Slate takes a look at those looking at Nick Hornby. (There are a ton of links in the original article, which I haven't read yet, but we jolly well should).

Nick Hornby. In a flashback to his days as the rock critic for The New Yorker, the archenemy of music writers everywhere popped up on the New York Times op-ed page last week to moan that "contemporary rock music no longer sounds young." (He also set out a middlebrow manifesto T.S. Eliot would have approved of—rock should have "recognizable" "influences that are not only embedded in pop history, but that have been properly digested.") He might as well have waved a red cape over blogland. Hornby's successor at The New Yorker, Sasha Frere-Jones, denounced him line by line for championing "as conservative a conception of rock as one could imagine." Critic Keith Harris was pithy: "I felt more pity for this sad old man than disgust." And Seattle Weekly music editor Michaelangelo Matos dispatched Hornby with relative mercy (the piece "reveals every one of his worst instincts all in one go"), only to turn on Salon's critic, Thomas Bartlett, with a lengthy and detailed evisceration.

  ¶ 5/29/2004 08:03:00 AM