Despite its fair share of accurate observations, the concept of hyperstasis is nihilistic to a fault. Firstly, determining the value of music by the extent to which it’s innovative is a strange and depressing way to think about art. The vast majority of songs which have ever been written do almost nothing to contribute to new genres or sounds or styles. My favourite song of all time is Sam Cooke’s ‘That’s Where It’s At’, an exquisite, joyful piece of music which brought absolutely nothing new to the table, if you were judging it by that metric. In the decade after Reynolds wrote those words, each and every week there have been great swathes of records filled with striking new ideas, they just weren’t necessarily ones based around the pioneering of a new type of song. I had never, for example, heard a track like Xenia Rubinos’ ‘Mexican Chef’ before: a tight, bouncing funk tune which explores the army of working-class Latino cooks behind half of America’s restaurants. How about Little Simz’ thundering, cavernous ‘Offence’ or Nick Cave’s utterly haunting ‘Hollywood’. These songs are stunningly creative and original in almost every other sense of the word, so why discount them? Underpinning the concern for the future of music espoused by the likes of Reynolds was a mourning for the loss of the political radicalism supposedly baked into stylistically revolutionary art.