone's aesthetic responses to an individual piece of music or portion of same. This means that even at the crudest levels they should generate questions like, "If I'm such a big fan of happy music how come I hate the Kars 4 Kids ad even more than you do?" or (to choose an example from this past March 17) "Shane MacGowan takes 'The Band Played Waltzing Matilda' so slow, why am I sitting there after the dishes are done doing nothing but listening six minutes in?" I go into this in some detail in the Sonic Youth piece "Rather Exhilarating" in Is It Still Good to Ya?, which includes the following slightly edited passage: "One concept the non-old have trouble getting their minds around is the difference between taste and judgment. It's fine not to like almost anything, except maybe Al Green. That's taste, yours to do with as you please, critical deployment included. By comparison, judgment requires serious psychological calisthenics. But the fact that objectivity only comes naturally in math doesn't mean it can't be approximated in art. One technique is to replace response reports--'boring' and all its self-involved pals, like 'exhilarating' or the less blatant 'dull,' with stimulus reports." Which is to say, I'll now go on, physical descriptions of the music, best accomplished for the lay reader with colloquial, non-musicological language.

[A] My records indicate that I Consumer-Guided just two albums by the man who sang Pharoah Sanders's "The Creator Has a Master Plan," neither of them Facets--The Legend of Leon Thomas. Both are from 1970: The Leon Thomas Album, an A, and Spirits Known and Unknown, a B plus. But by the time I did the '70s Consumer Guide book I had hedged Thomas over into the Subjects for Further Research addendum, where I pointed out that his solo career had disappeared by 1975 and expressed reservations about his "muddle-headedness." So I couldn't tell exactly what you were talking about. But with my memory jogged I went to Spotify, so much faster than excavating my vinyl, and streamed Spirits Known and Unknown. Not clunky by me, a B plus at the very least--the yodeling rousing, the scatting spectacular. And while the rationalist I am remains well south of agnostic about the Guy, Gal, or Both with the Master Plan, he fervently believes Thomas's "Disillusion Blues" should be brought out of retirement if there's anybody out there with the chops and spiritual wisdom to shout and yodel it.

[A] Elementary, really. When I give two consecutive albums by an artist I once liked C's, you can assume that I checked out the next one only briefly if at all, and chose not to find another way to hoist said artist on his or her own petard. In fact, said next one sounded like more of the self-important same, and I'm not sure I got all the way through the one after that, although I have a dim memory of trying briefly once. Nor has what little I've read about these albums given me any reason to believe I've missed anything. Punk is so tied up with the disillusions of growing up that punks do often age poorly.

[A] It seems to me that the answer to this and many similar questions is obvious: duh. (See Green Day directly above.) The reason I'm reprinting it here is to report that a year or two ago I received a letter that began: "Joanna Newsom is the greatest artist of the 21st century. Your misogyny is showing in your refusal to acknowledge her work." Such rhetoric is only to be expected when you're a critic because most people don't know what good criticism is, but though this correspondent was obviously only in her mid teens it was still disheartening--I am so not a misogynist. The second reason is to alert you to the superb and adulatory Erik Davis feature on Joanna Newsom in the 2007 Da Capo Best Music Writing anthology (those were the days), which I edited. Immensely long. As I explain in the book's intro, I read it in one 45-minute gulp, because I do know what good criticism is, and even though Newsom really ain't for me however much I appreciate her debut, this was clearly it. Different strokes, you know how it goes.

[A] Having had no idea there was a Judee Sill revival, if there is, my first thought is how glad I am not to feel obliged to worry overmuch about such wavelets in music's vast sea. Clearly this is a time when every moderately gifted female singer-songwriter in creation awaits rediscovery, and Sill was a distinctive one. But where I was curious about how Leon Thomas might sound today, I found I could do without hearing Sill again. An overstater, a militant if fundamentally humane Christian--life is too short, especially when you're turning 79.

[A] Expecting consistency from Todd Snider is like expecting pie in the sky when you die--this is a guy who probably changes his mind while he's tying his shoes. We listen to his albums quite a bit around here given the wealth of alternatives, and the only one over the past coupla years I thought maybe wasn't a full A was East Nashville Skyline, which I expect was because I wasn't paying attention at the right times. Can't swear we've played Agnostic Hymns, however. Did definitely play both discs of The Storyteller in recent memory, and got Nina to listen to the entirety of "KK Rider Story," which as a comedy fan she loved. But since it came out our surprise fave has been 2019's apparently ramshackle Cash Cabin Sessions--have enjoyed it so much so that we entered it in our private Rolling Stone best-of-all-time sweepstakes. In that company, true, he did admittedly fall somewhat short.

[A] I enjoy it as music merely, kind of the way I enjoy jazz--which generally entails harmonic details in musical languages I don't understand either. This means that when lyrics are prominent, as they are in a lot of non-Anglophone pop, I tune out--even when the lyrics are in French, which I can speak and understand well enough to find a restaurant or the train station, but not to follow lyrics. All of which is to generalize broadly, with numerous exceptions. But for sure what I usually respond to in non-Anglophone music is groove with a side order of vocal emotion or affect. Because I recognize and treasure the African contribution to the Anglophone rock-etc. at the center of my pleasure zone, and also because I've long been aware of how decisive African culture is in American culture generally, I've always been eager to hear what African music I could, and so paid attention to the few compilations that began to surface in the early '80s, starting with the great John Storm Roberts Africa Dances collection of the mid-'70s, which for whatever reason delighted me from the first time I heard it and prepared me for the trickle and then flood that followed; see the 1991 Rock & Roll & called "Afropop Without Guilt" for more details. But over the years many other grooves and even tune families have spoken to me. In Colombia itself it's been cumbia mostly, which didn't take long. For some reason, though the dominant horn parts are certainly part of it, I've never really gotten into Puerto Rican salsa even though I love Puerto Rico, which I've visited many times. But once in the south of the island I watched entranced for half an hour as a cumbia band entertained near the town square.

[A] To my surprise, since I never ever "crave" soul jazz or Hammond B-3, you guessed right. As I discovered by utilizing the Google Search function on my site, I've actually given positive reviews to albums by both Jimmy McGriff and Charles Earland. Stax mastermind and hidden genius of Willie Nelson's Stardust that he is, Booker T. doesn't have a horse in this race--soul jazz has never been what he's about, which is fine by me because I've always found that calling too schlocky by a factor of three. Jimmy Smith in particular I've avoided for half a century. Cornball, cornball, cornball.

[A] I've definitely softened on Queen since I started to figure out that there was camp and joy in their overstated virtuosity as well as vitality and endurance in their tunes. I have both Classic Queen and Greatest Hits in my iTunes, but not the physicals, presumably because my daughter Nina squirreled them away in her CD folders back in the pre-Spotify days. Since Nina comes over most weekends I thought I'd burn a CD of the latter just to play it at lunch and maybe come up with a grade and some wise words about music I now both enjoy and respect without loving it the way you and Nina both do. As I recall--this was just this past weekend--she observed that she would have liked to hear more of their early stuff, but that was as far as we got. Are they worth some kind of A by me? Conceivably--we'll see how it goes. But even given this query, which I only opened Sunday, it's a tossup whether I'll ever get that far. I should definitely check out the movie sometime. Nina loves it.

[A] Veronica Geng, who died of brain cancer when she was just 56, was among other things a renowned parodist, so much so that to be parodied by her was an honor. That piece, a Consumer Guide to imaginary albums spun off Nixon's impeachment, was included in a 1984 collection of hers called Partners. She invited me to the book party and give me an autographed copy: "To Robert Christgau, From a little clerk, Veronica Geng." Hmm. As I recall, she told me I was harder to get right than she'd expected, but looking back at the piece, I think she approximated my stylistic tics or shall we call them methods better than I had any reason to expect: long, grammatical sentences bursting with parentheticals and festooned with slang and wisecracks. It's a sweet memory that reminds me how sorry I was when left us so soon.

[A] First of all, although Micklin Silver did apparently write for the Voice before I started Rock & Roll & in 1969, I don't recall her byline and doubt she was ever a "staffer" there. She gave me $500 (??) to be some sort of musical consultant on Between the Lines, which I thought was cool because I loved Hester Street. I have a distinct but undetailed recollection of calling her from a pay phone in the course of a vacation road trip and advising that she include the Bobbettes' "Mr. Lee" in the film. Did she? Dunno. Insofar as it purports to depict the interior life of an alt-weekly I didn't think it had an especially penetrating feel, although it was certainly plausible. But that was a long time ago, and after attending the opening I never saw it again.

[A] You should follow me on Twitter, where I got so excited about Lovers Rock I dashed out an instant lateish-night rave that got plenty of lateish-night response, the most flattering from veteran critic Ira Robbins, who immediately sat down and watched it himself past midnight and then tweeted that he was as knocked out as I was. It's not just that it's the music sector of Small Axe, every installment of which I think is terrific. As Robbins noticed too, it's how formally audacious it is--an unprecedented masterpiece, I'd say. It has no plot in the usual sense. Instead it's structured as a documentary about a London reggae house party, from food and sound prep to individual partygoers dressing up to transportation to the shifting, organic interactions of the party itself. I find most cinematic party scenes, especially club-action ones (which this isn't because of the house setting) garish, corny, overstated, stupid. Here characters and relationships emerge, crises arise and resolve themselves. There's even an ending--several, in fact, each not exactly topping but inflecting what's gone before. Like all these five films, it's so humane; like most of them, it goes places you absolutely do not foresee. I thought what McQueen made of Twelve Years a Slave was excellent. But these films, set in a U.K. McQueen knows very well indeed, have a transcendent quality so remarkable I hope McQueen gives himself time to regroup before essaying anything too ambitious--hope he takes a few deep breaths and rests on his laurels for awhile.

[A] The reason I didn't write the book you describe--to research which I faithfully pursued immensely enlarging 1988 Guggenheim and 2002 National Arts Journalism Fellowships--is that it was too ambitious by a factor of I'll never know how much. Were I to have devoted my entire life to it I might have come up with something but also never heard most of the A albums I've scouted out for so long. As it stands, however, what I did come up with was the essays and lectures you reference--plus, less obviously, the 1992 Details piece "B.E.: A Dozen Moments in the Prehistory of Rock and Roll," the Book Reports review of Bernard Gendron's Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club for Bookforum, and many other book reviews; much of my writing on "world music," African music especially; the introductory class of my NYU course, which went back to Egypt via Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo; somewhere there's the unfinished 6000 or something words on Greece that I put together for the NAJP; and I have to be forgetting stuff.

[A] I file everything by individual artists together. Organizationally, there are two classes of CDs (and vinyl too)--the hallway and, I don't know, the permanent collection. Permanent collection albums by individual artists are filed alphabetically by artist in the living room, the part of the hall that leads from the living room to my office, and my office. How many? At a guesstimate put the CDs at 10,000, the Honorable Mention stuff mostly in skinny flexible vinyl sleeves sans slug line for space, which is fast disappearing though the ever-increasing paucity of physical promos has opened up shelving that after weeks of shifting stuff around should solve my space problems for a while; in addition I've recently invested in two sets of wire CD shelves that I believe will get pending physicals off the floor where I've lined them up since I was young enough not to worry about bending for them or tripping over them, concerns I'd better take seriously as I near 80, now just 14 months away. (Wow, was it surreal to write and then read that final clause.) Then there are the multiple-artist CDs, every one catalogued and marked by genre in my computer. The good ones are crammed into shelves in my office alphabetized by title, with B stuff out of reach sans ladder on top of the industrial shelves that hold both vinyl and CDs. I can name the titles of many multiple-artist CDs off the top of my head--Indestructible Beat of Soweto, Tea in Marrakech, American Graffiti, on and on--but some titles are hard to remember, like that great hard bop comp, so I search JA (jazz, get it?) and in a minute I find it (Roots of Jazz Funk, dumb name). And then there are . . . box sets.