This seems like a very Ted Gioia take. I remember over a decade ago one of my best grad-school friends, a fairly sophisticated student and connoisseur of rock,

This seems like a very Ted Gioia take. I remember over a decade ago one of my best grad-school friends, a fairly sophisticated student and connoisseur of rock, getting into an extended Facebook argument with Ted because he’d made an off-handed-yet-overly-confident dismissal of a significant portion of the genre. Ted was unrelenting in defending a bad take, even though it was pretty clear he didn’t know what he was talking about in that instance. The guy knows jazz and its history better than almost anyone, but he seems to sort of Dunning-Kruger his way through culture outside that rarefied sphere. He definitely shouldn’t be setting himself up as some sort of oracular critical voice on culture. (Of the brothers Gioia, I’ve always preferred Dana, anyway.)