I’ve always much preferred Dana of the two Gioia brothers, and mostly for this reason. Ted is a great jazz critic and historian, but his constant sense of being impressed with himself is just too much. I had a friend in grad school—an exceptionally good amateur historian of music himself—who got into a fight with Ted about music on Ted’s Facebook page. My friend offered a pretty cogent and insightful defense of popular music, to which Ted responded with disdainful bloviating. Ted is the kind of elitist who is is adamant that he isn’t one—as though his background somehow precludes it. (Nevermind that background, while beginning in a working-class milieu, also includes two degrees from Stanford, a degree from Oxford, and a stint at McKinsey.)