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Thursday, December 9, 2010

Rob Sheffield Has Never Actually Listened to a Morrissey Song

"At this point, she's like the new Morrissey, except with even more eyeliner." - Rob Sheffield of Rolling Stone.
Rob Sheffield, worse than Hitler
It would be easy to dismiss this quote as: ill-conceived; a desperate ploy to sound hip; a failed attempt to score indie cred, or; worse than Hitler, and all of the preceding quips would be completely justified. However, for a magazine that prides itself for raking musicians over the coals for songwriting faux pas, a quote this horrible must be thoroughly and utterly deconstructed.

Now in theory, comparing a musician like Taylor Swift - a celebrity dating, female pop-country starlet who rose to immense fame by writing songs about boys, losing boys, falling in love with boys and thinking about boys, and whose albums have consistently reached the top of the US charts to Morrissey; the asexual(?) heterosexual(?), bisexual(?), homosexual(?), celibate, pale, pompadoured former lead singer of the Smiths, whose work has been labeled as some of the most influential in all of popular culture but who never had an album reach higher than #55 on the US Billboard charts - seems completely and utterly moronic. But actually in practice it turns out that it's much, much worse. In fact it's so bad that it needs its own list of things that it is, in fact, worse than.

Things that this quote is worse than:
Hitler
9/11
Osama Bin Laden
Socialism
Kurt Cobain being named the 12th greatest guitarist of all time by Rolling Stone
George Bush's grasp of the English Language
Paul Krugman's grasp of economic theory
Pitchfork's genuine disregard and contempt for music and humanity in general
The Devil
Larry the Cable Guy's stand-up
Tyler Perry
The Show Lil'Bush
Ja'Rule
Limp Bizkit's cover of "Behind Blue Eyes"
L33t speak
People who tailgate
The fact that the sun will explode in 5 billion years destroying the entire solar system
The Crusades
Romantic comedies starring Sandra Bullock
Seeing your parents naked
Aids
Tucker Max's views towards women
MTV's Director of Programming
The slow and inevitable aging process that is slowly destroying your body and leaving you old, wrinkly, and impotent
Waterboarding

The quote is so offensive that the only explanation is that Rob Sheffield has never heard a song by Morrissey or the Smiths. This would make sense as neither of those is the Arcade Fire or Lil Wayne.

To paraphrase Wayne Campbell, "If Rob Sheffield was an ice cream flavor he'd be pralines and total sell-out in order to capitalize on Taylor Swift's burgeoning popularity."

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