“But I’m not in the neo-cassette scene or anything,” he adds. “Occasionally I’ll hear about something and I’ll get it, but I listen to a lot of classical music these days: there is no movement to bring back the age of the cassette in the classical world,” he laughs. Earlier this year John made the press by laying the smackdown on Mitt Romney viaTwitter.The Republican leader had commented on the death of Sally Ride, the world’s first female astronaut, who was openly gay. “Sally Ride ranks among the greatest of pioneers. I count myself among the millions of Americans she inspired with her travels to space,” Romney had said. John’s response:“Kind of despicable and grotesque that her partner of 27 years will be denied federal benefits, don’t you think?” It was a splendid, swiping hatchet at Romney’s anti-same-sexmarriage views. I ask how the 47% are reacting, to which John responds in recurrently modest form. “Well, we’re about to have an election,” he says, “and the wheels seem to have come off the Republican party, which is a general good, though I’m not a cheerleader for the Democratic party, either.This country is essentially a plutocracy – the best we can do is elect the people who seem to have a little more of a conscience about things. I’m just some guy, though, I don’t really consider myself qualified to lay out a terrain map of our political landscape. I’m very active in pro-choice politics, and so I support candidates likely to do less to erode the right to choose. I say ‘do less’, because the pro-choice movement here has few friends on either side of the aisle.A sad state! But I have to believe that the movement toward more rights, not less, will
“I go to shows to learn what’s new, not to tread over familiar ground. When an act I see plays a song I don’t know, I’m happiest”
continue.” In true arbitrary fashion, as promised, we end with a discussion about Lou Reed and Metallica that turns into a further discourse on the state and existence of modern music journalism. John is a well-known Lou Reed fan and a devout and expert metal-head. “I actually lobbied Pitchfork to let me review it and they gave me the OK, and I started a piece, but it was very long and I couldn’t get around to finishing it,” he says.“Pretty complex piece of work. I think things like that are sort of bound to be ridiculed by people during their first listen to it, just given the climate now. I can’t say I loved it, but people are generally given to responding as one would in a childhood classroom now, announcing their opinions on something without reflection, often during their first listen. What’s the value in that? None, I think. I don’t think an in-themoment reaction or an immediately-after-listening reaction is of any particular value to understanding music; and the weirder the music is, the less value such a critical approach is going to have. I have this idea that nobody should review an album until he’s lived with it for a few years. Obviously, given promotional cycles, that’s never going to happen, it’d make a publicist’s job very weird indeed, but if the question is ‘How best to evaluate music?’ the answer is ‘over time’, not ‘based on one’s first reaction’.” Thankfully, there is more than enough music in the Mountain Goats catalogue to appraise and ponder over a lifetime.
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