Sometimes you have to dig through plastic crates in musty basements to find strange and wonderful sounds that no one else is paying attention to. Sometimes you just have to listen to the radio. Two equally valid paths to delicious sonic surprises. Two equally valid routes to the distinct taste of something like, say, NATE DOGG. "It has become easy to forget about Nate Dogg," a certain Los Angeles critic wrote upon the rapper/singer's death in 2011. "Identifying the dozens of songs he enhanced is the rap enthusiast's equivalent of a jazzbo's listing KID ORY solos on LOUIS ARMSTRONG sides—but his crooning was as vital to the early '90s as BIGGIE's lisp or COBAIN's howl, a sound affixed to America's pop consciousness like a natty prison tattoo." That's great music writing. And great music listening. Knowledgeable, empathetic and, above all, aware. The critic was JONATHAN GOLD, who at the time was already much better known as America's greatest food writer. But before he became a full-time chronicler of southern California's taco trucks, pupuserías and soup dumpling houses, Gold had been a music writer and editor with a singular taste for cratedigging under everybody else's noses. LA punk. Gangsta rap. STONE TEMPLE PILOTS and W.A.S.P. None of it—literally none of it—taken as seriously in its time as it is today. He took it seriously. He lived in LA and it was part of the culture around him. It wasn't just about music for him. He wanted to understand people and cultures and share their stories. He wanted to travel through their sonic spaces. He wasn't interested in MICHELIN-starred bands. He was interested in the locally grounded bands who populated the villages scattered across his native Southland. His reporting on N.W.A for LA WEEKLY, whose music section he edited for most of the 1980s, was groundbreaking. He was fired from that job, he later wrote, when Weekly editor KIT RACHLIS "realized that my opinion of sainted folkies RICHARD and LINDA THOMPSON was pretty much the same as his opinion of QUIET RIOT." His musical expertise was wide and deep, and he didn't write in the rarefied, insider language of other rock critics. "He had an appreciation for the people who liked the band he was writing about, which is not the norm for writing about popular music," said CRAIG MARKS, who edited him at SPIN. "He wasn’t a snob about it.” Also, Marks told the LA TIMES on Sunday, he actually wanted to write about Stone Temple Pilots. (Also also, he had a band.) Gold approached food the same way he approached music and won a Pulitzer Prize in the process. It wasn't that his writing obliterated the line between haute cuisine and taco trucks; it's more that he refused to believe any such line existed. He was a cultural cratedigger in the most generous sense of the term, and the cultural melting pot of Los Angeles was his crate. "Jonathan didn’t write restaurant reviews," his friend and editor PETER MEEHAN said. "He wrote about who we are and how we feed each other. He wasn’t just a better writer than the rest of us, he cared more, too.” And he never stopped writing about music. While eating last year at VESPERTINE in Culver City, where dinner for two runs upward of $1,000, he informed us that he felt like he was on Jupiter and "I kept humming Sun Ra's 'Space Is the Place'' to myself as I ate." As you probably would, too. RIP... Space was literally the place for this KRAFTWERK sideman Friday night... You apparently can't walk in and film at the COLOSSEUM as easily as you can walk in and film at the LOUVRE... Off-TRGT.