One of my heroes died the other day. Lost among all the talk about Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett was the news that Steven Wells, the greatest music journalist of his generation, had passed away. One of the things that made him great was his realization that no matter how much you try to intellectualize a work of art, to explain what makes it good, bad, or mediocre, that really doesn’t have a lot of bearing on whether your audience will actually go out and enjoy it. Rather, he preferred to write about how he reacted to songs, how they made him feel, and tried to express that in a universal way.
And then he cursed a lot. Read more
