[A] Basically, I read other people's reviews to find albums to check out on Spotify and am gratified when I'm actively moved to then replay such a pick even once. This means I don't keep close enough track of current rock criticism to comment on it with any special insight. It's obvious enough that the two major outlets are caught up in self-branding, as they have to be (and as the also-rans are as well). P4K tries to stay ahead of the curve, often to what I hear as needlessly (also perishably and/or abstrusely) esoteric effect. This year, however, I was also struck not just that P4K's year-end list was dominated by women (as my 2019 list stands at the moment, it's almost half female), but by how many of the mag's female choices favored a rather retro singer-songwriter aesthetic--slow-moving, lyric-enunciating, strophic, and oft genteel--I've never had much use for. One more setback for catchy songs with a good beat, I suppose. Meanwhile, while doing a decent job of keeping up with young trendies, Rolling Stone serves as a counterweight to P4K's esotericism, finding aesthetic distinction in "residual" formal commitments that I too often find kinda just old. Wayne Robins, a very longtime acquaintance who replaced me at Newsday when I moved on to the Voice in 1974, wrote a Pazz & Jop-hooked essay (in the first year there's been no Voice-linked P&J, and by the way I've yet to glance at the Facebook-based self-proclaimed "Rip-Off" Pazz & Jop I'm told someone's launched) that deals usefully with many of these issues.

[A] Stick-to-it-iveness and the love of a good woman.

[A] First, this gives me a chance to mention that although my knee is doing well I can barely walk due to a related IT band problem that affects my thigh. This is not so-called IT band syndrome, a nasty variant of runner's knee. It's in my thigh specifically, and finding effective treatment has thus far been alarmingly difficult, although I've just met a trainer who impressed me. So if anyone has undergone a similar problem I'd appreciate learning about it. As for the Cloud Nothings, you've nailed the issue exactly. Look at the last Cloud Nothings review and note how I dismiss complaints about his sameyness--a little defensively, I'd say. No surprise that the new one sounded to me like one of those marginally differentiated Honorable Mentions I've vowed to cut down on. I could be missing something, of course. But the likelihood is small. I'd rather check out something differenter.

[A] There is no review of Artpop. It came out during the Consumer Guide's 2013 hiatus between its long Microsoft sojourn and its brief stay at Medium. Played it recently out of curiosity and did not feel compelled to play it again, hence wonder whether I would have rated it so highly had I been compelled to write about it, a process that my ears invariably find educational.

[A] A good title should be intriguing, suggestive, and accurate. Magazine editing is perfect training, because it compels you to think of a lot of them. Basic method: find some good language in there and work on it. Great album titles that come to mind are Rubber Soul and good kid, m.A.A.d city. Two great book titles are by people I'm close to: Mystery Train and The Only Ones. I don't remember how I came up with Any Old Way You Choose It, but it came pretty easy and I'm more than proud of it--it was definitive, thank you master phrasemaker Chuck Berry. Is It Still Good to Ya? came to me early in the compilation process because it was the hook of what I always knew would be the prologue; Book Reports took forever, landing simultaneously with its subtitle, which just popped into my head one day. Going Into the City was there from the start. Grown Up All Wrong, on the other hand, was hard labor. I wanted to raid the New York Dolls and call it If I'm Acting Like a King, That's Because I'm a Human Being. My editor Lindsay Waters vetoed it, never budged, although we had and still have a warm personal relationship. I was stubborn about it but finally gave up, just started thumbing through artists' albums for something to filch. After half a glum hour, up popped the song title "Grown Up All Wrong." I relistened to the lyric to make sure there was nothing I'd regret, rejiggered the intro to rationalize it, and have been very happy with it ever since--better than the Dolls one for sure.

[A] I've never gotten very far in Bourdieu's Distinction, an important piece of aesthetic theory I assume I agree with to some extent but in a less absolute, judgmental, dare I say snobbish way. So I can only wonder what if anything meaningful Bourdieu has to say about aesthetic pleasure itself, a real phenomenon however much it's compromised or tainted that is clearly inflected by what we know and how we grew up but I very much doubt is coextensive with our social positioning dramas. You and I like the same kind of bands, it would seem, but if you also like Ace of Base, who I've never gotten into, go with it. There's obviously real craft there. The idea is to let the music reach your ears unmediated insofar as that is possible, and although that'll always mean relatively unmediated, there are various ways to trick yourself into being more spontaneous about it. I've made it a discipline to figure out the real reasons I enjoy individual pieces of music and put my conclusions into writing for over half a century. I'm real good at it and never perfect. It's a contingent world. It's also the only one we got, and music generally makes it better.

[A] When the category is as vast as "classical music," it's not a "blind spot." It's something I'm not really interested in, like biochemistry or astronomy or sculpture, although in recent years I've come to care more about the first two than I do about classical music. That said, I've read a great deal of classical music history in passing, most recently when I was reviewing Ted Gioia's Music: A Subversive History for the L.A. Times. Most germane, however, is what I've written about the late great not-actually-a-musicologist (which-was-probably-a-good-thing) Christopher Small. My Voice piece about Small was eventually reprinted in a classical music journal whose title now escapes me. More to the point, the entirety of my long interview with him, transcribed over several days by none other than moi because like many who knew him I loved Christopher Small, was published in Jason Gross's long-running online music mag Perfect Sound Forever and reprinted in Robert Walser's posthumous Christopher Small Reader. I know no one at WQXR and have very little to do with academic musicologists, although onetime Times critic John Rockwell, who in "retirement" writes regularly for an opera magazine I can't keep straight from the other opera magazine, is one of my closest friends. Of course, he was also a rock critic for a while.

[A] Soon come.

[A] First, knee going well. Bends to 135 degrees inside of six weeks, which my musically astute leftwing physical therapist tells me is phenomenal. When I asked him what he attributed it to--I've been pretty good about my exercises--he replied "Luck." Second, haven't read the Norman, though I own it, but the rest I'm for. Tosches's Hellfire is some kind of masterpiece though I liked Rick Bragg's recent Jerry Lee book a lot too. My choice for best rock bio is Guralnick's Last Train to Memphis, and I'm finally reading Careless Love front to back--in laps going back to June--and finding it damn good as well. The great virtue of White's Little Richard is that it's the only one there is, but in this case--pretty solid if perhaps sometimes fanciful, as in the famous Buddy Holly story--that's enough. The Szwed I reviewed briefly and is superb. The first volume of Giddins's Crosby is of Last Train to Memphis caliber except for some of the movie synopses toward the end, the new one arguably too detailed but for me, at least, a revealing and engrossing account of World War II-era America in addition to detailed and candid about Crosby. As for Fagen, Sanders, and Stewart, all are pretty good though the Fagen is uneven and all covered in, how about that, Book Reports.

[A] Thank you for alerting me to the fact that although I taught the Boswell Sisters my last two terms at NYU, I never Consumer Guided them, presumably because the relevant collections were nothing like recent: Shout Sister Shout and 1930-1936. Because the And It Don't Stop version of the Consumer Guide is much less release date-sensitive, I may go back and break the available music down some time. Yes, the Boswells were great, a seminal New Orleans-spawned vocal group with eclectic tastes and great rhythm who were in addition female innovators in a music even more male-dominated then than it is now. What sparked my interest, you ask? The very first essay in the Donald Fagen half-memoir half-collection referenced just above--which I taught.

[A] Motorhead got better, sort of like the Pixies. Without having researched the question, I assume they just got tired of their speed-steamroller shtick, as why wouldn't they, and began to generate tunes. Not that there mightn't be an Honorable Mention I missed in their oover. Maybe two, even.

[A] I treated the Monkees kindly in my very first Esquire column in 1967--but not too kindly, as in the more or less contemporaneous Peter Tork moment in my Monterey Pop Festival piece. I just now played them from my iTunes and thought they sounded OK--fun, some good songs, etc. But that doesn't mean their deification by poptimist contrarians is anything but a perverse absurdity. There are literally hundreds of equally catchy and rather more meaty groups of the more or less pop persuasion.

[A] Obviously, I hope, any such grand generalization is impossible to test empirically, because by the time you've finished relistening to all plausible contenders you've forgotten exactly how good the first one was. Also, I'd have to include pre-rock material in my sample even though I don't have enough of that canon on instant or even artificially aided recall. Moreover, anyone's notion of what constitutes beauty will change from day to day or month to month unless that person is too stolid to feel beauty in the first place. Having thus hedged sufficiently, however, I'd say "Waterloo Sunset" is certainly a strong contender. The only time I've heard it performed live was as an encore at Rich Krueger's September show before an audience of three or four dozen (and where were you that night, readers from closer to NYC than Hawaii?), I found it a thrilling, audacious, powerful move. Next morning I put the original on at breakfast. Carola adores "Waterloo Sunset." She votes yes.

[A] Any serious writer should own a bound paper dictionary. I have an 11th edition Merriam-Webster where I can grab it anytime, as I do whenever I'm unsure of a meaning or spelling, which certainly happens several times a month. Online searches can be useful, especially for recent coinages and insight into the popularity of variant spellings and plurals, but I write in American English and M-W is the authority, not Oxford. I do however also own an Oxford that's probably 25 years old now. Very revealing as regards usage history. What I've written about the history of fun relies in part on the OED.

[A] First, knee going well. Bends to 135 degrees inside of six weeks, which my musically astute leftwing physical therapist tells me is phenomenal. When I asked him what he attributed it to--I've been pretty good about my exercises--he replied "Luck." Second, haven't read the Norman, though I own it, but the rest I'm for. Tosches's Hellfire is some kind of masterpiece though I liked Rick Bragg's recent Jerry Lee book a lot too. My choice for best rock bio is Guralnick's Last Train to Memphis, and I'm finally reading Careless Love front to back--in laps going back to June--and finding it damn good as well. The great virtue of White's Little Richard is that it's the only one there is, but in this case--pretty solid if perhaps sometimes fanciful, as in the famous Buddy Holly story--that's enough. The Szwed I reviewed briefly and is superb. The first volume of Giddins's Crosby is of Last Train to Memphis caliber except for some of the movie synopses toward the end, the new one arguably too detailed but for me, at least, a revealing and engrossing account of World War II-era America in addition to detailed and candid about Crosby. As for Fagen, Sanders, and Stewart, all are pretty good though the Fagen is uneven and all covered in, how about that, Book Reports.

[A] Thank you for alerting me to the fact that although I taught the Boswell Sisters my last two terms at NYU, I never Consumer Guided them, presumably because the relevant collections were nothing like recent: Shout Sister Shout and 1930-1936. Because the And It Don't Stop version of the Consumer Guide is much less release date-sensitive, I may go back and break the available music down some time. Yes, the Boswells were great, a seminal New Orleans-spawned vocal group with eclectic tastes and great rhythm who were in addition female innovators in a music even more male-dominated then than it is now. What sparked my interest, you ask? The very first essay in the Donald Fagen half-memoir half-collection referenced just above--which I taught.

[A] Motorhead got better, sort of like the Pixies. Without having researched the question, I assume they just got tired of their speed-steamroller shtick, as why wouldn't they, and began to generate tunes. Not that there mightn't be an Honorable Mention I missed in their oover. Maybe two, even.

[A] I treated the Monkees kindly in my very first Esquire column in 1967--but not too kindly, as in the more or less contemporaneous Peter Tork moment in my Monterey Pop Festival piece. I just now played them from my iTunes and thought they sounded OK--fun, some good songs, etc. But that doesn't mean their deification by poptimist contrarians is anything but a perverse absurdity. There are literally hundreds of equally catchy and rather more meaty groups of the more or less pop persuasion.

[A] Obviously, I hope, any such grand generalization is impossible to test empirically, because by the time you've finished relistening to all plausible contenders you've forgotten exactly how good the first one was. Also, I'd have to include pre-rock material in my sample even though I don't have enough of that canon on instant or even artificially aided recall. Moreover, anyone's notion of what constitutes beauty will change from day to day or month to month unless that person is too stolid to feel beauty in the first place. Having thus hedged sufficiently, however, I'd say "Waterloo Sunset" is certainly a strong contender. The only time I've heard it performed live was as an encore at Rich Krueger's September show before an audience of three or four dozen (and where were you that night, readers from closer to NYC than Hawaii?), I found it a thrilling, audacious, powerful move. Next morning I put the original on at breakfast. Carola adores "Waterloo Sunset." She votes yes.

[A] Any serious writer should own a bound paper dictionary. I have an 11th edition Merriam-Webster where I can grab it anytime, as I do whenever I'm unsure of a meaning or spelling, which certainly happens several times a month. Online searches can be useful, especially for recent coinages and insight into the popularity of variant spellings and plurals, but I write in American English and M-W is the authority, not Oxford. I do however also own an Oxford that's probably 25 years old now. Very revealing as regards usage history. What I've written about the history of fun relies in part on the OED.