Frank Kogan is an intense music critic who challenges readers and music listeners to question what they hear and why it makes them feel the way it does. His writing is dense but of high quality, like a Tom Robbins novel or a good article in The New Yorker.
His answers to the questions I emailed him are akin to the material collected in his book, Real Punks Don't Wear Black, with each containing many thoughtful ideas in nearly every paragraph.

Scott Butki: Can there then be multiple correct meanings to the same songs? If so, does that mean that the list of 100 most conservative songs — which I previously wrote about  — might not be as ridiculous idea as it might first seem?"

Frank Kogan: Well, the phrase "meaning of a song" (or "meaning of a poem" or "meaning of a story") is one I find utterly stupefying. It's basically something that's inflicted by English teachers on defenseless high school students. In its non-English-class uses, "to mean" and its variants are functional non-problematic words used in conveying or asking for further information.

For instance, you can explain that, to a kid, a vacant lot means that he can organize a pickup baseball game, while to a land developer it means potential investment opportunities. So a vacant lot can mean more than one thing, and there's nothing mysterious about this. You can ask what the phrase "I'll glock you" means, and if you don't give him the answer "I'll shoot you," you're wrong. But as to what a rapper is telling you about himself when he uses phrases such as "He'll glock you," there can legitimately be a number of different explanations. And again, this isn't mysterious. (And the word "subjective" and its cousin, "objective," are worthless in explaining why you can or cannot get more than one answer. They're just intellectual-sounding buzz words that explain nothing.)

Which is more rare: A great album or a great review of an album?

Way more great albums, but that's not owing to any inherent superiority of music over criticism, just that at the moment music is a healthier environment than journalism is, and most record reviewing is imprisoned within journalism. But I wouldn't say that there are more great albums than there are great dances to albums, or great conversations about albums, or great wisecracks about albums, or great love affairs conducted to the sound of albums. So I don't exalt music above the life that surrounds it, or above the writer's life.