Got a question for Christgau?

i don't think that correcting something you said in the past should be called "censorship". it needs a different word.

to me censorship implies not being able to express something that you believe. so if he no longer believed what he wrote, not just regretted saying it or was embarrassed by it but truly felt he could no longer stand by it, then freely a piece on his own website to more perfectly reflect his actual views ... imo thats editing, not censorship, 2 very different things. but if he truly doesnt regret those words & still believes them & was only changing them to avoid criticism, then i suppose it would be self censorship. "transparency" is a more useful term for what he might be talking about - taking accountability for past errors in judgement by not trying to hide them or scrub them away. but idk if that's what hes thinking.

or, what karl said in 10x fewer words than i used

It's generally a complete archive of what he wrote (i.e. he'd probably want to include as much as he can if not everything), and it's clear from his Q&A's that his opinions all evolve over time, so it becomes a bit of a morass in terms of how he'd handle past reviews that he'd change now, whether for regrettable statements or different views. I know some other critics with their own archival sites will put a small disclaimer when republishing a lengthy review, but that's usually a paragraph for a feature-length piece. I want to say there's no perfect solution - just engaging in dialogue about something he wrote before may be the best way about it. At least it allows for a thorough discourse with him on something he wrote in the past.

The last line of the Betty Davis review should never have been typed, but as for the rest of what he said...he's right, she mostly sucks.

Like I said, I've no problem with a person who thinks she sucks (I agree or is at least a footnote worth studying and citing, no more) or is bored by Flack, but he gets weird about Black artists when they don't meet his ideals of (a) transgression (b) domesticity.

Yeah, I agree about that. His argument that he grants them the same disrespectful hauteur he grants white acts doesn't hold up at all, because his bored response to Flack and Hathaway doesn't track with his adoration of bland-as-fuck singer-songwriters.