When I was 22, 23, I lived in East Hollywood in a horrible apartment with mold on the ceiling and a ratty carpet. It was an embarrassment, but looking back on it, it was where I needed to be at the time. I worked at a bookstore and I would get home from work at 1am. But that was never the end of my ...more

My review for the Chicago Tribune:

The show-business saying "everyone's a critic" came into common usage in the middle of the last century, but it's arguably never been more true than now. In our era of Yelp and Amazon, Twitter and Facebook, every literate person with a reliable Internet connection ...more

I'm in two minds about this collection of essays. There's some great stuff in there, and I really like what Hopper stands for and her style of music criticism that goes beyond technicality and into the sociocultural impacts of music. A really poignant piece was the one on R Kelly (is music a moral e ...more

Wonderfully written, a little scattershot, very readable. I learned so much about music that I'll never listen to. ...more