Why I Love Christgau.

Because he agrees with me, naturellement. Today's review of Sonic Youth's Rather Ripped echoes my fulsome praise last week. Dissenting with Amy Phillips' widely derided contention that, with Murray Street, Sonic Youth had passed into irrelevance as they approached middleage, Christgau nails the subtle paradigm shift which occurs in the aging and not at all to younger critics -- the ability to distinguish between taste and judgment:

It's fine not to like almost anything, except maybe Al Green. That's taste, yours to do with as you please, critical deployment included. By comparison, judgment requires serious psychological calisthenics. But the fact that objectivity only comes naturally in math doesn't mean it can't be approximated in art.

Rather Ripped has already surpassed Sonic Nurse as my favorite post-1990 SY album. So go buy it already.