[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.

[A] Fact is, there's not a lot of country on my radar—didn't even know who Billy Strings was. And in general I'm not a bluegrass guy, which is not a judgment just a matter of taste—sounds too folkie. While for sure what I value most in country music is such singular vocalists as Jones, Williams, Parton, Cash, Lynn and the colloquial, connubial, humane, hard-edged songwriting they imprint on musical history. So out of respect and curiosity I Spotified Billy Strings's Live at the Legion as I went down for a nap and as I figured found it enjoyable but not remarkable when I was conscious. Excellent "Tom Dooley" and "Don't Think Twice," give you that.

[A] Can't be sure but I doubt it, because while Hayes's professional skills have long been a matter of bizwise critical consensus, it's more the pro in me than the fan in me who's signed off on his rep. Also, I don't exactly know what that "pop faith" remark means exactly. But on the other hand, my personal loyalty to Swamp Dogg, real name Jerry Williams, has never flagged—pretty sure I was the first reviewer to note his existence on his 1969 debut. And the documentary, one of whose producers is the now Austin-based Paul Lovelace, an old friend who did a student documentary on me when he was at NYU circa 2000, is both a hoot—it really is about his swimming pool—and a revealing look at the world of r&b studio musicians.

[A] The simple fact is that I quickly came to prefer CDs. For decades I used a changer all the time, often but by no means always stacking LPs and listening half-album by half-album, though for sure I carefully and pretty much punctually I stacked the B sides of anything with an A side that caught my fancy (while never again hearing many albums that failed to grab me). For a long time I thought a 20/25-minute running time was more "natural" than 45-60, and for sure one's attention does flag over the near-hour or more so many CDs last. But I've learned to adjust in various ways. And I'm not the kind of audiophile who claims vinyl still sounds "warmer" or however that cavil is worded.

[A] Unfortunately, the details of this project, which involved a trip to LA when Nina was so young my fondest memory of the entire enterprise is walking her to sleep on the plane, and then rather later a trip to Minneapolis with different principals, has faded from my memory. There was always something screwy about the whole deal. Expect that some sort of physical pilot survives on a shelf somewhere. The producer didn't really seem to know what he was doing. I liked meeting Pond though.

[A] Especially in the wake of Brian Wilson's death, it's conceivable that were I to replay the Beach Boys' by all means likable albums of the early '60s, I'd admire them more enthusiastically than I did back when I was just starting out in rock criticism in 1967. But they were definitely what we called a singles band until the Beatles and the Stones reset the goalposts, whereupon they upped the ante with Pet Sounds and the glorious "Good Vibrations," which I can remember stopping the car for on 10th Street driving home from Brooklyn so I could concentrate first time I heard it. In my opinion their peak will always be 1967's Wild Honey, which at some point (don't really remember the details) I slotted an A plus. Still love it, not least because in the summer of 1972 my new girlfriend Carola, who had never given the Beach Boys a moment's thought, fell head over heels for it. Hadn't played it in a while when I put it on at dinner tonight, when "Darlin'" and "I'd Love Just Once to See You" and the rest sounded as great as ever to both of us. But if you'd like to explore the band more thoroughly I suggest you find a copy of Beach Boys fanatic and recent And It Don't Stop contributor Tom Smucker's Why the Beach Boys Matter, which I helped edit.

[A] I own 10 Leadbelly CDs on such labels as Rounder, RCA, Columbia Legacy, and especially Smithsonian Folkways. The two I'm most likely to play occasionally are still in jewel boxes (with shelf space at a premium around here, most are in plastic slipcases): Where Did You Sleep Last Night and Shout On, both on Smithsonian. I also reviewed Charles Wolfe and Kip Lornell's recommended although somewhat partial 1993 The Life and Legend of Leadbelly for the NYTBR. Let me thank my first girlfriend, ID'd as Miriam Meyer in Going Into the City to protect her privacy, for introducing me to both Leadbelly and the Weavers, crucial figures in my early musical development. She was an enthusiastic jazz fan as well, but also more of a folkie than I ever was.