Death to intellectuals! Art is not worth analyzing! Let the free market decide everything!

Bravo - you are the perfect Republican consumerist dupe.

its predictable way down the drain, Georgie Fame was releasing his masterpiece "Cool Cat Blues," which devastatingly combined the best of jazz, progressive rock and R&B, all of which Reynolds decries as missing from British music of the period. Outswinging Brian Setzer, it restarted his career, leading to a long string of live and studio albums featuring guests like Clark Terry, Paul Gonsalves and Alan Skidmore (of the wrenching sax solo on Clapton and Mayall's "Have You Heard," back thirty years later and that much better) and tribute albums and cuts to Mose Allison, Hoagy Carmichael and Eddie Jefferson.

If the indie press reviewed it at all, it was to dismiss it as Dadpop from someone of dad's generation.

Chronitis' weird rant ends with a snarling reference to stupid Americans' reading habits, and yet it is full to the brim with illiteracies itself. What's up with that?

I outgrew this whiteboy mess years ago - how come Salon doesn't cover all the amazing REAL music that comes from the rest of the world? How come they never cover acts like Tinariwen or Amadou & Mariam or Manu Chao? I guess their progressivism is only skin (color) deep.

Art Faggotry is out. Big boy bluster is in.

This is the kind of piece that once led me to pay for a subscription to Salon. It is smart--yes, it does have (omigod) a thesis--and well-written for a general audience. Even though Reynolds has it in him to plop right into jargon (a word like POHMer would have alienated 99.9% of his audience), he writes for smart people who have enough interest in the arts to give his piece a click. Salon used to treat movies and tv this way, too, before it learned the Power of Snark.

I do not pay for the political blogging and religion/anti-religion baiting that has, it seems, become the signature of today's Salon. One I can get better on more established blogs, and the other serves mainly to attract rage junkies.

Sweeping generalizations, unsupported hypotheses, sophomoric grand theories of Culture and History, arbitrary distinctions, juvenile ear-flicking that's supposed to be 'provocative writing', subjective response as qualitative analysis, lazy associations, weird hierarchies.

Morrissey is a narcissistic crypto-bigot. That's about the extent that I agree with most of the opinions in this article (but boy could he write a song).

Also, the "no true Scotsman" fallacy is alive and well and on display here for all to see.

It goes like this:

"No Scotsman would like shoegaze bands like Lush and Ride."

"Stuart, who's from Glasgow, likes those bands."

"No true Scotsman would like shoegaze bands like Lush and Ride."

"I outgrew this whiteboy mess years ago - how come Salon doesn't cover all the amazing REAL music that comes from the rest of the world? How come they never cover acts like Tinariwen or Amadou & Mariam or Manu Chao? I guess their progressivism is only skin (color) deep."

Nothing's more annoying than someone trying to show how deep they are by claiming to have "outgrown" a kind of music that a lot of people clearly enjoy. Especially when you call it "whiteboy" music. Good for you for being so superior!

And then to demand coverage of the only "real" music in the world, which is everything you personally like? When the very thesis of the article itself is that there was a subtle racism in British rock during the 80's and 90's?

Good god, what snobbery.

The extrapolation from Reynold's piece wld be that the English are racist to the French if they didn't buy the NME if they put Johnny Halliday on the cover, hate Brazilians if a samba band was on the cover...

Me, I'm with Morrissey - I dislike reggae, hip hop & RnB: and this dislike has zero to do with racism, and everything to do with my preference for English rock bands. How can it be a dirty secret if a cover with a black artist didn't sell to a constituency with a track record in listening and following guitar band music? Reynolds is just manipulating facts to fit his thesis, which is sloppy journalism at best, ... and if you really extrapolated his specious argument we English wld have to hate bands who were influenced by black music...

So, correct me if I am wrong but Reynolds' piece exists to make his point that music with black influences is good. Music without is bad. He also seems to be forgetting that the Black experience isn't as central in British music culture...(altho, of course, no less important for that)

Oh and I'm a girl which also doesn't fit yet another one of his convenient theses.

I found it very strange that no mention was made of Tears for Fears---Songs from the Big Chair deserves a place as one of the best albums to come out of new wave. David Sylvian and Bryan Ferry did excellent during this era.

Don't know if the letter deserved a star or not, but it was clearly written by someone who was upset by Reynolds' snarky overgeneralization about Americans who liked BBC television. I didn't care much for it, either.

Yes, the programming the BBC used to distribute in the U.S. was generally more intelligent than what was made here. That came to an end with the lad-culture inspired English viewers' revolt a few years ago. Now what we get is just as bad as the U.S. crud, with a different accent.

Reynolds just took a cheap punky/X/lad antiintellectual shot. He was better when he stuck to what he knew, not that that's worth much.

And one more thing about G. Fame: he also did us a service in exposing the jazz roots of people like Van Morrison and Ben Sidran. Worth checking out.

I didn't take this as some assault on the people who enjoy Britpop, or a claim that only "black-inspired" music is good -- I took it as a bit of cultural observation about a certain period in pop music history. The author doesn't deny his preferences, but I don't think there's anything fundamentally incorrect about claiming that Britpop is less interested than other genres in rhythm, instrumental prowess, and musical intensity.