Q: So perhaps it’s a case of preference breeding ideology? We have things that we like for whatever reason and build a case for liking them around preferences.

A: Sometimes, but sometimes I think we build cases around things we don’t like, but think we should.

Q: As someone whose been in criticism for a long time, and who’s arguably one of the architects of popular music criticism, I wonder if you’ve seen the field change a lot over your time in it, particularly regarding how entwined criticism is and has been with commerce.

A: It’s changed in that it’s always harder to find places that will let you write in public at length. It seems like space gets tighter and tighter all the time. In terms of it being intertwined with commerce, I don’t really know. The first place I ever wrote anything was at Rolling Stone in 1968, when Jann Wenner was the editor. We, the writers and section editors, had nothing to do with the record business. Jann did. Jann was going out and trying to get people to put ads in the magazine so it would survive, and wanted to meet people he’d always wanted to meet. But we were in San Francisco, there was no music business there, we didn’t go to press parties or junkets, we didn’t have people trying to inveigle us to like this or that in any serious way. The fact is that because I don’t live in New York City or Los Angeles, I’ve never had that. So I’m the wrong person to ask.