[A] Right. The '90s were a boom time for the music industry, driven in part by the arrival of almost everything old in a new format: CDs. Consumer Guide is at heart exactly that, a guide, and when a first-rate collection of first-rate songs arrived in the mail, consumer guidance often followed. With a few exceptions, most of the artists you list above recorded a lot of first-rate songs but didn't conceive their output in terms of albums, which at their best tend to be structured so they flow, to include tracks that may not be irresistible on their own but intrarelate (note: the previous word is not "interrelate," although that can happen with successions of songs as well). Greatest hits records hit home differently, track by track by track. Unsurprisingly, they suit artists who rode through their careers on the strength of memorable songs—some hits, some evocative of similar hits, others strung together by the artist in question's unique style and vocal identity.

[A] Remembering with certainty why I made that call half a century ago is pretty much impossible, but I can certainly see a logic there. A, B, C, and D don't stand for anything. They're the first four letters of the alphabet, just as 1, 2, 3, 4 are the first four numbers. To resort to F, which clearly stands for "Fail," would be to abandon that logic. E gives us five grades, with E the lowest and "Plus" and "Minus" available for further detail work. But did I ever actually resort to E Plus or E Minus? I dimly recall doings, and by checking my site—Tom Hull is unstoppable—have determined that there are seven E+'s, fifteen E's, and two E-'s (Aorta, Kim Fowley).

[A] Sure I'm missing something by not searching out singles. I'm also missing something by never visiting New Zealand. But do I hear enough great music in the course of my life? Damn right—few humans hear more, and focusing on albums as I have for 60 years has proven an enriching way to do that.

[A] I assume you mean 2024's Gratitude, of which I wasn't aware until I got this question, which says something about how "unnoticed" it's been. Streaming it first listen on Spotify as I write and would say solid, as she generally has been. But only time will tell—suitable breakfast music will enable me to check it out with my secret weapon the Carola Test. Would observe for the nonce that that's what Blige has always been: solid. Would observe that at 54 she's still an unmistakable pro. Would also observe that pros generally need something a little more scintillating than solid to break into the A list and that I'd handicap this as what I call an Honorable Mention.

[A] My suspicion after one play of Geese's Getting Killed is that your Television/Patti/Talking Heads comparison is a bit hyper. But I'll certainly play it again and at a guess would allow as how it might be some kind of A.

[A] I may be forgetting something, but I don't recall a single chansonnier (is there female variant of that term?) who's rung my chimes. I miss the African-American groove too much is one problem. But a while back I gave an A minus to a 2010 album called Bad Reputation: Pierre de Gaillande Sings Georges Brassens, in which de Gaillande translates and sings a bunch of Brassens's chansons. I ranked it 31st in that year's Dean's List. So I found it in my shelves and gave it a spin, which sounded damn good, funny and occasionally filthy (it's on Spotify). I read French moderately well, but I barely speak it unless I'm ordering food. Carola's French is quite good and when we've vacationed there she's run the show and saved our asses. Similarly, both she and Nina have run the show when we've visited Italy, where Nina's studied the language a little, although I do the driving, which in Italy is something to brag about.

[A] Two of the most renowned science fiction novelists are Black. One is the also quite feminist Octavia E. Butler (I've read Wild Seed and Kindred, which I admired though they didn't stick with me—this was well over a decade ago). The other is Harlem native Samuel R. Delany, a great. The acknowledged classics are Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand and The Motion of Light in Water. Plus there's the wonderful East Village memoir Heavenly Breakfast. Delany is gay and writes about it sometimes. He's 83. I deal with him at some length in Book Reports.

[A] I have not encountered the film but will keep an eye out for it. Another Green World is the only Eno album I play anything like regularly—I mean, I own something like over 10,000 CDs not to mention LPs, so give me a break. But your letter inspired me to return for at least four-five tracks to Taking Tiger Mountain, Before and After Science, and Here Come the Warm Jets. They all sounded good, but (as I'd anticipated) Warm Jets was tops. Rocked a little more, for one thing.

[A] Structurally, I found the film abstractly experimental in a mostly impressive but sometimes overly experimental way. Its operative conceit is an interesting one: that it's a semi-fictional or play-acted music doc. Found myself unsure at times where or who exactly Malkmus was. Was nonetheless glad that I saw it, just as a film.

[A] I'm not familiar with this truism, but it's sensible enough—up to a point. Among my early faves I certainly remember buying remember buying Doris Day's "Secret Love" and via my Aunt Mildred a Platters album while at the same time enjoying my parents' 78 of Fats Waller's "All That Meat and No Potatoes," which in an early book dedication I mistook for "One Meat Ball." For sure I still enjoy them all. But that doesn't mean I regard any of them as titanic or foundational.

[A] That clause was intended as a mild dig at the current manifestation of Pitchfork, which without having done a statistical breakdown certainly seems to be tending toward a less songful and more abstract aesthetic than I prefer, probably in the hope of nurturing a less fun-prone, more snobbish editorial identity and hence market. Not that this isn't the editors' true aesthetic penchant. But I've been poking holes in variants of the art-rock mindset for most of my career.

[A] I hold no grudge against "classic rock" on the level you posit, and would almost certainly give new albums by almost every artist you name a spin. All are clearly talented. But whether their aesthetic retains sufficient vitality is another matter. How many such albums would I get to the end of? I truly couldn't say. Most, probably, but people run out of gas, artists and critics both.

[A] As a well-read, self-taught writer who's spent his professional life looking inside himself and figuring out whether and how the good feeling the melody or timbre or beat or verbal intellection/humor/expressiveness of a compelling track arouses in me entails physical pleasure, fresh insight, incisive humor, affecting emotion, and now I'll stop until somebody pays me money—good money—to excavate further, I'm extremely skeptical regarding AI. For one thing, human writers have bodies. AI is certainly aware of this inconvenient fact. But that doesn't mean it has the proper physical equipment to understand what it means. AI, it's called, right? Intelligence does not happen in the body. It happens in the cerebellum, which AI presumably knows as opposed to understands is a different thing without having the intellectual wherewithal to "know" just exactly how it's different.

[A] First, don't kid yourself about the raw appeal of your prose. Be relatively confident that some people out there enjoy your writing AS WRITING. Second, don't fib about how much you yourself like or dislike the music in question, and even more important, why you feel the way you do. If the reasons aren't vivid or interesting or significant or striking or of general social/aesthetic usefulness, review something else.

[A] Why not? I played their 43-track 1994 The Unboxed Set before dinner and it sounded undiminished, though it has its limitations as dinner music. Here's hoping, though I'm not holding my breath, they do a concept EP about RFK Jr. fucking up American Samoa's vaccine program.

[A] I just put on It's Only Rock 'n' Roll when it was time for my nap—on Spotify, admittedly, wrestling vinyl out of my industrial shelves is not for 83-year-olds and the R's are especially awkward. Dozed off for a while, woke up, wondered briefly what that was because until I truly awakened I didn't know. Initial conclusion: no Exile, no Now! Duh. Subsequent analysis: I will never play it again. As for Emotional Rescue, I'll stick with what I said when assessing Dirty Work the best album the Stones came up with post-Some Girls: "it peters out quicker than the side-openers make you hope." And FYI, rerating albums can get pretty tiresome.

[A] I try never to downgrade how crucial growing up in a fundamentalist church not just was but HAD TO BE as regards what became of me. But I don't think fundamentalist notions of charity, which are real up to a point, led me on the road to humane politics. My younger brother has spent most of his life as a Christian youth worker. He's been instrumental in bringing Christians of color, most of them Asian, to middle-class Connecticut, where he's resided for most of his adult life. He's built housing in poor countries. He's honest and humane. But we seldom if ever talk about politics, and I very much doubt he's any kind of leftist, though perhaps he is some kind of liberal the way such things are gauged in his world.

[A] CDs only, in no particular order, alphabetical included.

• New Orleans Nights (Verve)
• Vol. 6: St. Louis Blues (Columbia)
• Louis in New York Volume V (Columbia)
• Plays W.C. Handy (Columbia/Legacy)
• Love Songs (MCA)
• Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines (Columbia)
• C'Est Ci Bon (Tomato)
• Louis Armstrong & Duke Ellington: The Master Takes (Roulette Jazz)
• 16 Most Requested Songs (Columbia/Legacy)
• What a Wonderful Christmas (Hip-O)
• An American Icon (Hip-O)
• Pops Is Tops: The Verve Studio Albums (Verve)
• Satch Plays Fats (Columbia/Legacy)
• The Complete Town Hall Concert 1947 (Fresh Sound)
• Satchmo: A Musical Autobiograph (Verve)
• Louis Armstrong Meets Oscar Peterson (Verve)
• Louis Armstrong and His All-Stars (Columbia/Legacy)
• Louis Armstrong Volume 7: You're Drivin' Me Crazy (Columbia/Legacy)
• Satch Blows the Blues (Columbia/Legacy)
• The Best of Louis Armstrong: Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings (Columbia/Legacy)
• The Complete RCA Victor Recordings (BMG Classics)
• Ken Burns Jazz (Columbia/Legacy)

[A] Good choices all, obviously, although I wouldn't be so quick to grab the Velvets (who I did see several-plus times during their justifiably legendary Danny Fields-conceived Max's stay in 1970). But to be truthful the only rock act—putting JB in a category of his own (and yes, I did see him at the Apollo early on)—I couldn't give up would be an early Beatles show, preferably in the UK '63 or '64 though I'd settle for Shea Stadium. That's because I'd go for jazz: something like the Coltrane-Dolphy gig I describe briefly in my memoir plus pre-Charlie Rouse Monk (not that there was anything wrong with the Rouse gigs, some dozen of which I attended, just to catch Sonny Rollins or someone comparable), and, hell, Charlie Parker with Dizzy Gillespie anywhere.

[A] FWIW, which is not much, none of those choices yells A plus at me, although any of them might plausibly qualify. But really, the only way to tell is to catch yourself raving when you put it on, whether because for some reason you're essaying a career lookback at the artist in question or because the album in question migrated into your hand for no better reason than impulse.