Years ago, a music journalist gave a review to what is arguably the most important album of the last 30 years; almost certainly the most important album of my generation; maybe the most important album in Dance music. An album which questions Sgt. Pepper’s, Nevermind the Bollocks, and The Chronic. THE album that put France on the world stage …

These were his genius words:

“… This isn’t exactly a good album by any stretch of the imagination. Aside from tracks like ‘Revolution 909’ and ‘Fresh,’ Homework is the work of a couple of DJs who sound amateurish at best. Just about all of the songs follow the same formula of starting off with a drumbeat for the first minute-and-a-half and then slowly bringing in other elements … If you already own Homework, best to bring it to the record exchange before it floods the second-hand market … “

Forget about whether you like Daft Punk for a minute, this is a bit more serious.

As you can see, this review reads no better than any old random twitter post by a self-appointed music critic in 2022. And this, I would say, is strong evidence that crappy music journalism was the precursor to the sewage fire that is social media.

So the only conclusion is that we should blame music journalists, and this review specifically, for social media and everything bad that it has contributed to these over the last decade: the erosion of democracy, “fake news”, “bot farms”, environmental destruction, identity politics, racism, both of Obama’s presidencies, Trump, Biden, much of the war in the middle-east up to the failure in leaving Afghanistan, the invasion of Ukraine … (I would blame China’s crimes on this review, as well, but I’m not sure what their approach to social media is, and I doubt they would allow this kind of publication.)

“ … that was the bad thing about the New Journalism. Cop a bit of Tom Wolfe or Hunter S. Thompson, get a bit of ellipsis down your grammatical throat and any fuckwit could sound cool and intelligent and actually did. Despite having the sense and sensibilities of a bucket of silage, any modern music journalist with a grasp of the new prose could hold his own as a knowing counter-culture hero and guardian of the gates of fame. Tossers. Silence is, of course, the lesson. The press are frequently the most dizzyingly incompetent arseholes that God has put on this earth. The mistake is to reply to them.” — Tony Wilson

• Daft Punk – Alive