Welcome to the New York Times Popcast, your eldest Barry, a music news and

criticism. I'm your host John Garamonica. We are back, back, what's a fire.

You get a cuz that

that they're fond of the redere.

We are back, quarantined, isolated Veritae Popcast, live from the home studio.

Last week was a Bonanza.

We had two very big episodes.

A lot of folks came through, and we are going to keep up that

energy this week because I have been struggling with a question that is

probably central to my job which is what is the point what is the role of criticism right now I don't mean

criticism being negative I mean the job of criticism of assessing art I had to write a bunch of pieces over the last couple

weeks and I have felt emotionally different about each of them. I've done some straight record reviews. I reviewed the Uzi albums. I reviewed

Bad Bunny and Jay Balvin. You know, the Bad Bunny was a really good example of something that was kind of a joy to do during this kind of tumultuous time.

We opened up with Safia. That's one of my favorite songs on the Bad Bunny album, Bad Bunny with some 2000s reggaeton stars, Yowale Randy and Niego Flow.

It gave me a lot to think about, about Bad Bunny's role as a tastemaker and where he is focusing his energy and kind of the

role how Regaton is finally starting to look backwards and embrace its history, not just kind of move in some of the softer global pop directions that some of the mainstream stars like J. Balvin have been moving in.

That was a great opportunity to get absorbed in a record and write about it.

I also wrote about the horrific Imagine cover, which I know Pedro will not let me play a sample of and frankly I would never punish you to listen to it.

But as you know, Gal Godot got a bunch of her celebrity friends to record a kind of baton passing

version of John Lennon's imagine, which is not even like a happier soothing song,

TB QH, and that was horrific and I felt so much bile towards it that I felt like I had to write about it. Anyway, that's been kind of the range of my last

couple weeks. And I got to thinking, what would I want to see for music criticism and for music

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