While Hilton Als has Culture, you're just reading stuff on the internet

Hilton Als might be my favorite critic. 

I love not that he loves Tiffany Haddish (who the f*** doesn't? what are you, some kind of freakin Nazi? do you hate America? Tiffany Haddish, everyone!) but the way he loves Tiffany Haddish, the way he breaks down what makes her work.

And I love that he loves women like Rickie Lee Jones and the point at which he decides he likes her is this album called Ghostyhead. 

This was when Rickie Lee Jones decided to use hip-hop beats and tour with a DJ. The only time I saw Rickie Lee Jones in concert was when she was on the Ghostyhead tour, and most of her fans seemed like they were like, uh... huh? And my reaction was: holy crap! Rickie Lee Jones! 

I mean, I'd associated some of her songs with the coffee shop and then the used bookstore where I used to work, when growing up in the same neighborhood where Lady Bird works at her coffee shop in Sacramento. And she was always a wierdo--great used bookstore music, really--but on Ghostyhead she turned into a completely differently wierd and awesome experimenter. And Hilton Als, you look this up on the Internet and he says, 

Sacrifice is a somewhat antiquated notion as it applies to the contemporary artist, but I use it defiantly in regard to Ms. Jones; she could not have recorded this album without having given something up and survived it, with wit.

Hilton Als is a man who believes deeply in Culture; he believes in people who take art seriously, and take making art seriously. As a critic should. I've stopped having that faith apparently, because when was the last time I actually finished a fiction book, but, I love Hilton Als for keeping the faith.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Tiffany Haddish, and Culture: