Art & Creativity Quote by Mark E. Smith

Mark E. Smith is doing what he did best: turning taste into a knife and then acting surprised it cuts. On the surface, he is dismissing Pavement as a second-hand version of The Fall, but the line’s real engine is the sneer in "when you reckon it up" - art reduced to bookkeeping, influence turned into a petty audit. Smith isn’t arguing; he’s scoring. The offhand "isn’t it?" is the punchline and the trap, inviting agreement while daring you to object.

The jab works because it’s built on a contradiction Smith understood intimately: rock mythology worships originality, yet most of guitar culture runs on theft, revision, and scene gossip dressed up as innovation. By naming a specific year - "The Fall in 1985" - he frames authenticity as something time-stamped, local, and already claimed. It’s not just that Pavement sounds like someone; it’s that they’re allegedly borrowing from a period Smith can designate as his territory, his weather, his grime.

There’s also class and posture in the insult. Pavement’s slacker irony and collegiate cool read, from Smith’s vantage, as aesthetic tourism: American kids importing post-punk abrasion without the economic and social pressure that made it feel necessary. "They haven't got an original idea in their heads" is less a literal claim than an assertion of hierarchy - a way of policing the canon while reminding everyone that The Fall weren’t a vibe; they were a method.