Earlier this month, the UK prog-rocker Steven Wilson, leader of the band Porcupine Tree, released his solo album The Overview. It’s got two tracks, and they span about 20 minutes apiece. The LP came out on the same day as Playboi Carti’s long-awaited 30-track data-dump Music. According to NME, The Overview was briefly projected to reach #1 on the UK album charts, which would’ve been quite a coup. It didn’t happen. In the end, Music topped the UK chart, and The Overview came in at #3 — still hugely impressive, considering the nature of the record. Now, Wilson has some words for Carti and for the generation who made him a star.

In a recent interview with The Telegraph, Steven Wilson says, “I’ve been touring around indie record stores, and I’ve yet to meet anyone who’s even heard of Playboi Carti,” which probably says more about Wilson than it does about Carti. He goes on: “[Carti’s] music is almost the antithesis of mine — short, minimal, full of the kind of digital sounds you hear on mobile phones. There are no solos, which have completely disappeared from modern music. It’s all about the vocals these days, and it reflects the pace of life we live now. I completely understand why it might be more interesting to 15-year-old kids raised on computer games and TikTok.”

Wilson didn’t necessarily say all this to settle some score with Playboi Carti. Instead, he seems to be making a larger point about the shorter attention spans of the listening public. Elsewhere in the interview, Wilson claims that tracks like Dire Straits’ “Private Investigations,” Rod Stewart’s “Maggie May,” David Bowie’s “Sound And Vision,” and Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” would not “have a hope in hell today.”