Every marriage is different, and it's impossible to understand your own marriage, really, much less anybody else's.
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 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.
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.
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.
In the worst of times, music is a promise that times are meant to be better.
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.
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.
I love collections. I got into journalism with the idea that I'd be doing them.
One way I judge music is whether it compels me to listen to it.
My personal experience has been that in my free bohemian subculture, I'm not unique.
Rock & roll fan that I am, Thelonious Monk is probably my favorite musical artist.
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.
Forget good for you - art should be good to you.
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.
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.
My love of written language is every bit as great as my love for music.
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.
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'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.
