Prince had always told us he just wanted to get through this thing called life. But now that his own physical life has ended, his artistic life will continue.
— Robert Christgau
Certainly it's much more important for me to go to a good movie and spend a nice night with my wife than it is to listen to a specific piece of music.
Everything I know about Facebook makes me want to avoid it. Twitter has really improved my reading habits.
I don't know any celebrities. I know a lot of people that most people have never heard of.
Subject is very important. If you're going to write non-fiction the style means nothing or very little. The content justifies the effort you need to put into the writing itself.
I like to say that I don't have the slightest doubt that Barack Obama read me in the early 80s. It's the kind of person he was!
I believe an editor's job is to help a writer sound like himself or herself.
If rock criticism is to be a political calling, which has always been my angle, that's obviously not because it's a fountainhead of protest songs.
One of the things that's happened in the music I love over the past five, 10 years is that some people have gotten very old and continued to make music.
My personal experience has been that in my free bohemian subculture, I'm not unique.
Even when I was working at The Village Voice, I only put in about 20 hours at the office.
My wife is more important to me than anything in the world - including music. She's a great editor and companion for all of my work and she's a great writer herself. If you live with somebody who's smart, they'll affect your thinking more than anything.
I am interested in the highbrow/lowbrow synthesis. My sensibility, I am proud to say, is middlebrow.
I love collections. I got into journalism with the idea that I'd be doing them.
Once people write criticism about something - and even in 1967 I was far from alone - they're assuming it's art, and art is supposed to last.
One meaningful distinction between high and popular culture, is that there's way more good popular culture - because its standards of quality are more forgiving, because sobriety isn't its default mode, because there's so damn much of it.
I don't see myself as having had an exceptional life. Yeah sure, I've had an interesting life, but I'm more interested in what's not exceptional about it.
Prince Rogers Nelson was the most gifted artist of the rock era. Not the greatest genius - just the most musical in the broadest sense.
I don't believe in pulling punches or being judicious, as the standard in literary criticism or academic musicology.
I'm not that Internet-savvy. I get by. But that's all. I don't have serious skills or any other stuff.
I believe that writing on music is experienced inside your head, is not a physically present in the world, it has a different kind of authority and prominence and you absorb it differently.
The idea with a collection is sort of to begin with a kind of bang.
People believe that criticism should be objective, whatever that means, but I really don't understand what people mean by that. I guess if you're doing sonata-allegro procedure analysis, you can be objective for a page or two. But in pop? Really hard.
Ultimately, to insist that rock criticism be political is first to insist that the humans who make and enjoy music are embroiled in politics whether they like it or not - and whether they know it or not.
One way I judge music is whether it compels me to listen to it.
Bonnie Raitt and Lynyrd Skynyrd were two people I went on the road with.
If you're intimate with a mind as powerful as that of Ellen Willis, it takes you a long time to separate yourself from her ideas. She had an extremely powerful mind.
Every marriage is different, and it's impossible to understand your own marriage, really, much less anybody else's.
As the editor at the Village Voice, I always tried to find writers of colour.
My love of written language is every bit as great as my love for music.
I found dozens of albums I loved every year of the early 70s and more in the late 70s and more still in the decades since, partly because I knew more about music by then and partly because there were more to choose from.
In the worst of times, music is a promise that times are meant to be better.
I am one of the barbarians - I love rock and roll.
I think I've had a certain amount of success at making phrases. I'm a good writer. But obviously, I'm incredibly flattered and pleased when people remember things that I say.
I've always been a jazz fan, but I don't write much about jazz, because I don't have the chops. But it's really, really hard to write about improvised instrumental music when you don't have a good knowledge of harmony and can't identify rhythm signatures very easily either.
The most important single fact about pop music in the Nineties, is the number of hours made commercially available increased by an estimated factor of ten.
You know, criticism began as the province of amateurs, of wealthy men who liked the arts.
If you wanna write non-fiction you have to be interested in the world.
Believe me, I think if I stopped writing when I left The Voice I would have quite a legacy. But the fact of the matter was, it never occurred to me to stop.
I basically believe that all pop stars create personas and manipulate them. What we relate to are not their real selves; they are projections, which tend to shift in shape.
In fact, many rock critics look askance at explicitly political lyrics, which I think is pretty stupid, without denying that some political lyrics are also pretty stupid.
As a power listener who listens to music between 10 and 14 hours a day and who always has his earphones and MP3 player with him, convenience really means a lot to me.
My experience of what a loving relationship is like rings true with a lot of people I meet. I have a theory that the people you meet, one way you choose them, is their suitability for you in that particular matter. Attitudes toward friendship and marriage are in many cases closely aligned.
I don't think that most of my peers in rock criticism are from the West Coast. I think most of them are from the East Coast.
I'm not happy that death is approaching because I like being alive but I'm glad I've escaped the two-post-a-day economy of contemporary journalism. Good writing takes time.
The Village Voice gave me an outlet. They encouraged writers to publish idiosyncratic, intellectually ambitious journalism in voices that ranged from demonic to highfalutin. And they paid me well once the magazine was unionized. Getting paid is motivational.
The first half of 'Book Reports' deals with the history of popular music and rock criticism. When I hooked all those historical pieces together, building on the minstrelsy piece, it became my history of popular music.
You can only adjust to so much history in your life. I still have trouble texting.
Forget good for you - art should be good to you.
Anyway, you know, when Richard Meltzer said rock and roll died in '68, what he means is Jefferson Airplane were no longer his buddies, that's what he really means. He means it in a political way: that was when the artists and the audience found themselves on different levels.
