The rock genre, pervasive as it may be, is also a highly constrained form. Even Guitar Gods (and their toadies) find themselves dwelling among the same five plus or minus two chords for much of their careers. Certain shills that call themselves "rock critics" just reinforce the practice such that the only acts they deem praiseworthy proffer little more than Academic Art, viz., rockism. Occasionally the Rock Anointed venture out and resonate with exploitable world music performers that happen to show up in the Village for a few nights, but by and large they are hidebound to the genre. Retail Therapy is a textbook example of this. Allmusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine says it well: "...the record is ambling where it should be provocative and meandering where it should be hypnotic...Retail Therapy remains a bland, colorless dead alley into electronic music from two musicians who don't comprehend its essence."Nevertheless, Retail Therapy is a useful document that demonstrates (1) Rock Bobos can't co-opt everything, (2) the Rock and Electronic genres have essentially separate and incommensurate vocabularies, and (3) those who do successfully crossover (e.g., Brian Eno, Robert Fripp, Kraftwerk, Karlheinz Stockhausen, even Cher) deserve a lot more praise than what they typically get.

TDF was a dance act project featuring Climie and Eric Clapton, with Clapton working under the name of x-sample. "TDF" is an acronym for Totally Dysfunctional Family. The project released one album called Retail Therapy on the Reprise record label. The title supposedly alludes to Clapton's "addiction" to buying clothes. Eric Clapton states in his autobiography that he persuaded Giorgio Armani, a friend of Clapton's, to let them do the music for one of his fashion shows.