When Robert Smith said that he “disagreed violently” with Radiohead’s pay-what-you-want experiment and added that “it can’t work,” the Internet backlash was inevitable. The Cure singer has decided to confront said detractors by fighting fire with fire: Smith took to his blog, blogged about bloggers, and made additional points about his thoughts on the modern digital music dilemma, adding, “ANYONE THAT DISAGREES WITH THIS POINT IS UNLIKELY TO BE AN ARTIST.” Kanye may have hacked into his account.
“MY POINT IS NEITHER PARTICULARLY NEW NOR ORIGINAL NOR EXCLUSIVELY ABOUT RADIOHEADS ‘IN RAINBOWS’ BUT IT IS I FEEL STILL COMPELLING,” Smith wrote. What follows is an impassioned (read: lots of caps and exclamation points) argument for people to be wary of exulting Radiohead’s experiment too much. He notes that bands like Radiohead can only succeed in offering free products because they have already benefited from corporate financial backing for many years. Then he stands by the point he made in his original statement, saying “AN ARTIST HAS TO VALUE THE ART THEY CREATE. OTHERWISE I DONT BELIEVE THEY CAN BELIEVE IT TO BE ART.”
For the record, we never offered much of an opinion about this topic, but we did hint that saying Radiohead’s multi-million dollar payoff “can’t work” was a bit dubious. Either way, we’ll let you judge for yourself, but be careful because Robert Smith called the previous critics “CRETINS!”