Q: From my vantage, it seems as if popular criticism is becoming more and more blatantly promotional. More and more young bands are recording one EP and then devoting the whole of their energies to promotion, hiring publicists and PR agencies. It seems like the whole tone of criticism has shifted since you got started, where writers are more expected to collaborate with the people who are selling the records.

A: Then they’re not writing criticism. They’re writing promotion. Cameron Crowe started doing that at Rolling Stone a long time ago. He was, in essence, writing great press copy for various bands in the pages of Rolling Stone in the guise of actual journalism. It got to the point where bands Rolling Stone wanted to interview would only agree to be interviewed by Cameron Crowe––not that he wasn’t talented and hardworking––but they knew he would always make them come off well. They would always come off like really decent, interesting people. I think that was really destructive to the magazine. Cameron was never a critic, he was a reporter, a journalist. That’s not to say that what he was doing was less worthy, it was just different.

Q: As a cultural critic, you seem cut from a similar cloth to Joan Didion, another writer who came to prominence in the 60’s, who’s interested in popular culture, and who seems heavily influenced by having lived in California. For Didion, California was where the American frontier ran out and American history began to amass on itself, and on the West Coast, she could see the whole of it behind her. Has living in California had an effect you can pin down on your perception of American-ness?

A: Sure. I grew up in the 50’s in the Bay Area. I can’t imagine a better place to live, I still live there. It was a blessed place if you were white and middle class, it really was. The 50’s were not a great time for a lot of people––I was very lucky. The thing that I get out of California is people trying new things, and living in a more open and free way, and being out from under the oppression of class, racial, ethnic, religious identities, that certainly when I was growing up were still controlling almost all of the rest of the country, but not in the Bay Area. That taught me a lot about freedom, but it also taught me that California is real life. It’s not weird, it’s not strange, it’s not funny, it’s not odd. There’s nothing I hate more than East Coast reporters coming to California to write about some new trend that’s so weird. It gave me a sense of freedom and possibility as ordinary life, not as big, spectacular, “here comes the gold rush” stuff.