This Blog--The Whats, Whys, and Wherefores

As some readers will know and others will not, I had a column at MSN Music until June, 2010: the Consumer Guide, which compiled letter-graded capsule record reviews at The Village Voice, Creem, the Voice again, and finally MSN for 41 years. This blog continues a part of that work I'd feel musically deprived to give up. The idea is to skip the reviews of good but ultimately marginal albums I called Honorable Mentions. Though they filled out the column conceptually, these required a lot of work without commensurate musical reward, and since no blogger gets paid enough to put in that kind of time I intend to break myself of the habit (though there'll be exceptions). What I don't want to give up is "A records": albums graded A+ (the rare masterwork), A (the meat of my leisure listening), A- (well over half the total), and B+ (too close not to get half a cigar). That's because these judgments are the gut and backbone of my musical pleasure‑-by the time I'm done writing a capsule, I know and understand the record in a way I didn't before, which prepares me to revisit it in the future, as I usually will. It's time-consuming work, but so rewarding psychologically that I'm happy to do it at blogger's rates.

The way the blog will work is this: two posts a week, Tuesday and Friday most of the time, usually comprising reviews of two A records. Since that would require me to find 16 or 18 A new records a month when there are seldom more than a dozen, I'll augment these with reissues, older records new to me, once in a while a live report, maybe a book review, and occasionally one of those flights of fancy that make blogging the inchoate free-for-all it is. But I've been off the album beat for so long that for a while I'll mostly be catching up, leading with two of the most widely reviewed albums of 2010, both of which I've written essays about elsewhere. My hope is to keep self-indulgence to a minimum. Forty years ago I dubbed myself the Dean of American Rock Critics. That was a joke with legs. The blog title Expert Witness is not a joke. It's a boast that in criticism, knowledge counts, and that I have a load and a half.