Jim DeRogatis brings up a blast from the past:
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Long before I was a twinkle in the eye of Holmes’s alma mater, the University of Chicago, I was familiar with Holmes—not through his work, the only Chicago band I’d ever heard of was, oddly enough, Freakwater—but through Thomas Frank’s 1998 Harper’s account of Holmes’s struggle to (ironically) break through with his (ironic) orch-pop act Yum-Yum (“With the benefit of hindsight, 1996’s Dan Loves Patti can almost be seen as bridging the gap between Cardinal and the Arcade Fire,” writes DeRogatis), and the brutal takedown published in Suck, still my favorite online-only magazine. Which wasn’t the only outlet taking shots at Frank and Holmes, in what became a remarkable class-baiting shit fit over a, um, not-terribly-successful major-label orch-pop band:
