The harshest takedown of a pop music star that's also the safest possible critique ever

In which a Washington Post critic rightly rips into a popular rapper named Post Malone while simultaneously saying all the right, liberal-approved things possible.

And it even includes a word that almost no one would ever know, and dammit, I had to look up to make sure I knew the meaning. (I did!).

Naturally, this piece is being celebrated (and critiqued) all over Twitter.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/life...?utm_term=.2737c41f3d9b&wpisrc=nl_most&wpmm=1

 

I read it on the wire a few days ago. That was the nastiest evisceration I’ve seen in a while. Not just of him, but culture in general.

 

He took down a cool kid while being a cool kid. @Alma, you must be so conflicted here.

 

Well, a specific kind of culture. Liberals don't account for a single note of it. You can read that piece and think: America is shit and none of it is my fault. Certainly not Jeff's fault.

There's a kind of eye-rolling cheapness in that kind of critique.

 

Oh, very.

 

I couldn't get through it. I want to read the review doing that to his review.

 

Post Malone is what you get if you take the bro country formula and apply it to hip-hop. Fuck that guy.

 

I clicked on this thread, read the first line, and played "guess which poster wrote that?"

I won.

 

How do we compare it with this?

Restaurant Review: Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar in Times Square

 

Same here, except I don't even care to read the review of the review.

 

I have zero admiration for Post Malone and think a lot of modern music is shit (although a lot of it is transcendent, too), but that piece did nothing for me. Too long and satisfied with itself, and too sneery. I don't like criticism as a profession in general, or at least his kind of criticism. It's pointless except to make the author and some of his readers feel superior to people who don't read. That piece is a lot of acreage to change no minds.