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.

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.

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.

Robert Christgau Quotes