Calvin Harris: Mad as hell, not gonna take it any more. Image: Sweded

Calvin Harris – the former Sainsburys shelf-stacker who claimed to have created disco and offered hugs to those born in the ’80s – has a new album out on Monday. Ready For The Weekend is meant to be Harris’s riposte to everyone who thought he was just a MySpace-era gimmick.

However, the first reviews are already in, and Harris has lost his shit on Twitter. With almost 72,000 followers at the time of writing, he’s a popular Twitter user, so Harris had to realise he’d get press for his series of enraged tweets on Friday morning, UK time, in which he accused the music press of being filled with posh gits with more euro-activity than neuro-activity.

“THIS ENTIRE INDUSTRY IS FULL OF RICH PEOPLES KIDS, EVERYWHERE, FUCKING RICH PEOPLES KIDS RICH PEOPLES KIDS,” Harris tweeted. “RICH PEOPLES KIDS GETTING GOOD REVIEWS BECAUSE MUMMY FUCKED THE JOURNO IN THE 80S. FUCK YOU RICH PEOPLE YOU WILL NOT BREAK ME I DON’T GIVE A FUCK I HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE YOU ARE ONLY RICH PEOPLE. RICH PEOPLE MEAN FUCK ALL TO ME SERIOUSLY. I’M MAKING MUSIC FOR REAL PEOPLE AND REAL PEOPLE DANCE – RICH PEOPLE STAND AT THE BACK. FUCK THE RICH PEOPLES KIDS WITH THEIR JOBS AS RUNNERS ON TV SHOWS OR THEIR ‘CLUB NIGHTS’ FUCK YOU YOU’VE DONE NOTHING ABSOLUTELY FUCK ALL.”

When he’d calmed down enough to use lowercase letters, Harris revealed what was really bugging him. “Imagine you just spent two years of your life making a record. On your own. Every single day, long hours, working to get it sounding right,” he wrote. “Imagine the buzz of making something that you love, and after two years you finally have something you can’t wait for other people to hear.

“Then imagine that CD landing on the desk of ‘Snide Rich Person’s Kid’ or ‘Pathetic London Scene-FACE’ then them skipping through the tracks in their lunch break, and saying, ‘Well it’s Calvin Harris isn’t it? Two stars, he’s a dickhead’,” Harris continued.  “I’m telling you now that it doesn’t feel good. BECAUSE OF THE FUCKING RICH PEOPLES KIDS there are people who will like the album who won’t get the album because they saw a shit review.“

Pop-philosopher Alain de Botton echoed Harris’s sentiments in June. Caleb Crain, who had given The Pleasures And Sorrows Of Work a scathing review in the New York Times, linked to the review on his own blog, provoking a furious blog comment from the slighted author.

“You have now killed my book in the United States, nothing short of that,” de Botton wrote. “So that’s two years of work down the drain in one miserable 900 word review … I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make. I will be watching with interest and schadenfreude.”

When an artist’s livelihood largely depends on consumers taking their cultural cues from tastemaking reviewers, it’s understandable that they might view poor reviews as malicious and unjust. But as Patton Oswalt reminds us, really terrible things are also the product of loving consideration and mental labour. Now, we’re not suggesting that Ready For The Weekend is pop music’s answer to Death Bed: The Bed That Eats, but Calvin – mate! – critics are allowed to dislike it.

And now they dislike Calvin. it’s intriguing that some British critics have responded defensively to Harris’s posh-bashing, when the more level-headed option might have been to ignore it, or to point out that Harris is no stranger to publicity-seeking. He recently soundtracked a Coca-Cola commercial (the song’s on his new album), and ‘went viral’ with a video in which he turned a bevy of hot chicks in their undies into a human synthesiser.

“For the record, Mr Harris – I’m far from rich, my Mum didn’t fuck any rock stars, and I still think you’re shit. And a bellend. So there,” writes Jamie Smith in The Music Magazine.

“Calvin Harris can rest assured that Iain Moffat, who will be reviewing Ready For The Weekend for the Quietus, is not the son of rich parents, and hails from the North East,” says the Quietus.

“I have to agree that he gets a bit of a rough press,” writes Tim Jonze in The Guardian. “I’ve elevated him to the position of evil pop genius, cackling away as he presses the buttons that invoke frenzies in festival tents. That said, his new single is complete pants – and I didn’t need monied parents to tell me that.”