[A] I should probably write up some new guidelines for how best to get me to review your music, but I'm going through yet another unsettled bit of time when I'm not even all that sure I want to review any more music, so why make it easier? Still, when someone writes a letter as nice as this one, I feel like I should respond. And I figure it would be good to register the answer here, as this is quite possibly a question that someone else might consider asking.

First, let me make a distinction between artists I'm familiar with and ones I'm not. For people I'm familiar with (and like), I'll probably notice, and may make some extra effort to follow up on. If you're not known to me, I'll probably delete your message quickly, unless you make it personal, with some details that I care about. I get 50-100 emails every day, and dispose of most of them immediately. (I do regularly check my spam directory, because the algorithms suck, but only look at titles there, because anything more is too much work.)

Some attachments may be benign enough that my mailer will include them when I open the message. Otherwise, the chances that I will open an attachment are near-zero. A good rule of thumb is don't attach anything unless I ask for it. You can send me a link to download, or a Bandcamp access code. In those cases, I'm likely to save the email in a "Downloads" directory, but I'm not very likely to do anything with it. Otherwise, I delete nearly all non-personal promo email. I will assume that if/when I need it, I'll be able to look up any bio or other info I need. (For jazz and archival records I like to have the recording dates, and frequently spend a lot of time trying to figure that out.)

If your full record is already out on streaming platforms -- I use Spotify and Napster -- or Bandcamp, you might note that, and I might even follow up immediately (if I'm sufficiently intrigued). Streaming sources are easier for me to use than downloading files (although they rarely come with adequate documentation). Advances rarely do me any good. I don't like reviewing things before they're available.

If you send me a CD, I will note receipt under "Unpacking," and put it in a queue, which I will eventually listen to and write up. (I am able to play 12-inch vinyl, but don't favor or recommend that.) That's the only way to guarantee I'll cover something. There are some other less tangible benefits to playing CDs -- they sound better, and I don't have to be near the computer when I listen -- but those things only matter if the record is good enough to merit extra listens. I got more junk than I can store, so I don't need unnecessary clutter. (I've never got the hang of selling or otherwise disposing of my excess, so I don't need more.) The mail address is under Contact.

I haven't undated my Music Critic, Emeritus file since 2014. While I should, not all that much has changed. After I wrote that file, most publicists dropped me, but a few kept sending me CDs, and I figured as long as they did, I'd keep writing my puny little notes, as some kind of public service. I've made up the slack by taking notes on streamed or downloaded files. The 2024 Music Tracking file shows I've reviewed 335 CDs and 1072 streamed albums released in 2024, which is not quite my highest total ever, but more than most years, and more than I planned. I'd be surprised if I ever did that much again, but I won't make any predictions.

[A] This is the sort of policy question I've been hoping to field questions on, but monetary policy is the part of economics I'm least interested in, and as such know the least about. As such, I tend to take my clues indirectly from others. There is clearly a huge amount of hypocrisy in the politics of debt, as was as much as admitted when Nixon declared that "we are all Keynesians now" and Cheney insisted "deficits don't matter." As if that wasn't clear enough, Greenspan spent the entire eight Clinton years hectoring him into running a surplus, then as soon as Bush became president, he testified in Congress about the urgent need to eliminate the surplus through Bush's tax cuts. And after Bush permanently red-lined the deficit and crashed the banking bubble, Republicans rediscovered the usefulness of debt hysteria in their effort to prevent the economy from recovering under Obama, who McConnell vowed to bury as a "one-term president."

So pretty much everyone agrees that deficit spending is an engine of economic growth. The initial rapid recovery from the Depression of 1929-34 was driven by deficit spending. The point was driven home even more dramatically during WWII, and military spending as well as massive public works kept the US economy growing dramatically through 1970, and to a lesser extent during the Reagan-through-Obama years. On the other hand, FDR's effort to balance the budget in 1938 led to a Second Depression, and Clinton's balancing, although initially masked by the speculative Internet boom, produced another slump in 2001. Meanwhile, much larger public sector spending in 2008 limited the crash, which started on the same trajectory as 1929, before the "automatic stabilizers" kicked in. Nobody honestly doubts any of this.

What may be debated is how much deficit spending is preferable, and how does it fit in with inflation, which is also a matter of some being better (for most people, and the economy as a whole) than none, but too much being worse. (The Fed has customarily pursued a target of 2% inflation, although as a regulatory agendy largely captive to the banking industry, one may suspect their motives in keeping it that low.) A bunch of other factors come into play here, and it's not something I find it terribly useful to go into depth in. But suffice it to say that most of the anti-deficit arguments are specious attempts to exploit your naivete or ignorance for nefarious political reasons, usually to impose an austerity regime to prevent government from helping the great majority of its citizens.

Over the years, I've read scores of essays on debt questions, many from Paul Krugman. I figured it would be easy enough to cite something by him, but chances are you'll find one or both of these behind a paywall: Why You Shouldn't Obsess About the National Debt [2024-06-06]; The Cowardice of the Deficit Scolds [2023-05-08]; and Federal Debt: More Than You Want to Know [2025-02-23]. Personally, I suspect that Krugman himself errs on the sides of the deficit scolds, and that the ideas behind Modern Monetary Theory (also see this explainer) have more merit than Krugman has ever acknowledged. Another, evidently more balanced, piece you actually can read is Dean Baker's Should We be Worried About the Deficit Now? [2023-11-13].

Circling back to your original argument, beware that lots of complaints about deficits are really covert arguments against spending money on something specific that bothers the plaintiff: often welfare, or education, or social services -- very rarely on things that we actually do spend too much on, like arms, or jails, because the people who are critical of them are usually aware that those are things to oppose spending on with principle and not through stealth arguments about what we can afford. The agenda behind deficit hysteria is almost always austerity. If not, they would be equally open to raising taxes, which almost none of them are.

[A] I've played those now, and they'll appear in Music Week, as well as the February Streamnotes archive (along with a couple more). It's relatively difficult to keep track of what one has and hasn't heard from an artist like Armstrong, given the high degree of redundancy in his catalog: he started 30 years before LPs, so the early material has all been picked up in various compilations, and later material has been relicensed, anthologized, and/or simply bootlegged to a large extent.

[A] My initial response to this was:

And a fat lot of good I did. You don't need me to tell you things are spinning out of control or what's wrong with that. You also don't need me saying "I told you so." But sure, I do have some ideas that aren't commonplaces. What I need to do is to figure out how and where to present them, and I'm thinking about that.

I quoted this letter in Music Week, where I commented:

Sure, I have things to say. While I've made very little effort to follow the news, and especially to let myself get involved in subjects like Democratic political strategy, I can't live in the same house as my wife and stay unaware of what's happening. And while I'm tempted to just point back to my post-election essay and add a heaping of "I told you so," some things I posited as possibilities then have evaporated, while I didn't anticipate a few things that have happened, or at least marginally shifted beyond my expectations. At some point I'll look into things like this and that more closely. But I'm also painfully aware that whatever I do come up with go nowhere and amount to nothing, at least as long as I'm operating the way I have the last few years.

I'm not oblivious to the fact that there are people, some known and others unknown, who appreciate my writing. I'm just trying to figure out what path makes the most sense for me at this particular time. I can't go into that here, but will write more about it in the near future. What I can do here is leave you with three thoughts:

1. The more radical Trumpism becomes, the harder it's going to break up, because it is based on fundamentally unsound precepts, both about power and people.

2. Opposition to Trumpism is going to be generated from among the people directly affected by it -- which for one thing means not by people like me -- and its form is yet to be determined.

3. When Trumpism ultimately fails, we are going to need to replace it with better ideas as well as morals, so perhaps those of us who cannot fight but can still think would be more useful doing the latter.

I'm not unaware of or insensitive to the very real damage that Trump and Musk -- and it's probably good tactics to treat them as inseparable, with Musk by far the dominant personality -- are doing and will continue to do until they're stopped. I'm also no less opposed to genocide than I've been since I first used the word on October 9, 2023. But as I noted in my post-election piece, the Trump election definitively quashes the notion, which persisted very faintly as long as Biden was president, that anyone involved might develop a bit of conscience and stop the killing short of complete destruction.

One thing I put great emphasis on in my assessment of how bad a Trump election would be is opportunity costs. Trump's election ensure that the US will do nothing to address the very real problems that Democrats spent way too much time pretending to have finessed for at least the next four years -- plus whatever extra time it takes to undo what they do manage to do. Given the speed with which they are wrecking things, I may have underestimated those opportunity costs. One more thing that I likely underestimated was the extent to which Trumpist power is going to brutalize everyone, even those who resist it. Genocide in Gaza is not just a tragedy befallen a mostly helpless people, but a monument to the notion of "might makes right," which will encourage its use elsewhere, while numbing our response. As proverbs attest, such brutality is almost certain to return to haunt us.

I added a PS to a reply:

One thing that seems to have changed is the chemistry of the Republican Party. For a long time, I argued that the rotten core of the Trump administration was the mainstream Republican Party, which Democrats [foolishly] thought they could turn against Trump. But now Trump has his own activist core, and the Party is totally subservient to their agenda. Fair to call the whole thing Trumpist now (as I've started doing).

I might have added that that "MAGA" always seemed like a mere cult of personality, while Trumpism now seems to have emerged as a coherent ideology and plan of action. (I'm not saying that Trump's followers understand and approve of this ideology, but many of them are taking the first steps in moving beyond personality -- the blind faith that "Trump will fix it" -- to partisan action. Unfortunately, the best historical examples are the cadres motivated by Hitler -- an unfortunate analogy that won't go away until we find a better way of talking about it.)

Moeller kindly replied:

Don't underestimate your influence. At this point in time we need EVERYBODY to stand up and be heard. He is now investigating social security, which I receive monthly (I am now checking my bank account to make sure I get the monthly check) I am pretty sure his changes will effect everyone at some point and if not it will effect people close to you. I also worry how in one month he has alienated our closest allies ie: Canada, Mexico, and the EU and has cosied up to Putin. Just so many things that are scary for us citizens.

I will continue to read your blog for both the music and the politics. BTW I posted your Speaking Of Which to my Facebook page weekly to get all the info out (not that may followers though LOL) Again we have to all stand up even if we don't have a forum to do so.

I don't really have a response to this, or maybe I just have too many to bother with. I don't think it does much good to try to anticipate the limits of Trump's power, let alone his will, which will surely be significant. I'm not worried about Social Security, or about America's "allies," or about "cozying up to Putin," as those particular aberrations strike me as oversteps -- either because he doesn't have that much power or because the opposition has ample strength to resist. I worry more about what already falls within his authority, and about the example he sets for his goons and fans. And, of course, for the inevitable disasters he won't be able deal with competently because he doesn't have the temperament, the skill, or the simple decency of concern.

Along these lines, I got another letter from Claudio Vedovati which can serve as a coda here:

I also want to thank you for the great work you do. It has had immense value for me for years, and I think for many others.

But I also want to thank you for the honesty and humility with which you speak about the advent of Trump.

It is a good start and a good example.