Why does nobody hate rotten, rancid, sanctimonious, brain-rotting music any more?

Why does nobody hate music any more? Not all music, obviously, just the rotten, rancid, stupid, derivative, hypocritical, sanctimonious, self-indulgent, self-regarding, brain-rotting stuff that you don’t happen to like yourself.

In the days before Spotify threw all the world’s recorded music into a gigantic meat grinder, finer points of musical difference formed a vital part of many people’s identities. Friendships were forged through them. Romances became strained over them. There were times when you might find yourself in real physical danger because of your musical preferences. Nobody wants that, but there is still something to be said for such rigorous commitment to the cause.

Ferocious antipathy to certain types of music has often been as important as fervent allegiance to other types. Journalism played its part. The recent downgrading of Pitchfork by its owner, Condé Nast, which folded the popular music site into GQ magazine, has led many to predict, not for the first time, the imminent end of mass-audience music criticism. If this time the doomsayers are right, what might be missed as much as the enthusiastic advocacy of the fresh and unexpected is the snarky takedown of the overblown and overhyped. In an age of sponsored content, AI-generated listicles and the entertainment-as-sportstalk of awards season, we still need a couple more naysayers beyond the anonymous internet hordes to point out the nakedness of all our emperors.

Neil Kulkarni, who died in January at the age of 51, wrote for Melody Maker, Kerrang, the Quietus and many others, as well as producing a couple of books on hip hop. Among the tributes paid following his death, some pointed to a good example of a no-holds-barred assault on bad pop in the form of a listicle he published in 2021. (Warning: rude words ahead.)

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‘My god, how withered does your soul have to be to be willing to put your name to such flabby, lazy larceny?’

—  Critic Neil Kulkarni on Oasis album Definitely Maybe

Kulkarni’s Ten Most Overrated Albums in Pop History include Screamadelica, by Primal Scream (“Besides the fu**awful half baked pastiche of music that this record is isn’t it just the sh**test laziest NAME for an album ever?”), Who’s Next?, by The Who (“We are asked to chuckle at four streaks of piss leaving four streaks of piss behind – the perfect summation of their grubby be-denimmed pomposity and sanctimoniousness”) and Definitely Maybe, by Oasis (”My god, how withered does your soul have to be to be willing to put your name to such flabby, lazy larceny?”).

His number one, reasonably enough, is the entire recorded works of Frank Zappa (“The most contemptible plank-wankery, devoid of joy, dedicated only to an endlessly egotistic proof of technical ability”).

There is something joyous about all this vitriol, Sure, it’s a little rude, but it contrasts refreshingly with the blandness and fandom that surround much of contemporary pop culture, where a behemoth such as Taylor Swift sails serenely and unmaligned through the firmament. You don’t have to do a Kulkani on Swift, but it would be preferable if the only people who had a bad word to say about her were not the tinfoil-hat-wearers of the American extreme right.

The algorithmic information economy leaves little room for creative antipathy. The long hangover of postmodernism, where everything becomes a text to be decoded and notions of objective value are suspect, doesn’t help either

In 1977 John Lydon startled the hippie establishment when he scrawled “I hate” above the logo on his Pink Floyd T-shirt. He was lying. It took him a couple of decades to admit he’d actually always been partial to Dark Side of the Moon. But that original desecration sparked a thousand light bulbs in a thousand teenage brains. Call it Hegelian dialectics, call it yin and yang, but every action requires its own reaction, every movement its opposition. But from Rotten Tomatoes to GoodReads to Discover Weekly, the algorithmic information economy leaves little room for creative antipathy. The long hangover of postmodernism, where everything becomes a text to be decoded and notions of objective value are suspect, doesn’t help either.

[ Getting it down on tape – John Fleming on cassettes ]

[ Taylor Swift, Coldplay and the spread of superstar economics ]

As the old mass-entertainment monoculture gasps its last, to be replaced by an uncertain but definitely more fragmented future in which human gatekeepers and tastemakers are replaced by machines, and as those machines themselves become ever more sophisticated and attuned to human psychological desires, the idea of a shared cultural space, let alone a contested one, recedes into the forgotten past. That’s the dystopian version. A more optimistic one sees new forms of insurgent subcultures springing up outside the big platforms and actively opposed to them. If that is to happen, a rallying cry will surely be: “I’m not going to listen to that rubbish.”