But I don't write a full capsule review of anything I haven't heard five times. It's usually closer to ten.
— Robert Christgau
Because I've always been good at knowing what I thought and not reviewing prematurely and have gotten better at those things over the years, my flips are rarely that significant.
I don't think it's such a bad idea that people learn the same history in school. I think it tends to ground people and give them something to respond to and react against.
I don't have any thoughts on blogs, because I don't read them. I don't read them not out of any principle, but because there are only 24 hours in a day, and I like to read books.
I don't like most world music because you need to know what the words are to really understand it.
Chuck Berry's 'Maybellene' hit the airwaves at about the time Alan Freed got to New York, and it was definitely a song I really loved and related to.
The idea is every time I go to a show, that night or the next morning I write it down in the gig log. Sometimes they're very scant, sometimes they're very long.
I actually think I learned to write concisely working for an encyclopedia company in Chicago.
Every once in a while there's a day or two when I say, 'Gee, electric guitars, what an ugly sound.' But I'm a very enthusiastic person. For sure I'm an excitable, fun-loving person. I enjoy life.
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is a canonizing institution. Jann Wenner has worked to make Rolling Stone the keeper of the canon since 1970. I don't like that, because he uses institutional power and he uses economic power to enforce those standards.
I think Theodore Adorno was profoundly ignorant. I think even Adorno's fans think he was bad at understanding popular music. He thought it was all jazz.
I was never really a bohemian. I was a sloppy guy who liked cheap apartments and the arts, and who was very left-wing politically as the 60's progressed, though it took me a little while.
One of the many things I hate about Donald Trump is that he embodies a kind of very popular popular culture that, as near as I'm able to perceive and stomach, is of no quality whatsoever.
Rock & roll fan that I am, Thelonious Monk is probably my favorite musical artist.
I'm not a musician, I can't read music, but I came from a family of music fans. Not mad music fans, but people who like music. Both of my parents can play the piano. They were very good dancers, which I am not.
I'm slow on the uptake about things. I didn't understand that the first Wu Tang album was great when I first heard it.
What helps change bad writing into mediocre writing is editing. Editing is in bad shape in print journalism, and is in virtually nonexistent shape in online journalism.
When I grew up, there was a monoculture. Everybody listened to the same music on the radio. I miss monoculture. I think it's good for people to have a shared experience.
There's a musicologist named Peter van der Merwe whose theory is that the blues generates tune families, and that their similarity to each other is in fact part of the pleasure you take in them - rather than the differentiation in which Jerome Kern and George Gershwin indulged to great effect.
I review albums - really positive reviews - I know I'll never hear again, 'cause I'm just not going to have the time.
