[A] I respect Kanye West as an artist. If not I wouldn't have given even the Kid Cudi collab EP Kids See Ghosts the time of day, but it was pretty good, so it snuck in at the bottom of the 2018 Dean's List. But that was a close call. Jesus Is King was not a close call. As a militantly secular ex-Christian, I'm not crazy about Christian music in general, but I make plenty of exceptions, and I diligently streamed Jesus Is King three-four times before finding better things to do. Grandiose, self-involved, uninspired, plus there are the underlying politics, which far as I'm concerned verge on evil. Compare My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, the last time he was brilliant though I can hear why Ye has its cult; I don't like the philosophical underpinnings there much either, but sonically it's undeniable. And if you want to argue that he still had plenty on the ball with the Jay-Z collab and yes Ye and even Life of Pablo though I never wanted to play it once I'd reviewed it, well sure. Not now. Spiritually he's an egomaniacal shell, and the music is nothing. May he be born again for real, but I'm not holding my breath. As for Post Malone, I'm too old for that pop world and have no notion of what you mean by his personality. My only recent new pop enthusiasm is Lewis Capaldi, and that only because my now 34-year-old daughter hipped me to him, although she never could sell me on One Direction. I knew Post Malone was a big deal and streamed him half-heartedly a few times--none of my scattered pop informants, my daughter included, thought he was much. Heard nothing there and moved on.

[A] When I was still at Esquire, BMI's late great Russ Sanjek, a onetime music journalist who authored a three-volume history of popular music that I regret to say falls apart in the 20th century, called me up, found out I was heading to Cali with Ellen Willis, and asked me to write brief profiles of two artists I'd never heard of for the BMI magazine: Van Dyke Parks and Randy Newman. Don't remember much about meeting Parks, though I was quite a fan of Song Cycle for a while. But I got along with Newman, then living with his first wife in a modest corner house in Studio City. In fact, we went to the park and played one-on-one basketball, where I plugged away and won even though he had several inches on me. I didn't remember I'd won until the lunch you refer to. Thought the debut album was fine but had its limitations, but when the sparer 12 Songs came out in 1970 I was bowled over--still one of my favorite albums ever. I'd spent time with him when I was at Newsday--once watched a World Series game in his Manhattan hotel room--and was fairly close to a long-deceased pal of his, but was nonetheless astonished when he phoned me out of the blue in 2014, or did he maybe email me first? Anyway, that was in June--he told me how much he liked my criticism and credited me in particular with having opened him up to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, a masterpiece by him. Then when he was in NYC in October he invited me to a rehearsal and a concert and then set up a lunch--me, Carola, his (female) (road?) manager, and Randy at a Japanese place where he ordered the best sashimi. We had a great conversation about all kinds of things including family and got along very well, but Carola would be a better fly on the wall because with her memory she always is--he told me later that he was impressed by how close she and I were, to which I'll add that the "Venus in sweatpants" touch on his new social distancing song "Stay Away" sounds uxorious enough to me. The big thing I remember him saying was how the whole semi-classical Tin Pan Alley palette--which he knows well because it's in his blood with two uncles big-time Hollywood composers as he now is as well--was blown away by four chords circa 1954. What he does for Hollywood, of course, encompasses both traditions, plus he still makes a great solo album every once in a while. When Covid hit I found myself hoping he was OK and emailed him to say so. If me and C ever get to LA again, I hope to look him up.

[A] There is a 1994 Clapton essay in my 1998 Harvard collection Grown Up All Wrong, which is not available online and never will be because that's the contract I signed. It's an excellent book, worth buying. But right, I'm not a big Clapton fan. Here's a copied-and-pasted excerpt (and a few grafs later you should see what I say about his sex life): "A promiscuous sideman whose monklike aura has never diminished his extravagant appetites, Clapton likes to get paid, and he's amassed a discography that for an artist of his caliber is remarkably undistinguished. In his self-protective self-deprecation he often attributes this to his own laziness or his need for a catalyst, but it's also guitar hero's disease: like many other guys whose hand-ear coordination is off the curve, he's a casual tunesmith and a corny lyricist, and his band concepts are chronically hit-or-miss." As I recall--remember, please, that I only started the Consumer Guide mid 1969--my favorite Cream album was Goodbye but I ended up liking Fresh Cream more in the end than I did when it came out to too much fanfare. Problem wasn't Slowhand, it was bassist-vocalist Jack Bruce, the original model of countless metal frontmen with classical pretensions--hate his singing, hate his lyrics too. As for the Yardbirds, I've been gifted with Yardbirds albums by not one but two friends hoping to prove what I missed, one of them Lester Bangs. A more than OK band, sure, but not much as songwriters, which matters matters matters--I so prefer the Who and the Kinks and for that matter the Hollies, maybe even the Dave Clark Five.

[A] Grohl. The band was excellent before him, world-historic after he moved in on drums--not, please, guitar. Probably Nirvana would have happened anyway, but a great band needs a great drummer and that was the timeline. One of the many tragedies of Cobain's death was that it stuck us with the Foo Fighters.

[A] I'm deeply flattered by this, which I haven't edited an iota as your English is plenty accomplished--I get cruder prose all the time. Around 2010 I began to get word of China-based enthusiasm for my work, even a discussion group about the Expert Witness commenting community, and I hope every one of that group is doing well in this scary moment. Sharing a reading with my wife in a Queens bookstore in 2015, in fact, I was amazed to learn that among the attendees was a fan from China, a teenager or young twentysomething who introduced himself afterward. As for your questions, it's worth pointing out occasionally that the Consumer Guide only began mid-1969. This means that all but a few of the '60s albums reviewed on my site were done in connection with special '60s lookback spreads in the Voice and Rolling Stone. As for the Beatles, my favorites among the late albums are Sgt. Pepper and Rubber Soul with Abbey Road third. Revolver I find somewhat cluttered, the White Album somewhat scattered, though both are high A minuses at least. As for the evolution of music, I think you did well by the 2010s, though I'd add the persistence of punk and the evolution of Afropop. All anyone dare say about the future is that it will be bigger and more various than anyone can comprehend. The prog tendencies I've been complaining about since early in the century will certainly persist. I'd add that at the moment the welcome and indeed essential efflorescence of female artists in general seems to have brought with it a folkie madonna renaissance I can generally do without.

[A] As with the Boswell Sisters a while back, an artist I thought I'd reviewed but hadn't. That's because I did review Rufus Wainwright's take on the legendary Judy at Carnegie Hall, which original I bought and quickly decided buried the tribute, but never wrote about in itself. A strong A minus at least. But when I go back to check out one of the two or three single-label studio best-ofs I've been sent over the years, most recently because I liked the Renee Zellweger vehicle Judy quite a bit, I didn't hear anything I felt I needed to delve into. Might yet, but might well not.

[A] First of all, I don't expect any rocker to be radical the way Willis was, not least because I'm not myself. And I'm glad you mentioned the violent tendencies, because before Yoko and possibly after they cut into his pro-woman proclivities big time (as they did those of other male rockers). But for sure his attraction to/adoration of Yoko said something major and positive about his feminism even though on an ideological level she wasn't any kind of conventional feminist herself; in my opinion, "Woman Is the Nigger of the World" has survived its dubious claim on the N-word. And as someone who identifies feminist himself but is also deeply into marriage, I thought their marriage of at least metaphorical interest even though I wouldn't recommend it as a model--it was pretty eccentric. After Lennon's death I wrote about this twice: for the Voice in 1981 and for a Rolling Stone John and Yoko book in 1982. If you've read that far, however, I suggest you also take a look at a 1983 review Carola and I did of May Pang's Loving John.

[A] First of all, those are all individual artists--no Beatles, no Stones, etc. Second, the ringer on my list is Bowie, who like Wilson seems to me to have worn out after a single decade, the '70s as opposed to the '60s. The difference is that I found my good friend Rob Sheffield's On Bowie more convincing than my even better friend Tom Smucker's Why the Beach Boys Matter (which you should definitely check out). That's because Sheffield praised late work I knew I had no predilection for formally--that I expected he could hear better than me--while Smucker praised late work whose less evolved formal materials are in my wheelhouse yet despite Tom's tips never broke through for me because they seemed all too merely competent. (Tellingly, the great exception is the magnificent remade Smile, which embellishes and finalizes inspirations almost four decades old.) Lyrics are certainly Wilson's weakness (though he didn't write all of them, by any means)--underrated though the imaginary teendom of "surf" and wigged-out whimsy of Wild Honey and Love You are, he's not remotely in a league with Dylan or Prince or even Smokey Robinson, Lennon-McCartney God knows or indeed Jagger-Richard. All that said, Wild Honey and Smile never disappoint when I put them on, as I do. (Carola loves Wild Honey; "Darlin'" is definitely one of Our Songs.)

[A] I find keeping up with new stuff in my natural but increasingly distant musical habitat quite challenging enough, thank you. The Substack incarnation of Consumer Guide gives me the opportunity to explore old jazz classics I've never paid enough mind, with Carola cheering me on. If I run out of those I might spelunk around, although it might be just as rewarding to dive into some of the '60s rock albums that like I was just saying I've barely written about. Every once in a while along comes a Harriet Tubman or Sons of Kemet album that hits me where I live. But the likes of Kamasi Washington and Makaya McCraven (not to mention that horrible Miles Okazaki Monk thing) sound not much better to me than Roy Ayers did when Gang Starr started pumping him in the early '90s. I do follow Tom Hull's reviews and every once in a while check out something from there. But I'm very selective and very judgmental so seldom come up with anything.

[A] Yup. No contest.

[A] For me, the moral is inextricable from the aesthetic. Maybe that reflects the fact that my aesthetic has more pleasure than beauty in it, although both these grand experiential abstractions should be in quotes because defining either is impossible. But this far we can go--the moral impinges on pleasure more than it does on beauty, because pleasure is more subjective than beauty. It's experienced from within rather than observed from without, although we do take ("subjective") pleasure in ("objective") beauty. Thus I've never been able to enjoy or even appreciate D.W. Griffiths's mise-en-scene in the morally odious Birth of a Nation, or found any use for Toby Keith's lynching bagatelle "Beer for My Horses" no matter how much Willie Nelson loves it.

[A] First of all, you don't have to hate Paul to think it's silly to view him as "pretty much the most important musician alive" in a time that also included Bob Dylan, James Brown, Miles Davis, Aretha Franklin, David Bowie, Michael Jackson, Prince, etc. But in any case you're misapprehending how it was in the Beatles years. Maybe some people preferred the Stones--that was always an argument. Dylan, too. Maybe even Miles Davis, although among white listeners rarely then James Brown. But Beatles fans, which was most of us, usually had a favorite Beatle and liked them all--for me the order went John-Ringo-Paul-George. And if you liked John best it wasn't about his politics, which were simplistic and not terribly radical back then. It was about seriousness and substance and what we would not then have called soul combined with sharp wit and a hard edge. After the breakup, however, this got more confused and sectarian, not least because none of them made much Beatles-quality music, although I say John's was by far the best and most consistent even so. During what I assume you mean by his prime years--1970-1985, something like that?--Paul was prolific going on facile and a sucker for pothead whimsy. As a marriage fan, I always approved of Linda's co-starring role in Wings in principle, but compared to Yoko, just as a for instance, she was a cipher musically. There were great tracks, sure, but never enough to constitute a decent best-of, especially given the air pudding like "My Love" and "With a Little Luck" any such would be saddled with. The superb covers album he made after Linda died is a great exception, however, and the scuttlebutt about his 21st-century concert tours is impressive. I've come to admire him as a survivor and a public figure, and were someone who knows how my ears work to burn an Xgau-specific sampler I'd listen. But even recently, when I've given some well-reviewed new Macca album a few tries, it's invariably fallen short.

[A] That stat is an exaggeration traceable to Substack's practice of calling anything over one thousand "thousands." Between Christmas and New Year's we did indeed hit the 1000 mark, which is much higher than I ever expected this project to go. But one thousand isn't "thousands"--we've picked up more subscribers since, but we're a long, long way from two. Of course I'm gratified to have gotten this far--thrilled, really. But "thousands"--nah.

[A] As someone who certainly likes the song and just as certainly doesn't love it, I went to my iTunes and found four versions: Magic Sam, Robert Johnson, Taj Mahal, Buddy Guy & Junior Wells. But while Johnson's version obviously has some jam, only Taj's, amply and crucially abetted by the Pointer Sisters, made me want to hear it again--probably because he/they mess so joyfully with what is by now a generic song. That said, the Guy-Wells is also a step above, and cult Chicagoan Magic Sam's seemed markedly more vital than anything I then played on Spotify except Johnson. Order of frequency as Spotify has it: Blues Brothers, Johnson, Eric Clapton, Urban Knights (??), Steve Miller. I can't remember who sang it in the Blues Brothers (Ackroyd? did Matt Murphy even sing?) and am tired of trying to find out. Clapton's version is dull vocally as became the rule as he got older and "bluesier," abandoning the Don Williams and J.J. Cale impressions he was born for. Midway through Miller's version I'd had enough; Magic Sam is seventh in the Spotify queue.

[A] Thanks. Music fans tend to live in insular worlds. Usually they're students and then borderline bohemian when young, as you might have been or still be. When they get older they make their livings in what I'll broadly designate the information industry--teaching, law, journalism, advertising, promotion, if they're younger tech. It's always encouraging to encounter a fan from a different work world. One of the most enthusiastic Wussy fans I've ever encountered was right next to me at a Studio at Webster Hall gig singing more words than I could have remembered offhand. We talked a little, and he told me he was a cop. Bring your pals was my attitude.

[A] This is an enormous question I can answer only in part. Nina is not as big a music fan as she used to be, but she was always into One Direction, who I, perhaps callously--Rob Sheffield loves them--simply could not hear. But last June she expressed a similar interest in Lewis Capaldi and Capitol was kind enough to get me three tickets--for me, Nina, and her friend Val. Val knew nothing of the man and is no pushover, but she was knocked out, and so was I--live, so hard-working and self-deprecating and kind and, crucially, funny. The funny does not come across as much on record, but I liked his album anyway--he was nominated for one of the Grammys Billie Eilish won and looked a little sad after even though he'd been a longshot, only to recover with enthusiastic applause as I expect is his way and don't believe is at all phony, at least not yet. I also have a sister and brother-in-law living upstairs in my building and always want to know what they think about music--Georgia published rock criticism for years. Steven retired from the law to play as much trumpet as he can. Ga and I have such related sensibilities that I take her movie and fiction recommendations as seriously as those of anyone I know. And then there's . . . Second set of ears? No shit. Now more than ever. I adore Carola for many reasons--many many--but our aesthetic compatibilities are high on the list. When we disagree, which happens, we wonder why and interrogate it a little. If Carola had wanted to be a fulltime critic she would have been a first-rate. But one reason her responses and ideas are so insightful and original is that she didn't, which freed her up to respond at will in a way full-timers rarely can. Insofar as I'm an exception to that generalization it's partly because having her around frees me up--I play new music with her in the room almost every day. Indulge me and follow this link to a review of a Fleetwood Mac concert she covered because 12-year-old Nina was such a fan. Note how skillfully she skirts the fact that, actually, she isn't so much. Note how irrelevant that pirouette remains to any reader who just wonders how the show was.

[A] Always special to learn I've reached someone half a century younger, so thanks. As for the comments question, thanks too--for getting me to set my mind to it. Once I did the answer was a clear no, for two basic reasons. The first is that it's work to oversee a comments section, even lightly as I did back when Expert Witness was at MSN. The work I do for And It Don't Stop should be more writing, sometimes subscriber-only and sometimes not--I have several things in mind that I've yet to get to. Moreover, as you don't quite say, that comments section was a miracle--believe it or not, there was apparently a discussion group in China devoted not principally to my writing (although once a young Chinese speaker came to a reading of mine and told me he'd been part of it) but to the commenters themselves (here's to you, Cam Patterson, Blair Fraipont, Jason Gubbels, Michael Tatum, Liam Smith, Bradley Sroka, Nicky Farruggia, and so many others). It was so rare to find comments almost devoid of backbiting and trolling, which in many ways was the greatest thing about it--I made many friends including a few close ones there. In the Twitter age of course, the situation is worse. Even subscriber-only, I very much doubt the temperature would remain as temperate as it did back then, and keeping it down would be not just labor-intensive but emotionally taxing. As for quitting your day job, let me try and be a good dad. Is your good-paying job a stroke of luck or probably replicable in the absence of an economic collapse? If the former, I'd be cautious; if the latter and you're chomping at the bit, well, assuming you don't have kids yet this might be the time. I'm surprising myself somewhat by writing this, because I've been preaching since I started teaching at NYU in 2005 that the US economy is designed to exploit your generation. So please don't just ask me. It's a big decision.

[A] First of all, I've reviewed three Coltrane albums, not just one. Let me remind you that I've also done lots of Ornette, who like Davis made rockish moves. Monk is about my favorite artist except maybe the Beatles, and Bird was the shit when I was getting into jazz in college. And how about Sonny Rollins? Coltrane, meanwhile, wasn't helped discographically by his early death-- not unlike Hendrix's various would-be canonizers, Impulse pushed the posthumous catalogue till distinguishing among newly fabricated albums became a game for specialists and suckers (and I should add that the old jazzbos I know don't think much of the "newly discovered" 2018 album the younger set was so impressed by). However. If only because my most trusted aesthetic advisor is always ready to hear more jazz at dinner and for that matter breakfast, I've been doing some exploring. So far I can report that neither the Atlantic nor the Prestige "Trane plays the blues" albums seems like a standout to me, and that there will definitely be Coltrane reviews in future CGs, with details yet to be determined.

[A] Yes, in that order, and these are records I still put on occasionally, as I do Chilton's solo work--at least once after early 2019, when I was checking out Chilton reissues including the Ocean Club recording and reading Holly George-Warren's excellent if dismaying Chilton biography, A Man Called Destruction.

[A] Thanks for apologizing, but you know you're grade-grubbing anyway. Look, fellas (and I do mean fellas), it's not hard to understand. In part because I've set up the Consumer Guide to be relatively free of normal deadline pressure, I don't generally jump the gun on grades and remain remarkably steady in my judgments over the years. But this is still journalism, and some sort of news value is the responsibility of all but its most perverse practitioners. Tha Carter III was one of the most long-anticipated albums of the '00s. So you can be sure that I felt more than the usual pressure to get to it sooner rather than later--and also that I didn't stop checking it out after I'd weighed in. I dimly recall that there was a lag before the brilliance of "Phone Home" hit me, but it was more than that--the album is remarkably substantive front to back, playable too. So as I listened, I grew to appreciate it more and them love it some.