Xgau Sez: December, 2024

Moral compasses and the election, coming soon to Bluesky, morning TV avoided, the second sex comes first, Randy Newman upgrades, and song by song by Christgau.

Harris is the establishment. Trump is viewed by his voters as a counter-establishment force, albeit uncontrollable, self-centered, and potentially dangerous. I also have to disagree with you on your assessment of KH as a public speaker . . . she rambles on, often changing her policies to please the crowd in front of her. Voters sensed, correctly, her duplicity and lack of a moral compass when discussing Israel or the Ukrainian issue. — Ricardo Pini, New Zealand

May I suggest that unless American politics is your academic specialty or something you refrain from gross generalizations about a nation half a world away from yours. It’s certainly true that today’s active Democrats have a collegiate/academic tinge/orientation that diluted or strained their moral compass and damaged their appeal to large swaths of the working-class electorate. But the “establishment” is the people with too much money, not the people who inflect a major field of discourse. As far as Harris’s lack of moral compass is concerned, do you really believe that being compelled to do some sort of impossible balancing act as regards Palestine, an issue regarding which only a sliver of the American electorate and indeed political class knows how to “solve” unless making Netanyahu and his apparatchiks vanish in thin air suddenly becomes practicable, is what cost her the election? What cost her the election was her gender, her color, her classiness, and the Dems’ failure to address the economy in a clear and plausible way.

Asking as someone who used to follow you on Twitter, but decamped from there around the time the current owner changed its name to X, have you considered starting a new account on non-X/Twitter social media? I’m personally partial to Bluesky, but there are plenty of other options (Mastodon, Threads, maybe even Instagram). Bluesky in particular has picked up a large number of users who left X/Twitter after the US election, including journalists who’ve reported getting more engagement on their posts on the former than the latter. (Elon Musk has confirmed that the X/Twitter algorithm has been reworked to downgrade tweets with off-site links, which has hampered journalists trying to get people to read their work.) Anyway, I guess I miss you on social media even though you’ve never been a big user of it. Glad you’ve got the Substack thing going, though. — Rob Tomshamy, Tulsa

I never quit Twitter/X because I wanted to be able to check something whose buzz there interested me, which I doubt I did half a dozen times, mostly on Carola’s say-so. But that was when I thought Musk was a rich eccentric albeit the union-busting billionaire he’d proved himself at Tesla. But once he began flaunting his Trumpy antics I just never got around to quitting, which I soon will. He is vile, vain, actively revolting. Bluesky here I come.

Regarding MSNBC and its “comforting” effect you cite, what’s your comfort level with Joe & Mika’s crawl to Florida? — Frederick P Bulman, Massachusetts

I never watch morning TV and hence cannot count myself any special admirer or detractor of Joe and Mika, although as a marriage fan I approve of them in principle. As I understand it, they do a light, chatty show with the occasional political edge, which given the just-waking-up audience they serve presumably requires more cordiality than any of MSNBC’s night people are inclined to provide. So if they want to make sure they’re not cut out of America’s newly elected ruling class, I don’t see any reason to blame them.

Hey Dean, it seems like there are a lot more at-least-moderately-successful female-fronted rock bands these days than there were in the past. Do you think that’s true? And do you think there’s a general aesthetic difference between the female-fronted bands of today and yesterday, that is itself notably different from the aesthetic differences between male rock bands of today and yesterday? Been listening to a lot of Wet Leg, Alvvays, and tUnE-yArDs these days—thanks for the recommendations. — Griffin, Damiriscotta, Maine

Duh. I say as someone who regarded himself as a feminist even before he hooked up with Ellen Willis, mostly via a Canadian woman I dated from afar 1964-66, who gave me my copy of The Second Sex, women’s bands do tend to have better sexual politics than all-male bands, thus evading what with so many male rockers can be a major annoyance factor, to put it mildly. Like I said, duh.

Are there any revisions you’d make to your previous letter grades for Randy Newman’s albums at this point, or do you still feel the same ways about them as you did back then? — Ben Merliss, Bethesda, Maryland

As it happens, Robert Hilburn asked me to write something for his excellent new Newman bio, which I’m now 70 pages from finishing, and what I wrote was based on a relisten to the three Newman studio albums I’d given a B plus, all of which I quickly concluded I’d underrated. So make Land of Dreams, Little Criminals, and Born Again some kind of A. But let me add one thing I’m realizing from the Hilburn, which is that Newman like his famous uncles also devoted a lot of creative energy to movie soundtracks to which I’ve paid very little attention. While I recognize that movies need soundtracks and presume that Randy’s are fine, I am not a guy equipped to appreciate them critically or enjoy them the way I enjoy song collections, even though most soundtracks include a few songs.

Hi Bob — Considering the sweep and delight of your thousands of reviews of full albums, I found myself wondering: do you have any favorite pieces, or passages from pieces, that you’ve written on a single song? Thanks for your time. — Jay Thompson, Seattle

There must be others, but two that occur to me are the piece I wrote about Chuck Berry’s eternal “You Never Can Tell” for London’s Sunday Times and the long takeout on Thelonious Monk’s (and Johnny Griffin’s!) “In Walked Bud” to close out the Monk piece collected in Is It Still Good to Ya? I also once did a whole Double Dee & Steinski piece that kind of qualifies.