[A] That is not the way it works for me. I decided Beggars Banquet was worth a full A because I sat there with Carola with both of us saying, "Holy shit, that one" as familiar classic we hadn't heard in a while followed familiar classic we hadn't heard in a while. Context and oeuvre had nothing to do with these responses and in principle never should. For the same reason there is no A plus album I think better subtracted from the world than any A album. But to be clear that's the world and this response is mine and mine alone, so instead of "the" world it should probably be "my" world. Moreover, there pretty much have to be some albums currently graded A that should be A plus--quite a few, conceivably. The one I always think of is Wussy's Funeral Dress. Nor is it impossible to imagine hearing an A plus and deciding it's only an A. But only insofar as it's a good use of ear time to make such judgments every time you play something. I try not to. Makes the fun too much like work.

[A] Many times, although not when Simone--who suffered from mental illness for most if not all of her life--sent me what amounted to a death threat after I gave Baltimore a B minus in 1977, my only review of her ever. When I signed on at NYU in 2005 I taught the Simone chapter of Daphne Brooks's terrific Jeff Buckley 33 1/3 book on the grounds that I ought to teach something I didn't like--two somethings, actually, since I don't like Buckley either. In both cases it's about what I hear as self-aggrandizing expressionism--she overdoes everything. So I tried to like her more then, with encouragement from Carola, a somewhat bigger fan although undying love it ain't. Tried again a few years later too. Nah. I should mention, though, that in 2014 one of my best students ever, an Anglo-Nigerian woman, wrote a Simone paper I admired with reservations I explained and came back with a rewrite so all-encompassing I gave it an A plus and sent it to none other than Daphne Brooks.

[A] Springsteen fans can be so single-minded. They expect unqualified, uninterrupted fealty. So for starters, let me point out that pre-1976 includes three positive reviews of his first three albums--well before Jon Landau, I was promoting Springsteen's early work with no thought he'd ever be a superstar, though note that the Landau-overseen Born to Run that marks Bruce's pop breakthrough was actually released 1975, hence before 1976, and got a full A. His 1984 superstardom breakthrough Born in the U.S.A. got an A plus. As of 1992, however, I began to feel he was overextending himself, and it was 2005 before I gave him another A (for Devils and Dust), with only one more subsequently not counting Springsteen on Broadway: 2012's Wrecking Ball. I awarded 2020's Western Stars a one-star Honorable Mention; I gave its follow-up Letter to You a lot of time and did not find it worthy of even that. So say that as a songwriter and album-maker I assume he's pretty much run out of gas as so many veteran geniuses do. In addition, however, I gave Springsteen's Born to Run memoir such a rave that I not only reprinted the review in Book Reports but named the book itself in that collection's introduction is one of the very best there reviewed. In addition, I should note that below the CG stuff on my site are five relevant links. The one I recommend most heartily is "Singing Along With Bruce," a rave account of his performance at 2012's Roskilde Festival in Denmark. Finally, but unlinked, there is a very enthusiastic account of back-to-back live shows by Bruce and Michael Jackson in 1984 in my Harvard collection Grown Up All Wrong. Since Harvard doesn't let me post its contents, you'll have to buy the book to read it, which as a completist I'm sure you will.

[A] That's always been a favorite of mine, but it does rely in part on its long-gone historical context. When In Utero came out Nirvana epitomized a certain subset of what we'll just call young people--the suddenly booming and perhaps even hegemonic though as history turned out actually fleeting alt-rock "subculture," footloose and fancy free. My review was among other things an oblique reminder that these youths would before too long engender their own younger generation, as the cover of Nevermind, the title of In Utero, and indeed the fact the Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love were parents of a one-year-old all portended. It imagined two probably male Nirvana fans charged at that future juncture with babycare responsibilities deciding which of their favorite band's albums to play. It did not by any means imagine that Kurt would be dead in six months, rendering the imaginary Bluebaby a tragic joke.

[A] Hadn't heard tell of this--the Kid Rock Radar Kit I got when I bought Frosted Flakes by mistake crapped out years ago, piece of shit that it was. So I watched "We the People" on YouTube--twice, I'm such a fussbudget--without having any "fun" whatsoever. Fascism is never fun. So when I reread my old review I did think about replaying that 1998 album but decided life is too short. "Fuck Fauci," what a card--the demonizing of one of the most gifted, diligent, and honorable public servants ever is odious beyond my ability to crack jokes or Citizen Ritchie's ability to keep a thought worthy of the name in his head.

[A] Approximately two. One, it's two fucking hours long, three if you count Donda 2. And though I thought its first five-six tracks sounded OK, the plausible rumor that it was radically front-loaded scotched what little desire I had to proceed. Two, West is even more mentally unbalanced than the average Trump stooge.

[A] Carola is recovering--fairly well, it would appear--from February 11 eye surgery. Neither of us has (yet) contracted Covid. We continue to greatly enjoy each other's company in our forced seclusion, though social occasions, which are very occasional, always feel enlarging. As for Roger Ebert, I respect him enormously from a distance on reputation alone but have not checked out much of his criticism--I read a lot, but mostly in the areas of fiction, politics/history, and of course music. As for my favorite poem, there are two: Yeats's "Vacillation" and Williams's "The Dance." (Clarification: Carola reminds me that Williams wrote two poems called "The Dance." This is the later one, which begins: "When the snow falls the flakes/spin upon the long axis/that concerns them most intimately/two and two to make a dance.") These I write about at some length to close out the college chapter of my Going Into the City memoir, because college is when I really cared about poetry. Pages 122-124, to be precise--good stuff. An excerpt: "Both are very much old men's poems, and both very much grabbed young me. I'll say too swiftly that 'Vacillation' is about death and quite confidently that 'The Dance' is about love, then admit cheerfully that both are also about Time [n.b.: a bugbear of mine]; 'The Dance,' however, is more about death than 'Vacillation' is about love, never Yeats's area of expertise." I still read both Yeats and Williams on occasion, and of course I love "The Red Wheelbarrow"--who doesn't? Also Robert Creeley. Other poets much less, which is not to say never.

[A] If this is true I'm not aware of it. It's my observation is that many aging rock stars continue to play to aging audiences I assume are nostalgic for their youths and happy to shell out the big bucks they now have to revisit or recall those relatively carefree, innocent days. It's also my observation that for most of these artists the conceptual excitement and creative spark have long since dimmed. I have no objection to this fan-artist transaction and not the slightest desire--or, given how absorbing I continue to find current music, need--to partake of such transactions myself. Offhand I can think of only three aging artists who I'd love to see right now. One is Neil Young, whose 2021 album was my number one. Another is Randy Newman, who has never made a bad album and whose 2017 Dark Matter was my favorite of that year. The third is Maria Muldaur, who as it happens was a childhood friend of my wife but who in addition has recorded plenty of top-notch music since she turned 60. But as one of the few critics to love the Dead in a prime that began to fade in the mid-'70s and whose early records are still big favorites in my house, I can say that the last time I saw them was at the Garden circa 1977 and I thought they stunk. So with plenty of other live music to enjoy and some two dozen Dead shows behind me, I stopped going. As the extraordinary 2017 documentary Long Strange Trip establishes, they didn't--their audience kept getting bigger and also, in many respects, stupider, though I found several good late live albums more or less at random. Then I don't remember exactly when there was a solo Bob Weir album I tried and failed to get behind, and now this Dead and Friends thing, which may indicate the rise in popularity you posit but I'd adjudge not worth my time. Once again, everyone should have a good time if that's their idea of one. There's nothing remotely shameful about it. But I'm busy.

[A] This seems like the perfect chance to remind readers of this monthly feature that robertchristgau.com comes equipped with a search function that makes it easy to look up my Consumer Guide reviews of any artist, all of which include links to longer pieces on the same subject such as, in this instance, "No Hope Radio"--which, I can further point out, also appears in my National Book Critics Circle finalist Is It Still Good to Ya: Fifty Years of Rock Criticism 1967-2017. Moreover, the Google Search function of the site enables you to search for other mentions of that band's distinctive name. I recommend you start with "No Hope Radio" and, if so inclined, proceed from there.

[A] Question or no question, how am I not going to reprint that? Thank you, though I would say that rather than a steel-stern separation there has to be a merger of subjective and objective that doesn't preclude separating the two rhetorically, if that makes any sense, which I'm not positive it does. You should be aware that my overseer Joe Levy burned CDs of the oud music you sent that I've played once or twice with some pleasure and interest albeit no true critical purchase. Thank you.

[A] As it happens, I just read the very strange Mingus memoir Beneath the Underdog and for the umpteenth time pulled a Mingus album--don't recall which one--out of my A shelves, where they take up several inches even though, as you note, I am not a Mingus fan. In the memoir I began to glimpse, in between the sex parts, why this was so. Simple, really, and as I like to say a taste not a judgment, many people I like and love like or love Mingus--Carola might well if I gave her the chance, though she didn't bite this time. In between sex parts, Mingus makes a great deal of both his chops on the bass and the breadth of his musical interests, which definitely run to what I'll just call classical music because I don't want to go back and check specifics. My tastes in jazz are very much small-group theme-and-variation. There are plenty of exceptions, but that's my aural wheelhouse. Mingus is plainly interested in more complex and "classically" inflected arrangements and compositions. Since I'm only 79 and in good health, I may yet develop a taste for such sounds. So far, no. As I always say about others and can therefore also say about myself: I like what I like.

[A] I never do this, but A and A plus. That's because your question made me feel as if I hadn't played either in years--Now!, Exile, and Aftermath are my normal Stones picks. My gut reaction was that Let It Bleed was superior and I thought it would be fun to play them back to back at dinner, whereupon I learned that I didn't own Let It Bleed on CD. I've ordered it, but meanwhile I played the BB CD and then Spotified Let It Bleed, which because it came out more or less simultaneous with Altamont I admired but didn't play all that much at the time, though because I wrote a lot about the Stones in the '70s I'd certainly heard it a lot. Carola and I agreed that Beggars Banquet was an A, and then could hardly believe how good Let it Bleed sounded. Just the playing is fantastic; we were so snowed we even gave "Midnight Rambler" a pass. I learned that it was one of the first (and few, she was poor) rock albums Carola had bought when she returned from England in 1969 and that she played it constantly, but that was 50 years ago. Now she's decided that "You Can't Always Get What You Want" should be one of her funeral songs (along with both Dusty Springfield's and Aretha Franklin's "A Brand New Me")--no, as indicated above she's not anything like dying, but at our age you start to think about that stuff. Nicky Hopkins is great on it, so much so that I can forgive them for downsizing Ian Stewart.

[A] I've been wracking my brains about this, but I think the answer is that I never saw him back in the day even though I did own and often play his 1960 Change of the Century, which opens with "Ramblin'," the tune I called his "beloved Diddleybeat blues" in my Billboard report on what proved to be his final live performance. There's no record I can find of his playing the Jazz Gallery or the Five Spot, which were my jazz venues after I turned 18 in 1960. But looking around I did find the extensive notes I took on his Carnegie Hall performance for my 2006 "A Month on the Town," which I'll now copy with the warning that my show notes, preserved in files I call giglogs, are rarely this polished. Ahem:

June 16, 2006, Ornette Coleman Quartet at Carnegie Hall. Billed as Ornette Coleman Quartet, meaning Denardo on drums, stand-up bassist Greg Cohen, and an arco bassist named Tony Falanga basically taking a saxophonist's part, but there was also a new electric bassist named Al MacDowell. As Stanley Crouch put it, "In the book of music, the shortest chapter is the one on melody, because nobody knows how to write one." Coleman does. On at 8:06, our seats in Row F on the right, excellent visual vantage, although Ashley Kahn warned that the acoustics might not be so good. Stanley was in the right toward the rear, and ours beat his--he couldn't hear anything but Ornette, Denardo's bass drum and cymbals, and Falanga. I could hear Cohen easily, watching his fingers helped, and all of Denardo's kit, muffled though it was behind a baffle, but not MacDowell, who I also couldn't see, Coleman being situated directly between him and me. (Will Friedwald in the Sun later reported no acoustic problems except distinguishing the bass players--wonder where he was.) At 76, Coleman looked frail in his electric-blue suit (cobalt, Carola said--it looked silk, and shone), charcoal shirt, yellow tie, porkpie hat, and shiny black patent leather shoes. He often sat on a stool, played mostly alto--trumpet adequate, violin scratchy, which I suppose is the idea. Fast ones generally alternated with ballads, with Falanga commonly stating the theme or doing an intro on the ballads. Coleman's tone on alto has just gotten smoother and sweeter, almost French horn-like, and there were moments when Falanga sounded like Ben Webster, but generally the effect was more tenor than baritone much less bass saxophone--maybe he has to play higher just to get some modicum of flexibility. Didn't know the tunes, maybe Ratliff will get them right, but he might have begun with "Ramblin'," a blues I liked a lot toward the end was "Turnaround" I was told, and the encore was of course "Lonely Woman." One ballad evoked "My One and Only Love," one fast one "Mexican Hat Dance," and there were quotes: "Do I Need You," "Blues in the Night" were two I wrote down. Off 9:23, encore till 9:31. Afterward went to Tribeca afterparty--Kahn was driving. Had met the manager and partygiver, Michaela Dreiss, at John Rockwell's 65th. Great Afropop comp on when I got there. That's where I saw Crouch--Gary, who I tried to make my plus one, wasn't around after the show. Talked to Ornette for a while, always a privilege, though his soft voice is hard to hear and he was going on about one of my least favorite subjects, music and memory. He is 76, after all.

[A] By "review" you seem to mean a full paragraph as opposed to an Honorable Mention sentence/clause. But Honorable Mentions are reviews by me. They represent at least three to five listens, often more while less is very unusual. Sometimes the writing is dashed off--if something succinct comes to me I thank the prose gods and go with it. Usually, however, I put real time into the first draft and go over it many times. In addition, at the bottom of my Costello page you'll find a full-length review of his Roots show and collab written for MSN in 2013. Have played the new one once. Thought it began strong. Will return at my own pace.

[A] No, I'm not a transphobe--see my 1997 review of John Heidenry's What Wild Ecstasy, collected in Book Reports--and am happy to employ the singular "they" when circumstances warrant. In Clover's book it was used as a default, which is not my way. Just as I value the serial comma, I value the distinction between singular and plural. It can be so clarifying.

[A] You guessed correctly--even in the '50s, when I was the right age, I wasn't big on comic books and preferred the actually comic ones. Was very interested in head comix later, and played a small role in Harvey Pekar's success that included nominating him for a Macarthur, and wrote a big piece on R. Crumb's version of the book of Genesis that's in Book Reports. My daughter, on the other hand, seldom misses one of the many Marvel movies and I've seen a few with her. I am definitely an admirer of Douglas Wolk, who's clearly done yeoman-as-genius work here, and am flattered by his footnote. We did a National Arts Journalism Program stint together, and share an agent, Sarah Lazin, who gave me a copy of the book when I saw her for the first time in way too long. I certainly intend to at least begin it, because if anyone is going to make critical sense of that world, which is plainly of tremendous cultural importance, he's the guy.

[A] Backatcha, David, who those who don't recognize the name should be aware is responsible for an amazing series of albums in which interviews with people living out their endgames in senior residences are read aloud and set to music--very much worth checking out. Your tribute to Hickey gives me the chance to opine yet again that while nothing tops Air Guitar, Hickey's 2017 collection Perfect Wave, which I reviewed in And It Don't Stop early on, is almost as good--indeed, deserves its own legend.

[A] My wife and daughter telling me they love me, or maybe a variation on the last sound my father heard, which was me murmuring "Thank you. Thank you." Not music, unless something occurs to me as the time grows near, as I suppose it might. Chuck Berry? Monk? Impossible to predict.

[A] I love Wikipedia. Use it almost every day, have learned to see through its inevitable glitches, and donate as I believe everyone who visits it regularly should. As soon as it became apparent that my Substack thingy was going to be a success that would pay me decently to work hard, I called my webmaster Tom Hull to thank him for creating my site almost single-handed, because I assume at least half of robertchristgau.com's regular visitors discovered me via Wikipedia, which cites me so often because my site is a very searchable, very reliable source of pithy reviews of thousands of artists. Do I find errors there fairly often? Yes. Are all subjects covered with equal skill and dedication? How could they be? As I'm about to say just below, there are lots of scary things about the internet. Wikipedia isn't one of them.

[A] I think things are a little different, and maybe better, in the UK, about which I know little, so will stick to the USA. I am alarmed, let's call it, although terrified is in the running even now and things seem all too likely to get worse before they get better, by the effect of let's say alt-right (so as not to resort to fascist quite yet) social media on national and especially local politics in the U.S. Election workers and school-board members, who've historically been earnest if occasionally self-important people of considerable integrity and public-spiritedness, have been under concerted attack, with the aim of denying or greatly complicating the franchise of people who for class or racial reasons are likely to vote Democratic and of expunging "liberal" ideas about race, class, gender, and sexual identity from public school curriculums--and by ideas is often meant something very much like facts, as in the recent controversy over the history of post-Civil War "Reconstruction," the 1876 abandonment of which the right seems to have forgotten greatly accelerated, among other things, the lynching fad that was all the rage as late as the 1920s. Moreover, all manner of disinformation, especially about Covid and the 2020 election, is accepted as fact by an alarmingly large proportion of U.S. citizens--10, 20, often 30 percent. In this rightwing websites have played not merely a role but the leading one. How this all reaches down to the young (who to me seem less adept than inept) I know much less about. Is TikTok, for instance, in play? I myself have been appalled by how complicit Facebook has been in the right's disinformation campaign. In addition I would note that a bitter urban-rural dichotomy has divided this spacious, widely populated nation since its very beginnings.