From a review of Tom Waits’s music in The Guardian, the writer seems insistent on contradicting himself.
After a paragraph detailing Waits’s basis in Kurt Weill’s music, he goes on to say this:

But the comparison [to Weill] undersells Waits’s originality, for there’s something almost Shakespearean about the breadth of Tom Waits’s take on modern American life.

Seriously, did he even read what he wrote?