The Pale Fountains

"Generalizing wildly, I’d argue that the higher echelons of American music writing are oriented more to significance than to jouissance, resonance rather than rapture. (Hence that blend of vernacular and lofty that reaches its highest heights with the work of Greil Marcus.) Sontag declared herself against interpretation, calling for ‘an erotics of art’; what I think you get in the best of the British school of pallid theory is a kind of eroticized hermeneutics, a libidinized delirium of over-interpretation."

Simon Reynolds in Frieze Magazine considers the use of theory in pop-music criticism.