This week, Ray Davies was asked about Moby’s recent comments criticizing the Kinks. His response was four words: “Who the f**k is Moby?” The quote spread quickly across music sites, as such things do, and most people took it as a simple diss. It is a little more interesting than that.

Davies is 81 years old. He wrote “You Really Got Me” and “Lola” and “Waterloo Sunset” and “Victoria” and somewhere north of a hundred other songs that have outlasted every era they were written in. Moby is a Grammy-nominated producer and musician who had one of the best-selling electronic albums of the late 1990s with Play and has since become known as much for his diet and his opinions about other artists as for his music. These are not equivalent careers. Davies knows this. That is the joke.

But the thing about the Davies response is what it says about hierarchy in pop music, and how that hierarchy is felt but rarely spoken aloud. There is a generational gap between artists from the classic rock era and the alternative-to-electronic artists who emerged after MTV, and it is not a gap that gets bridged often. Davies coming out of that gap to simply express bewilderment at who Moby is, sincerely or performatively, is a reminder that fame is not uniform and legacy is not linear.

Moby’s career has been unusual. He was a genuine pioneer of electronic music in the early nineties, playing almost every instrument himself at a time when that was not the model for electronic production. Play arrived in 1999 and became the best-selling album in electronic music history up to that point, fueled by its unusual licensing strategy of making every track available for film and television use. He was everywhere for two years and then, in the way these things go, he was not.

Since then, Moby has remained a working musician and a fairly prolific commentator on the music industry. He has criticized other artists periodically, sometimes with valid points and sometimes with the specific energy of someone who peaked in a particular moment and has complicated feelings about the artists who came after. His criticism of the Kinks, a band that formed before he was born and whose creative peak came when he was a toddler, sits in that latter category.

Davies’ dismissal is the classic move of someone who genuinely does not have to know who you are. It is not cruelty. It is just the honest response of a man who wrote songs that are still in rotation sixty years later, being asked about someone whose songs are in rotation mostly in nostalgia playlists. The temporal distance between their respective moments of peak cultural saturation is roughly thirty years. Davies writing “You Really Got Me” and Moby making Play are separated by more years than Play and the current day.

What makes the exchange interesting is that both artists have real claims to influence, just not on each other. Moby’s work in the early nineties helped shape the sound of electronic music in ways that matter. The Kinks’ influence on British pop, punk, and Britpop is documented in a hundred retrospectives and covers and tribute albums. These are parallel lineages that never needed to intersect.

Davies calling out Moby, or rather calling out Moby’s name as unknown to him, is funny in the way that most honest statements are funny. He is not wrong that from his vantage point the comparison Moby is drawing is odd. He is also not entirely unaware of what he is doing. Davies has always had a performer’s instinct for the crowd-pleasing line.

The larger question the incident pokes at is what it means to criticize someone from a different era of music. Moby invoking the Kinks to make a point about something contemporary requires the assumption that the Kinks’ legacy is stable enough to use as a reference point, which it is. What it does not require is that Ray Davies be interested in the comparison. He is not. That is his right. And it is genuinely funnier than most things that happened in music this week.