A few months ago I posted a little diversion on Genesis and the critics (in particular, regarding Christgau). I guess my boredom has reached an apex today, because I’ve been wading my way through a similar message board, this time with Tull fans having at the critics, including Bangs, Marsh, et al. You could read worse things today, I suppose, but anyway, it takes me back to when I was 14 or 15, feeling my way through the armfuls of new wave records — good and bad, great and terrible — I was starting to became an avid consumer of, and being struck by an Ian Anderson quote in Creem (I think he was on the cover, I think Simon Frith wrote the piece), wherein he professed an interest in… Ian Dury. For some reason, that connection resonated strongly at the time — I just spent hours thinking about it; how odd and yet how perfect — and there hasn’t been a time since when I’ve thought about Ian Dury that I haven’t also thought about Jethro Tull and vice versa. (And for the record, I grew up in a household with a certain brother obsessed with JT for many years, and I can still name half a dozen tunes by them I like a lot.)