Abstract
Two accusations circulate around the mid-1980s reception of Howard Jones, and each is an accusation of resentment. The first is made by reviewers about the music: beneath the synthesizer optimism sits a scolding, aggrieved posture toward audiences, institutions, and “conditioning.” The second is made by fans, by later revisionists, and occasionally by critics about critics: the hostility of the British music press toward a commercially successful, sincere, unfashionable artist was itself a grudge, the reflex of people who hold judgment but not the thing judged. This paper treats both charges as specimens of the same analytic problem — resentment as an imputed interior state, inferred from a surface that does not confess it — and uses the pair to build a working typology. I propose five diagnostic axes (object, direction, etiology, disguise, and remedy-relation), eight named types, and four falsification tests intended to keep the category from doing what it usually does, which is to explain everything and therefore nothing.
1. Why This Pair Is Useful
Resentment is one of the few psychological categories that critics, moralists, and political analysts all deploy freely and none define carefully. It is the workhorse of cultural explanation: a voting bloc is resentful, a genre is resentful, a review is resentful. The word carries a built-in verdict — to name a motive as resentment is to disqualify it — and it is almost never asserted in the first person. Nobody writes “I resent this record.” The state is always attributed.
That asymmetry is what makes the Howard Jones case worth the trouble. Here is a small, bounded, well-documented reception history in which the same charge is fired in both directions across a status gap, by parties who are not symmetric in any other respect. One side has commercial success and no critical standing; the other has critical standing and no commercial stake. Each accuses the other of the affect proper to the loser of the exchange. Both cannot be right in the same sense. Sorting out how they differ is the beginning of a typology.
Two constraints on the argument. First, this paper does not adjudicate whether Howard Jones is a good songwriter; the reception is the object, not the catalog. Second, and more important, the paper is skeptical of its own instrument. The accusation of resentment is cheap, unfalsifiable in its usual form, and structurally immunized against denial — a calm reply is composure concealing the grudge, an angry reply is the grudge itself. A typology that does not build in falsification is just a nicer-looking version of the same rhetorical move.
2. Case A: The Resentment Reviewers Find in the Music
2.1 The reception in brief
Jones arrived in 1983–84 as a one-man synthesizer act with a mime onstage and a first album titled Human’s Lib. Commercially it worked: he is associated with the 1980s Second British Invasion of the US, performed at Live Aid in 1985, and has sold over eight million albums. Critically, especially at home, it did not. The standard account is that his relentless positivity made him a target in the press, particularly in England, where critics preferred the gloom of New Order and Depeche Mode to a man who shared the stage with a mime and wrote lyrics counseling listeners to enjoy the present and let the future sort itself out. Contemporary reviews took the material as thin: writing in Sounds, David Tibet dismissed the debut as lightweight electronic pop and suggested listeners deserved something more demanding than “aural air conditioning”, while another notice mocked the confidence with which worn-out commonplaces were presented as discoveries.
2.2 Where the resentment reading comes from
Note that “lightweight” is a different charge from “resentful.” The resentment reading is a second and more interesting move, and it comes from attending to the album’s verbs rather than its mood. Human’s Lib is not a happy record about happy things. It is a liberation record, and liberation records require a captor.
The opening track is “Conditioning”; a later reviewer hears in it a systematic closing-down of hope and individuality carried by increasing discordance. The same review finds in “Hunt the Self” an impatience on the singer’s part, quoting the song’s declaration that it is time for a change and its swipe at deep talks with fine-sounding scholars. It identifies a recurring tendency toward pulpit preaching, in the out-of-tempo coda of “Equality” and the rhetorical structure of “What Is Love?”, and observes that sometimes his lectures verge on hectoring — the diagnostic instance being a lyric that tells the listener what he wants even when he thinks otherwise.
That last construction is the crux. “You want this even though you think you don’t” is not an optimistic sentence. It is a sentence about a listener who has been made unfit to know his own good, and it presupposes an agency that did the making. The optimism is downstream; the grievance is upstream. Jones sings cheerfully because he believes the human being has been conditioned into a smallness that is not native to him, and cheer is the demonstration that the conditioning is reversible. The album title says as much: lib, as in liberation, as in something currently held.
So what reviewers detect is real, but they detect it under the wrong name. The affect is not primarily resentment at persons. It is grievance at a structure — schooling, class expectation, respectable pessimism, the credentialed talkers of “Hunt the Self” — combined with mild contempt for the audience’s complicity in it. The contempt is the part that reads as resentment, because it is directed downward and sideways at the very people being addressed, and because it is delivered by a man who is winning. A grievance held by someone at the top of the charts looks ungrateful, and ingratitude is one of the surfaces under which resentment is usually diagnosed.
2.3 The counter-evidence
Jones himself declines the frame. Asked decades later whether hostile press treatment cost him credibility he might otherwise have had, he replied that he had not worried about it, because he was confident the message was in the songs and the things surrounding the music were largely outside his control. He also, notably, never developed the standard grievance catalog of the wronged artist: no comeback record about the critics, no memoir score-settling. He has kept working across four decades, and in a recent interview about artificial intelligence expressed the belief that the good guys will win out in the end. This is either equanimity or the most disciplined suppression in the history of British pop; the parsimonious reading is equanimity.
3. Case B: The Resentment Others Find in the Reviewers
3.1 The charge
The counter-accusation runs roughly as follows. The music weeklies of the early 1980s were a status economy with its own currency — coolness, difficulty, the correct affiliations — and Jones arrived holding a different currency he had not earned in their market. Worse, he was earnest, provincial, and self-made: he hired the Marquee Club in 1983 and invited record labels to come see him perform, which is the do-it-yourself ethic the same papers claimed to prize. He was also happy in public, which is the one posture a status system built on discernment cannot metabolize, because happiness is available to anyone and confers no rank.
On this reading the pans were not judgments but tolls: a levy on someone who succeeded without the papers’ permission. Jones’s own interviewer put the structural version plainly — that different marketing and positioning might have won him far more respect from papers like the NME, since the early work had a punk-adjacent spirit of challenging the status quo and doing it yourself. If the same content plus different packaging would have flipped the verdict, the verdict was about placement in a status order, not about the record.
3.2 The structural argument
The general form of this charge is old and Nietzschean: the person who lacks a good and cannot obtain it revalues the good as contemptible, and the revaluation feels, from the inside, like refinement. Applied to criticism, the claim is that the critic occupies a permanently derivative position — no catalog, no audience of his own, standing borrowed entirely from the objects he ranks — and that the position generates a chronic low-grade grudge against those whose standing is primary rather than borrowed. The professional inhabits this suspicion daily; the trade’s own literature returns to it constantly, most visibly in the long argument over rockism and poptimism.
That argument is worth reading as evidence rather than as theory, because both of its sides accuse the other of exactly this. The anti-rockist case holds that a critical consensus favoring singer-songwriters with traditional instruments on albums was a status structure with an orthodoxy attached, and that the snobbery it enforced neglected artists who were not white and male. The anti-poptimist case returns fire by charging that the replacement is not judgment at all: that some critics, unable to form judgments of their own, took commercial success as their guide, and that a tenet worth keeping is refusal to grade a record by its chart position or a concert by the crowd’s response. Detractors add that under the new consensus, standards of originality and craft got subordinated to audience metrics, so that weak work from sales leaders escapes a pan. Observers on both flanks note the resulting flatness: once a star reaches a certain level of fame, bad reviews stop arriving, critics turn into cheerleaders, and the discussion settles into uncritical consensus.
The pattern here matters more than the merits. Each camp explains the other’s evaluations by reference to the other’s position. That is the resentment move, executed twice, and its ubiquity should lower our confidence in any single deployment of it.
3.3 The counter-evidence
Two facts cut against the strong version of the charge. First, the same press that buried Jones elevated other synthesizer acts working the same technology, which means the objection tracked something other than instrumentation or commercial scale — plausibly the didacticism catalogued in §2.2, which is a real property of the records and not an artifact of envy. Second, hostility to Jones was not uniform across markets; American reception was warmer, and the durable revisionist case for him now comes from critics, not from fans. A grudge structurally inherent to the critical position should not vary so cleanly by nationality and decade. What varies by nationality and decade is fashion, and fashion is a weaker and more ordinary explanation that covers the same evidence.
4. What the Two Cases Share
Both are attributions, never confessions. Neither party claims the state. Every instance in the record is one party explaining another party’s output by an interior condition the second party denies.
Both infer the affect from a surface that contradicts it. Jones’s grievance is read through cheerfulness; the critic’s grudge is read through the language of standards. In each case the disguise is treated as confirming evidence, which is precisely the structure that makes the charge unfalsifiable.
Both require a status asymmetry to be legible. Remove the gap — imagine Jones unsigned, or the reviewer as a peer artist — and the same sentences read as ordinary disagreement.
Both perform a transvaluation. Jones’s records rename mainstream respectability as captivity; the hostile review renames mass affection as vacancy. Each converts a thing not possessed into a thing not worth possessing.
Both are, in the strict sense, moral claims wearing psychological clothes. “You are resentful” means “your judgment does not deserve a hearing.” It is a disqualification, not a description, which is why it is so rarely accompanied by evidence that would distinguish it from its alternatives.
5. What Separates Them
| Dimension | Jones (as read by reviewers) | Reviewers (as read by others) |
|---|---|---|
| Object | A structure: conditioning, schooling, respectable pessimism | Persons and their success |
| Direction | Against a system the singer claims to have escaped | Across a gap the critic cannot cross |
| Etiology | Thwarted ideal — the world fails a standard | Comparative — another holds what I lack |
| Named remedy | Yes, explicit and repeated: liberation, self-examination | None; the charge implies no program |
| Cost to holder | High — cost him critical standing for a decade | Low — conferred standing within the guild |
| Would granting the good dissolve it? | No; Jones held the position while winning | Predicted yes, and this is testable |
| Confessed? | Semi — the grievance is the stated content of the songs | Never |
The decisive difference is the fifth and sixth rows. Jones’s grievance was expensive to hold and survived success, which is the signature of conviction rather than of envy. The grudge attributed to reviewers is cheap to hold and is predicted to dissolve if the status gap closes — and something like that dissolution is observable in the poptimist turn, in which the same institutional position, once the gap was reframed, began producing praise as reflexively as it once produced scorn. An affect that flips polarity when the incentives flip was never about the music.
6. A Typology of Resentment
6.1 Five axes
- Object — person, class, institution, structure, or self.
- Direction — upward (against those above), downward (against those beneath, usually for their complacency), lateral (peers), or reflexive.
- Etiology — injury (something was taken), comparison (another has what I lack), or thwarted ideal (the world fails a standard I hold).
- Disguise — overt, or sublimated into an idiom that reads as its opposite: cheer, connoisseurship, duty, humility, concern.
- Remedy-relation — programmatic (a stated cure exists and would end the grievance) or terminal (the state is self-feeding and would survive its own satisfaction).
6.2 Eight types
T1. Prophetic resentment. Object: structure. Direction: upward and downward at once. Etiology: thwarted ideal. Programmatic. Grievance against a system for deforming people, paired with impatience at the deformed for their acquiescence. Costly to the holder and survives his success. Human’s Lib is a clean specimen. So, at a different altitude, is most reform literature.
T2. Positional resentment. Object: persons who hold a good. Direction: upward. Etiology: comparison. Sublimated as standards. Terminal. This is the classical ressentiment of the critic charge, and the type most often asserted without evidence.
T3. Custodial resentment. Object: whoever threatens a form the holder guards. Direction: downward. Etiology: thwarted ideal, sincerely held. Sublimated as duty. Semi-programmatic. Rockism at its most defensible belongs here rather than in T2 — a guardianship that experiences its own exclusions as fidelity.
T4. Insurgent resentment. Object: the custodians. Direction: upward. Etiology: injury (exclusion). Sublimated as inclusiveness. Programmatic, and prone to becoming T3 upon victory. The poptimist turn is the case in chief, including the reversion.
T5. Displaced resentment. Object: whoever is available. Direction: any. Etiology: injury sustained elsewhere. The diagnostic is target-substitutability: the affect precedes its object and would attach to a different one just as well. A critic whose real grievance is with an industry, discharged onto an artist, sits here.
T6. Reflexive resentment. Object: the self, usually the conditioned or complicit self. Etiology: thwarted ideal turned inward. “Hunt the Self” names this directly. Under-theorized, and important, because it is the type most likely to be projected outward and misread as T2.
T7. Vicarious resentment. Object: those who wronged a third party. Held by fans on behalf of an artist who declines to hold it himself. Jones’s equanimity coexists with a partisan literature considerably angrier than he is. This type is durable precisely because its holder pays none of the costs.
T8. Imputed resentment (second-order). The attribution itself, when it functions as disqualification. Not a state of the accused but a move by the accuser. Both of this paper’s cases are, at the level of the evidence actually available, specimens of T8 wrapped around contested instances of T1 and T2.
6.3 Four falsification tests
Applied to any imputation, these separate the diagnosis from the insult:
- The withdrawal test. If the withheld good were granted, does the affect end? Ending indicates comparison-etiology (T2, T4). Persisting indicates ideal-etiology (T1, T3).
- The specification test. Can the holder name the object and state a remedy? Precision indicates conviction; diffuseness indicates T2 or T5.
- The substitution test. Would another target serve as well? If yes, T5.
- The cost test. What does holding this cost? Costly positions held over time against incentive are poor candidates for T2, which is by nature a cheap posture with a status payoff.
Jones passes the specification and cost tests and fails the withdrawal test in the direction of conviction: T1, with a T6 seam running through it. The imputation against the reviewers passes the withdrawal test in the direction of comparison but generally fails the specification test, since it is rarely made against a named critic with named evidence — which places most instances of it in T8, hovering over a genuine but unproven T2.
7. Scriptural Anatomy of the Same Categories
Scripture supplies the sharpest case in the literature, and it is a case about a song. In 1 Samuel 18, the women meet the returning army with a chant ranking Saul’s thousands against David’s ten thousands, and from that day Saul eyed David. The grievance is not that David did wrong. It is that a public ranking, delivered in verse, assigned relative worth. Every element of T2 is present: a comparison the resenter did not choose, an object who has committed no injury, an affect that arrives fully formed the moment the chart is published, and a subsequent career of behavior rationalized as prudence and duty.
The distinction between the types is likewise scriptural. Cain’s anger in Genesis 4 and the elder brother’s in Luke 15 are comparison-etiology and terminal — in each, granting the good would not have satisfied, since what is wanted is the other’s non-possession of it. Jonah’s anger at Nineveh’s sparing is a thwarted ideal soured into T2. Against these stand the prophetic denunciations, which are grievances against structures with remedies attached and costs borne by the one who speaks. The tests in §6.3 are, in substance, the tests already implied by that contrast.
Two proverbs do most of the diagnostic work. Ecclesiastes 4:4 observes that every right work brings a man the envy of his neighbor, which is the general law under which the critic charge is a special case: excellence reliably generates comparison-affect in observers, so its presence is weak evidence about any particular observer. Proverbs 14:30 names the physiology — envy as rottenness of the bones — the point being that this is a wasting condition in the holder, not merely an injustice to the target. James 3:14–16 completes it, distinguishing bitter envying and strife, which produce confusion and every evil work, from wisdom, which is peaceable and without partiality. Partiality is the operative term: the sign of T2 is not severity but inconsistency of standard across targets — the same fault forgiven in the fashionable and punished in the unfashionable. That is a testable claim about a body of reviews, and it is the empirical program §8 recommends.
Jesus Christ’s teaching supplies the corrective that keeps the typology from becoming another weapon. The instruction to examine the beam in one’s own eye before the mote in another’s is precisely a warning about T8: the confident diagnosis of a neighbor’s hidden motive is the characteristic act of a person not examining his own. A typology of resentment used chiefly to catalog other people’s grudges has failed on its own terms.
8. Research Program
The typology above is analytic; the following would make it empirical.
- A partiality index. Code a defined corpus of 1983–86 UK weekly reviews for fault-categories (didacticism, simplicity, sentiment, technological reliance) against artist fashionability. T2 predicts that identical faults draw unequal penalties. This is the single cleanest available test of the critic charge and, so far as I can find, has never been run.
- Longitudinal reversal analysis. Track individual critics across the poptimist turn. T4-becoming-T3 predicts that the same writers reverse polarity while preserving the form of their judgments.
- Cost accounting. For any artist accused of T1, document what the position cost in access, airplay, and standing. Costless grievance is a different animal.
- The confession gap. Assemble first-person admissions of resentment across criticism, memoir, and interview. The rarity of the confession relative to the frequency of the accusation is itself the finding, and it bears directly on how much weight T8 should carry in any reception history.
- Extension beyond music. The pair examined here — an earnest producer accused of a grudge against his audience, and gatekeepers accused of a grudge against his success — recurs in film, in academic reception, and in the reception of popular religious writing. The typology is portable and should be tested where the status gap runs in different directions.
9. Conclusion
The two charges are not mirror images, and the temptation to treat them as symmetric should be resisted. Howard Jones’s records do carry a grievance, and the reviewers who heard something scolding under the cheerfulness were hearing accurately; they simply misfiled a structural complaint with a stated remedy as personal sourness. The counter-charge against the reviewers is more plausible than its targets admit and less proven than its proponents believe — plausible because the profession’s own long argument about rockism and poptimism is, from end to end, two camps explaining each other’s judgments by each other’s positions; unproven because the specific claim has almost never been tested against the review corpus in a way that could fail.
What the pair mainly establishes is a caution. Resentment is a real state with distinguishable species, and the eight types above are worth keeping. But the accusation of it is a solvent that dissolves whatever it touches, including the accuser’s obligation to argue. The value of a typology is not that it lets us convict more precisely. It is that, by specifying what each type predicts, it tells us what would have to be true for the charge to be wrong — and forces the person making it to say why he is so confident about the inside of a stranger’s head.
References
Erlewine, S. T. (n.d.). Howard Jones: Biography. AllMusic.
Grow, K. (2018, March 10). Howard Jones and the importance of staying poptimistic. InsideHook.
Nietzsche, F. (1887/1998). On the genealogy of morality (M. Clark & A. Swensen, Trans.). Hackett.
Regev, M. (2004). “Rockism” and the canonization of popular music. In U. Beck (Ed.), Global America? The cultural consequences of globalization. Liverpool University Press.
Sanneh, K. (2004, October 31). The rap against rockism. The New York Times.
The Mouth Magazine. (2017, February 5). Howard Jones [Interview].
Then Play Long. (2014, April 15). Howard Jones: Human’s Lib.
Tibet, D. (1984). [Review of Human’s Lib]. Sounds.
Robbins, I. (2025, September 7). Pop, rock and the ism dialectic. Trouser Press.
Rosen, J. (2006, May 9). Does hating rock make you a music critic? Slate.
