Today in veteran white rock musicians insulting Kanye West: In a recent interview with The Guardian, Blur’s Graham Coxon took issue with Kanye’s particular brand of artistry. When reporter Tim Jonze (he of the Lana Del Rey controversy) cited Kanye as an example of a mainstream and innovative musician, Coxon responded with the following:

He’s a fucking idiot, isn’t he? Does he even make his own albums? People aren’t interested in learning instruments and putting effort and time into it. They want it immediately. It’s McDonalds, isn’t it? It’s convenient. But all I hear is a loop starting, some bloke starts to sing or rap, and the loop finishes. There’s no shape to this stuff. And the lyrics just seem to be idiotic.

Coxon had been pontificating on the disappointments of ’90s pop music, calling the era “a wasted opportunity to make good music.” The Kanye diss followed up a statement that today’s music industry is just “a splurge of shit all over the internet.” In a less predictable portion of the interview, Coxon described a Punching Game he used to play with Blur’s Dave Rowntree and other musicians back in 1992:

“Dave used to play this game called the Punching Game,” he continues. “We all took it in turns to punch each other. I remember playing it with the bass player from Dinosaur Jr … he was fucking massive. Taller than me. He lumped the shit out of everyone.”

Rowntree remembers the game, too. “It wasn’t playful, it really hurt,” he says. “We’d sit on chairs in a big circle and everyone would punch the person to their left as hard as they liked in the head, and it would go on round. Generally it wasn’t too bad. You rarely fell off your chair from being punched in the head too hard, mainly because we were always too drunk.”

The game emerged during a gruelling American tour in 1992, when the band were forced to play their Anglocentric songs in tiny venues to bewildered crowds while they tried to pay back debts racked up by their previous manager. Coxon remembers the culture shock: “We ended up being chased out of one radio station by people with shotguns,” he says. “Just because we cussed on air.”

It’s not entirely clear whether subjection to the Punching Game and Coxon’s comments about Kanye are directly connected. Read more here.