“I have an appetite for deliverance, and am not really interested in trying to figure out whether it qualifies me as lucky or pathetic,” writes Jessica Hopper in the essay that opens both the 2015 first edition and the newly issued second edition of The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic.

When I first read that line, I was filled with such a rush of recognition that I wanted to throw the book across the room. I’ve been listening to music obsessively since gaining conscious use of my brain; my diary entries circa 1999 detail my incipient, fan-girl love for Britney Spears; later musings on online platforms that will remain undisclosed chronicle a perhaps alarming infatuation with Radiohead; I spent a few years in my late teens and early twenties writing for a now-defunct music blog because I loved music so much that merely listening to it and sweating at shows and talking about it until three in the morning and even playing it sometimes did not suffice. I also have an appetite for deliverance; I also have, to quote Hopper, a “void in my gut that can only be filled by songs.”

It’s not always easy, loving music so much that my life might actually depend on it. Sometimes I simply ask music for too much. And it’s not easy to deal with the contradictions of music under capitalism, music as both art and business. Hopper knows that, and her essays constantly wrestle with those two competing pressures. At times, she excises the human heart at the center of why we make and listen to music with scalpel-like precision, shows it to us beating, then carefully puts it back. Other times, she peels back the curtain on some rotten part of what in an interview she called “the capitalist music world system” so thoroughly that it makes you question whether it’s possible to simply love music under our current economic system.