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

In a piece about counterfeit pop, he includes a counterfeit king at the end. Which seems reasonable in the current moment.

 

Fair point. The game is changing. Cultural revolution awaits.

 

Nah. I'm of the hipster generation. We're already rung dry. The generation below us is kept docile in a pretend world of video games and the internet of things.

 

It is not an inclusion. It’s the point.

 

This is how we get to the world of Ready Player One. Anybody ready to go live in the Stacks?

 

I work with a lot of people 21-30. They're bright and they're witty and they're conversant in...absolutely nothing but video games. Immersed in them. No hopes or dreams for this world, completely happy if they can work eight hours and get to their screen for another eight hours. And they have children and boyfriends and girlfriends! And it's understood that hours of their lives every day will be taken up by this world! The video games are what TV and music was to us, except the video games are so immersive they never have to even face the outside world.

It's creepy as hell.

I think they'll be a very docile, controllable group. I think we'll live in a society much like the current Chinese one.

 

With video games and prescription meds they’ll lull us right back to the 1890s in no time.

 

The folks wearing Vineyard Vine shirts and Chums sunglasses holders aren't guilty of groupthink like the vest/beard crowd? The tens of thousands of folks who'll pull on Columbia PFG shirts this weekend while grabbing beers out of their Yeti coolers aren't exhibiting groupthink?

I really think you're overanalyzing fashion trends in relation to political thought.

 

I'm not sure it is. At least not entirely. Nor wrongly.

Art and society are reciprocal. Symbiotic. So it's fair for a critic to assess the art and the culture that produced it.

I grant absolutely that this review is particularly florid and over the top, but I'm not sure why it strikes you any different than 50 years of reviews in Crawdaddy or Rolling Stone or the Village Voice.

 

No umami to be found at Red Robin today, but my dad, who is in his 90s, had raw onion on his burger.

Loves it. I’m good with that. Carry on.

 

I actually enjoyed the takedown of Posty -- my son listens to that awful garbage so I enjoyed every word. But I like the review of Guy's American Kitchen better. Especially this line, with its name-check of Calvin Trillin (my father-in-law's first cousin):

Has anyone ever told you that your high-wattage passion for no-collar American food makes you television’s answer to Calvin Trillin, if Mr. Trillin bleached his hair, drove a Camaro and drank Boozy Creamsicles? When you cruise around the country for your show “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,” rasping out slangy odes to the unfancy places where Americans like to get down and greasy, do you really mean it?

 

'It’s not that it’s stupid but that it’s vacant.'

The author can endorse stupid entertainment, just not vacant entertainment.
#mostentertainmentisboth