Terence Leung

Inventory

21 magazine articles in R4NT between June 2001 and April 2005 — 5 in 2001, 8 in 2002, 6 in 2003, 1 in 2004, 1 in 2005. No blog companion pieces. The bulk centers on music (album reviews, year-end lists, an interview, mood-driven mixtapes), with four cultural essays plus one outlier movie review on the side.

Voice

Leung writes with deliberate excess: run-on sentences, exaggerated metaphors ("warbly Magpie," "electronic fuckery"), self-aware sarcasm, and a willingness to express contradictory impulses inside the same paragraph. He favors parenthetical asides, lists within prose, and sudden tonal shifts from formal analysis to crude jokes. His critical vocabulary oscillates between academic (Adorno and Horkheimer, face-symmetry research, Gagné's model of talent) and locker-room. The signature move is the self-stacking parenthetical — "[and am using comments placed in brackets to make this shorter (read: lazy)]" — which lets him simultaneously do and undermine the bit. The volatility is intentional: a posture that refuses easy consumption.

Topic mix

Music reviews and year-end lists dominate (about fifteen pieces — Coldplay, Oasis, Travis, Muse, Beth Orton, Cerys Matthews, Tristeza, Remy Zero, the year-end "Anti Anti-Top Ten," the Music Grab Bag mini-omnibus). Cultural essays form the spine: gender bias in music publicity (Ugliness Rears Its Ugly Head on Talent), disability and the boundary of comedy (The Police Officer, The Construction Worker…), post-Janet-Jackson censorship hysteria (The Breast Police), and homophobia in the gay-marriage debate (You're a Fag!). One movie review (Scary Movie 3) sneaks in. One mock-instructional comic essay (An Illustrated Guide to Playing Guitar Like a Lazy Person) sits alongside everything else without explanation.

Evolution

• 2001 — confessional listening: My One Hundred Dollar List of Shame outs his Bryan Adams / Tom Cochrane / Vanilla Ice CDs; N'SYNC? Bigger than Jesus? stages the same argument with his brother in a Toronto record store; Top Whatever sends up the year-end-list industrial complex while filing one. Establishes the voice: snide, listy, secretly tender about Catatonia.
• 2002 — peak output (eight pieces) and pivot to album-as-argument. The Coldplay, Beth Orton, Oasis, Remy Zero, and Tristeza reviews each test a different model of what a record can do; the Chuck D interview is the year's most generous piece; Ugliness… is the year's most serious.
• 2003 — broadest range. The Cerys Matthews review is a tender redemption story; Music Grab Bag is a sketchbook of half-reviews; the year-end "Anti Anti-Top Ten" indulges in self-mocking critic-club fantasy; The Police Officer… is the longest moral argument; Scary Movie 3 is a 600-word complaint that he wanted better dookie jokes.
• 2004–2005 — he closes with two op-eds. The Breast Police is a vulgar broadside against post-Super-Bowl moralism; You're a Fag! reframes opposition to gay marriage as discomfort with one specific image, then dismantles the rest. Both brief, both acidic, both confident the reader will keep up.

Standout pieces

1. Interview: Public Enemy's Chuck D — A substantive multi-question exchange on hip-hop's future, indie distribution, and the politics of visibility. Leung moderates effectively and lets Chuck D articulate a vision of technology democratizing rap.
2. Ugliness Rears Its Ugly Head on Talent — His most sustained cultural criticism. Using face-symmetry research and photo comparison, he argues female musicians are selected for beauty while male musicians are permitted to be unconventional. Dense, footnoted, uncomfortable, urgent.
3. The Police Officer, The Construction Worker, The Indian, The Biker and The Retard — A 3,000-word essay on the boundary between comedy and cruelty, sparked by watching a man with Down Syndrome dance to YMCA at a basketball game. He refuses easy answers, interrogates his own sadism, lands on something genuinely philosophical.
4. Beth Orton — Daybreaker — A masterclass in voice analysis: Orton's delivery as "warbly Magpie," believability connected to genuine emotion. One of his few purely admiring reviews.
5. Coldplay — A Rush of Blood to the Head — Acknowledges the band's sincerity while dissecting the rigid conventions of "Old Sad Bastard Music." Ends with a Radiohead comparison that invites readers to speculate on trajectories.
6. An Illustrated Guide to Playing Guitar Like a Lazy Person — A tonal oddity: humorous, self-aware, illustrated. Leung weaponizes laziness as a pose while sneaking in genuine guitar pedagogy.
7. Oasis — Heathen Chemistry — The funniest demolition in the run. Opens "This 'album' is pure shit" and earns it: a contract-with-Satan thesis about why post–Morning Glory Oasis collapsed into "carnival sideshow." A Brit-pop heartbreak letter disguised as a pan.
8. The Anti Anti-Top Ten Songs of the Year List — The Belated Edition — His best pure-voice piece. Invents the "Pop-Culture Essay Enthusiast Association" and the "My Knowledge Reigns Supreme and No Two-Bit Hack Will Compromise My Overtly Feeble Opinion Society" before quietly making his actual case for fun.
9. You're a Fag! — His final piece. Argues, with characteristic vulgarity, that opposition to gay marriage reduces to a single visceral image and that a private discomfort isn't grounds for public policy. Brief, principled, unsentimental — and a fitting close.
10. The Breast Police — Post–Super Bowl reaction essay attacking censorship hysteria. One of his few pure hot takes.

Throughlines

Melody is Leung's core value — he returns obsessively to whether pop music retains genuine emotional peaks. He distrusts both prog-ambient boredom (the Tristeza review's "shitty sleep music") and manufactured pop (the N'SYNC numbers vs. the Bible), but grants exceptions to artists (Coldplay, Beth Orton, Catatonia, Muse, The New Pornographers) who blend accessibility and ambition. Beneath the crude humor lies a moralist concerned with authenticity, representation, and whether commercial culture permits genuine voice. The closing op-eds aren't a swerve — they're the same argument scaled up: keep your hands off the things that bring people pleasure unless you can show real harm.

Fun details

• The "List of Shame" is real: Bryan Adams' Waking Up the Neighbourhood, Tom Cochrane's Mad Mad World, Vanilla Ice's To the Extreme. He'd rather "stick needles in my foot" than listen again, but won't throw them out either.
• The Tristeza review pivots from a dissertation on REM sleep to the claim that the album "could pass for a soundtrack in a 16-bit adventure video game fit for the Super Nintendo." That sentence is the whole pan.
• The Anti Anti-Top Ten imagines critics dueling "by reflecting bright lights off crappy CD's into each other's eyes and making each other cry by playing Coldplay in the background" — a sentence that contains his entire stance toward music journalism.
• Scary Movie 3 is the only film review in the run, and the complaint is that the movie's poop jokes weren't poop-y enough — he wants Jeff Daniels' toilet scene from Dumb and Dumber, not "facsimile" spoofery. The standards are exacting even for dookie.

The arc

Four years, twenty-one pieces, one of the magazine's most distinctive voices. He arrived as a record-store ranter, matured into a structural critic of gender, disability, and free speech, and signed off with two short, principled op-eds. Never abandoned the pose — he was still cracking boobie jokes in 2003 and 2005 — but used it to smuggle in arguments that wouldn't have worked straight. A short, sharp run that punches well above its weight.