Mime + Xena = Hokey Club Music

Pic drawn by Al Jaffee
I've recently finished the hilarious, and totally condescending Rock Snob's Dictionary. Here are some choice excerpts from the book:

Math Rock - Ridiculous micro-trend whose indie-rock practitioners abruptly shift time signatures from one bar to the next (from, say, four-four to six-eight to seven-four, hence the "math" designation) and pride themselves on their "tight" playing. Akin to the sound of seventies and eighties wank-rock specialists Rush, with more pronounced punk overtones and less hair.

Post-rock - Amorphous genre born of rock-crit necessity in the nineties, mainly to explain to a skeptical public that the free-form, slo-mo noodlings of such semi-smart strivers as Tortoise and Low were not lazy, unstructured cop-out jams but the music of the twenty-first century.

Flaming Lips, the - Late-blooming Oklahoma-based rock group, around along enough to have opened for the SEMINAL eighties hardcore and punk-pop bands Black Flag, Husker Du, and the Butthole Surfers, but now at the vanguard of a widescreen-psychedelia movement that also includes Mercury Rev and the Polyphonic Spree. Gradually sloughing off their scuzz-rock origins, the Lips won minor recognition for their hit "She Don't Use Jelly" in 1994, before hitting the Snob mother lode with their melodious quasi-concept albums The Soft Bulletin (1999) and Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (2002), which have turned their front man, the adorable, prematurely gray Wayne Coyne, into the Justin Timberlake of the Volvo-owning set.

Electroclash - Assaultive, hokey club-music trendlet with wishfully grandiose name. Poisted as the music of the twenty-second century by warehouse-club folk and newspaper style sections, Electroclash, as practiced by New York City standard-bearers Fischerspooner and A.R.E. Weapons, amounts to little more than eighties-style synth-and-beast-box music played in art galleries while its practitioners stage street-theater "happeneings" that owe more to mime and Xena, Warrior Princess than Velvets subversiveness or Warholian spark.

Ouch.

Very snobby indeed... But not snobby enough for me!