This charmless band

I expect Mallory's impatience with the Smiths will get a lot of unnecessary attention. I disagree, but it's hard to argue with his assessment of the early records: listening to them "is like being pounded to death by a bag full of rose petals and peacock feathers."

As for Mal's belief in the aesthetic superiority of music recorded by black people, here's my take on one of the 1980's greatest singles: a blast of frosty cocaine breath.

P.S: To be fair, I doubt fans of, say, Husker Du, Orange Juice, the Go-Betweens, Aztec Camera, and a dozen more of my favorite bands of the period were listening to the Gap Band or Luther Vandross (although Duran Duran, New Order, and Culture Club themselves probably were). In the mid '90s I spent too many idle hours reading Blur like Balzac – a devotion which Toni Braxton and the Babyface hit factory deserved.