I took a long swig of beer and I told this stranger of a dream I’d had. “I have this idea where I’d like to, just once, opt out of the whole cycle and write a review of an older album,” I said. “And not one celebrating a special anniversary or something, because that’s also something we are expected to do now. Maybe when a big artist has an album coming out, I’d write a review not of their new album, but the previous one that they put out, that I’d lived with for a few years. I’m curious about what impressions remain and what impressions fall away; maybe it would even better help me understand my first response to the new album. Is this a better way to talk about pop, to evaluate it, to explore the way it actually functions in our lives?”Well, it wasn’t the worst idea he’d ever heard, he said. But if it was going to be about Kanye West, with all due respect, he probably wouldn’t be reading it, because he really didn’t care about Kanye West. How can I explain that this made me so much happier than if he’d been excited to read it? It reminded me that the world is not as small as it sometimes seems. There are other ways of doing things.