well that was depressing.

This bloke should be put in pseuds corner in private eye:

Or as Simon Reynolds noted in a blog post a few months back, "something I realized with a slight shock earlier this year, in an unlikely context- Germany, travelling on the autobahn- ...is that I don't believe in beats anymore." Reynolds describes how listening to OutKast's Idlewild "suddenly got me flashing on the excitement of tracking the BeatGeist all those years, following each advance towards the brink of total dysfunktionalism, every startling new balance struck between mechanistic and swinging...an adventure, a way of listening to and conceptualising about and feeling music, that began for me really with jungle, blossomed with 2step and street rap and nu-R&B and dancehall, then entered a tawny golden autumnal phase with grime... and then thinking about how it was all underpinned by a quasi-mystical faith in beats as somehow figurative: a belief that the tremors that each breakthrough by auteur-producer or scenius alike sent through the state of pop somehow correlated with or could be equated to tremors through society...

"After a good decade at full-tilt, that particular structure of affect and belief has faded away for me now, or for now (something could bring it back, possibly, but what that would be I can't even begin to imagine). Beats are just beats again: cool, funky, useful, invigorating, inventive."

what is "pseuds corner in private eye"?

Private eye is a satirical magazine printed in the UK. Pseuds corner is a section that highlights pretentious crap in the media.

got it, thanks. have you read reynolds before?

by which i only mean to say, reynolds' "faith in beats" is in many ways the motivating factor behind all of his writing about dance music, and i think dismissing this quote out of hand as "pretentious" (a word, admittedly, i loathe) doesn't make much sense unless you've engaged with his writing in, say, books like "generation ecstasy."

Ah still sounds like waffle to me

kilmovee likes his criticism a bit more REAL, more down-to-earth say, more authentic, less pseud-y... since he obviously knows what this kind of stuff looks like when he sees it, would he like to point us to some examples...?

c'mon, enlighten us, brother!

Reynold's book is called 'Energy Flash' in the UK, btw. an absorbing, informative read. however the new chapters reveal his biases and prejudices and date the work as a whole (not that there's anything wrong with that) but that seems invevitable for a book about this music...

as always, nice column, phil.

Alright mate sorry. Seem to have touched a nerve there. Lets agree to disagree on this one.