A Few Indisputable Points About Poptimism and Then I Give Up

everybody's afraid to disagree with you, so, you know, cool

this piece is by a literature professor btw

I mean, honestly, what are we doing here? Where does this go? When does the madness end? What degree of all-swallowing society-wide celebration of pop music might be considered sufficient, for pop fans? How much more slavish devotion can Taylor Swift engender before they stop calling her an underdog? What is the endgame? What level of delusion is yet to be achieved, in the space of pretending that pop music is somehow marginalized or disrespected? This is, I’m told, “pop girl summer,” and it is genuinely difficult to find new music that gets any burn that isn’t some 18 to 28 year old photogenic woman, autotuning over shlocky overproduced midtempo backing tracks complete with beats stolen from mid-2010s EDM and muddy indistinct synth lines that all sound exactly the same. (Jack Antonoff should be put to death for his crimes.) My friends: you get all the streams, you get all the good reviews, you get all the Grammys, you get all the magazine covers. There exist almost no mainstream publications that regularly cover any music other than the kind you like. If anyone uses words like “authenticity” in music criticism, they will be sent to the gulag; if anyone suggests that musicians who write their own songs possess some sort of intimate connection to them, that person receives the digital equivalent of being pressed to death like Giles Corey. What more adulation do you want for your stars? What additional level of respect is there for them to secure? What do you want?

NPR says “This summer's music charts are dominated by pop girl underdogs.” Underdogs cannot dominate! Definitionally! If they are dominating, they are not underdogs! This is the modern hell of crybullying, the person who tells you that you're oppressing them while they’re busy mashing your face into the asphalt.

And, of course, it’s mostly all a negotiation with aging. As one of the oldest Millennials, I’m watching as my generation reaches middle age and reacts to that transition, and I can give you an initial verdict on how it’s going: not well, at all. We’re mostly adjusting to it by not adjusting to it. So, so many Millennials are confronting the end of their youth by performatively embracing youth culture, loudly declaring that the only music that matters is that which you discover on TikTok. They need everyone to know that they’ve spent the cost of a new Toyota on tickets to the Eras Tour. (Which soaks up seats that might otherwise be available to actual young people, not wine moms with too much money, but nevertheless.) They might like music. But in a much deeper way, they need it. They need what they think it represents.

Of course, this is all made a little bleaker by the fact that elder Millennials were once defined as the “hipster” generation, Williamsburg residents swilling PBR at backyard parties where they listened to the latest indie darling. In other words, they - we - have gone from being ostentatiously countercultural to ostentatiously mainstream, in the span of twenty years, which makes it hard not to conclude that they - we - never actually had aesthetic tastes at all and have instead lived like little reeds in the wind, terrified of ever appearing to not be The Right Kind of Person, which can only ever be defined through our capitalist consumption, since we think that all we are is our capitalist consumption.

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It’s a grim business, reading the famous 2004 Kelefa Sanneh New York Times Magazine essay about poptimism, today. It didn’t invent the philosophy, but it was the most influential cri de coeur of its moment; it wasn’t a particularly bad expression of the argument, in fact was perfectly reasonable in the basic version that literally no one disagrees with - that what we call pop music should be taken seriously and evaluated with the same charity and rigor as any other. And yet Sanneh’s essay is an object lesson in the (predictable) consequences of ideas gone viral. Poptimism has been wildly successful, almost unprecedentedly successful, as a critical movement. But now, 20 years later, after it’s all gone toxic, there’s no widespread acknowledgement of what’s happened. Because for the poptimists everything has changed, substantively, and yet nothing has changed, rhetorically. They’re still living in a 2004 discursive world, even the ones who weren’t born when the essay came out. Sanneh:

A rockist isn't just someone who loves rock 'n' roll, who goes on and on about Bruce Springsteen, who champions ragged-voiced singer-songwriters no one has ever heard of

Not just that, but they are that, and so you see friends, it’s wicked to like Bruce Springsteen, and championing some ragged-voiced singer-songwriters no one has ever heard of - helping your readers discover new music was once kind of the point of being a music critic, but never mind - was apparently already déclassée twenty years ago.

Countless critics assail pop stars for not being rock 'n' roll enough, without stopping to wonder why that should be everybody's goal.

This could not possibly be less true today. I cannot imagine such a thing.

Rockism isn't unrelated to older, more familiar prejudices… could it really be a coincidence that rockist complaints often pit straight white men against the rest of the world?

And here you have the most inescapable and perversely powerful claim in the poptimist arsenal - “if you don’t like the music I like, you’re racist and sexist.” Of course Sanneh would never have put it that crassly, but then this was always one of the worst things about poptimist essayists: they would make more limited and qualified versions of arguments that they knew full well would become sweeping and ugly in the hands of fans. Which is exactly what happened. Ant-infested Twitter personality Arthur Chu would go on, years after Sanneh’s essay, to state baldly that anyone who didn’t like disco was racist, period. All of the care and limitation from this line of thought has been leeched out of poptimism as it has devolved into an excuse architecture for harassing and threatening people who criticize pop artists. (Personally, I don’t listen to disco because it sounds like absolute shit, and for the record a really big portion of popular disco was produced by white men.) Which is why, to pick a glaring example, it’s incredibly difficult to find negative reviews of K-pop albums in pretty much any professional venues. Who wants the grief? Those stans will burn down your house. Better to just nod along and pretend that you like it. And this is how you get model Emily Ratajkowski saying directly that if you don’t like Taylor Swift, you are definitionally a misogynist, that that is the only reason why one might not like Taylor Swift. That’s where we’re at, with this.

A recent Rolling Stone review praised the Beastie Boys for scruffily resisting “the gold-plated phooey currently passing for gangsta.”

Well, good news. Rolling Stone is now comically, self-parodically down with the youngs. Because you see, as I will not stop pointing out, many people are exquisitely sensitive to these cultural stereotypes and will change their whole personality on a dime to avoid falling on the wrong side of one. And that’s how a magazine that gave a 2001 Mick Jagger solo record five fucking stars now stands as one of the most enthusiastic enforcers of the pop consensus. Nobody wants to look old, especially old people.

From punk-rock rags to handsomely illustrated journals, rockism permeates the way we think about music.

Good news, those are all out of business now, liquidated by private equity.

Two weeks ago, in The New York Times Book Review, Sarah Vowell approvingly recalled Nirvana's rise: “a group with loud guitars and louder drums knocking the whimpering Mariah Carey off the top of the charts.” Why did the changing of the guard sound so much like a sexual assault? And when did we all agree that Nirvana's neo-punk was more respectable than Ms. Carey's neo-disco?

Who is “we”? The operative question is, does Sarah Vowell have the right to prefer Nirvana to Mariah Carey? And the communal answer, 20 years later, is definitively “NO.”

Rock 'n' roll is the unmarked section in the record store, a vague pop-music category that swallows all the others.

I have good news

If you write about music, you're presumed to be a rock critic.

I have good news

Rockism just won't go away.

I have good news

The challenge isn't merely to replace the old list of Great Rock Albums with a new list of Great Pop Songs -- although that would, at the very least, be a nice change of pace.

I have good news

The rules, even today, are: concentrate on making albums, not singles; portray yourself as a rebellious individualist, not an industry pro; give listeners the uncomfortable truth, instead of pandering to their tastes. Overnight celebrities, one-hit-wonders and lip-synchers, step aside.

I have such good news

No one cares about albums, in the streaming era, meaning that the world is left with one fewer artform, one fewer way to express aesthetic and emotional meaning. Rebellious individualism is a quaint anachronism in an era where everyone is pointing a camera at their own face all the time - the only kind of individualism is the kind that makes you just like everyone else. There is essentially no extant criticism of the music industry that aligns with the “rockist” antipathy to inauthenticity and the denial of creative control, and former Abercrombie & Fitch model Lana del Rey cosplays as a working class waitress not to backlash but to virality and cheers. No one, I mean no one, is giving listeners the uncomfortable truth. In the era of the algorithm there is no alternative to pandering to tastes. We live in a world of limitless overnight celebrities, one-hit-wonders, and lip-synchers; our entire culture industry is now set up to produce only those. I even hear that Ashlee Simpson is attempting a comeback.

Like I said, the news is good. The day is yours. You won.

No doubt our current obsessions and comparisons will come to seem hopelessly blinkered as popular music mutates some more

This is what I was saying above: everything in music criticism and music culture has changed, except music poptimist perceptions of music criticism and music culture. That is what refuses to mutate. And I think it’s ugly and toxic and has left us in this bizarre place where people who write about music for large audiences think their sacred duty is to affirm the legitimacy of what the audience already likes, instead of championing something entirely new and totally different. But then, that’s what happens when you tell a lot of mostly white and mostly male taste makers that a particular set of tastes is inherently sexist and racist - they sprint in the opposite direction as fast as they can. Because aging white men are almost as afraid of being called racist and sexist as they are of being old.

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1. You can’t fix insecurity with facts. A certain subset of pop culture fans love to talk about how, when they were kids, everyone made fun of them because of their obscure, niche, indie interest, Star Wars. That’s Star Wars, as in the franchise that produced the world’s first $100 million dollar movie, a licensing and merchandising empire unlike any seen before or since, and a uniquely popular and obsessed-over set of stories. Every kid in elementary school had a Star Wars lunchbox, but for some reason you were an outcast for having one too. When the “Marvel Cinematic Universe” was a box office juggernaut the likes of which had never been seen before, when Avengers Endgame became literally the most successful movie of all time, MCU fans still found ways to cast themselves as lonely outsiders. And, today, educated professionals in their mid-30s host podcasts in which they tell each other that their love for Taylor Swift makes them daring iconoclasts. It never changes: people will hold onto their victim narratives long after the facts render those narratives utterly absurd.
   
   And I think that this fundamentally stems from a basic dynamic - there was never any factual reality that made people insecure in the first place, so no factual reality can erase that insecurity. It all stemmed from inchoate forces below the surface. Star Wars was never ever ever unpopular, but people felt sad and lonely as kids, and so they stitched together a personal mythology about how they were oppressed for liking Star Wars. Similarly, no one has ever proven that it was ever actually the case that pop music was once critically derided, suggesting that the whole narrative is a farce. But people who like pop music have long felt like they were marginalized. They felt low status. They felt like other people had more sophisticated tastes. You can actually go back and check the reviews - my favorite poptimist claim is that Robyn was initially critically dismissed, go back and check the actual reviews fellas - but this was never inspired by actual, in-real-life critical behavior in the first place. It was always feeligns, and no amount of change in the music industry or music criticism could ever prove those feelings wrong.

2. It’s more embarrassing to try and keep up than to fall behind. I find it grimly comic that my generation has spent so many years flinging the “fellow kids” meme around; Millennials are now desperately signaling to everyone in earshot, at all times, that they’re still kids. I wrote a piece about the aging white guy stereotype, that of the guy who still always listens to Smashing Pumpkins or, if a decade younger, Neutral Milk Hotel. This is supposed to be a terribly sad condition, something pitiable. But as I pointed out, a lot of aging white men have attempted to be the exact opposite, embrace the negation of the stereotype - be the Cool Dad. I find never progressing past the musical tastes you had when you were 17 a little sad, and there’s a whole world of discovering new music without trying to stay in the scene as your hair greys. But I do find sticking with what you already loved vastly more adult and sympathetic than the alternative, which is being a 37-year-old parent and starting a TikTok to aggressively display how much you love Camilla Cabello, or an aging straight white man who ostentatiously parades around in his many Taylor Swift t-shirts, just waiting for someone to say something vaguely judgmental so that he can righteously perform the role of hip older guy, or the cool mom, who’s hip to Sabrina Carpenter and who thinks that this sentence is about someone else but I'm actually taking about you specifically, Jessica. I find the guys sitting in lawn chairs smoking shitty weed and listening to Superunknown for the billionth time so much more true to themselves, so much more at peace, and so much less pretentious than this generation of softening bodies who have given absolutely no indication that they know they must someday leave the stage. God save me from people who like things to be seen liking them.

3. It’s cruel to make people this defensive. I’ve never gotten anything out of Pearl Jam, ever, going all the way back to when they first became popular when I was 10 years old. I just see nothing to enjoy in their music. I have told Pearl Jam fans this many times, again since I was 10 years old. And you know what they said then, and in the intervening years, and would say now, when I share this low opinion? “Eh, whatever,” or “Fuck you too” or “Oh yeah, well the stuff you listen to sucks worse.” Because they understand that some people dislike the music they like and this is an inevitable and natural state of affairs. This basic, necessary wisdom has been lost. If you tell an Olivia Rodrigo fan that you think her music is bad, they’ll have you arrested on hate crime charges. These kids can’t fucking handle it; they can’t live in a world where someone thinks the music they like sucks. But that’s what liking music is! It is, inevitably, to be invested in something someone else hates. And it’s not just that I think the Pearl Jam guys are philosophically better, though I do. It’s that the Pearl Jam guys are so much healthier. It’s just a much more practical, livable way to feel and act about musical taste. But I honestly can hardly blame these Zoomers who think insulting the music they like is a kind of violation - how else do you think they’re going to behave, exactly, when you’ve told them that criticism of the music they like is inherently racist?

4. There is no distinction between “this is bad” and “this is low status.” The poptimist obsession with status hierarchies has created a broad confusion about what it means to like and not like music. And in particular, it’s common for poptimist types to say that the sin is not disliking any given pop musician but to think that your music is somehow elevated above pop music, that it operates at some higher register of prestige or sophistication than pop music. But I’ve become convinced that this is a distinction without a difference. I do think the music I like is more elevated, more sophisticated, more advanced, more highbrow than the music I don’t, precisely because it is what I like. When pop fans sneeringly dismiss the stuff that they don’t like - and they do that, for the record, with total derision utter shamelessness - they are asserting their own hierarchy of taste. (Enthusiastic poptimists do not, it will shock you to learn, follow their own advice and show mawkish respect to other kinds of music.) They have their favorites, I have mine, and there’s no point in trying to sort out where status distinctions end and pure, unadulterated taste begins. The trouble, again, is that a discourse which insists that criticizing pop music is inherently bigoted has swallowed the entirety of cultural criticism. Which leaves us in a war over tastes in which only one side is commanded to lay down their guns.
   
   In his essay, Sanneh writes “Rockism means idolizing the authentic old legend (or underground hero) while mocking the latest pop star; lionizing punk while barely tolerating disco; loving the live show and hating the music video; extolling the growling performer while hating the lip-syncher.”
   
   But what if you don’t like the latest pop star? What if you don’t like disco? What if you like live music and not music videos? What if you like growling performers and don’t like lip-synchers? What if this is all the authentic expression of how you feel, inside, when you listen to music? The biggest lie poptimists have told has always been that they’re not dictating taste. But there is no difference between making the kind of value distinctions Sanneh makes and dictating taste. They are one and the same.

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Sanneh ends his essay by writing “we deserve some new prejudices.” Well, poptimism’s prejudices have ruled for twenty years, and they have congealed into something ugly and destructive, at the end of which there’s a kid swatting a YouTuber for daring to dislike New Jeans. Can we not get the “I wash my hands of this” essays, now? Is this not far enough? Have we not gone deep enough into this hole? If this is not the right time to leave poptimism behind?

Here’s the punchline: I think a significant majority of people in our culture industry know that this shit is all crazy. I think they know that the poptimist narrative, if it ever was accurate, has been out of date for at least a decade and a half. I think the cringe along with me at most of this stuff. But nobody wants to be called racist over their opinion about KC and The Sunshine Band. Nobody wants to be considered cringe by the cool kids because they still listen to that Blind Melon song sometimes. So they just withdraw, refuse to engage. Which, I think, explains more and more of our supposed critical discourse. I see so many who seem to think that when it comes to talking shit about music the risks just outweigh the fun. And that’s a shame. Music, in particular, is a lot of fun and something worth arguing about.

I think the seething generational panic of the now-middle aged Millennial deserves to be covered, by someone, somewhere. It’s coming up on us very fast and I think someone needs to grab a bunch of 35-42 year olds by the lapels and tell them that we’re getting old and that fact can’t be negotiated away.

Can’t be me, though, at least not through this lens. When it comes to poptimism I give up, personally. I’m off this beat. I can’t generate any push on this shit from this newsletter, and I can’t get any bigger publication to run a piece about this insane turn in our culture industry. They don't. want. to permit. this critique. For an argument about this stuff to be worth writing, it has to appear in a venue that has the ability to spark broader conversations than I can. Unfortunately, those fancy places are all staffed by aging white liberals who are a) afraid to appear to be on the wrong side of identity issues, which poptimism absurdly injects into discussion of musical taste and b) usually among the most flagrantly eager to appear to still be young, to appear to still be down. So I give up. This is my last missive on this, until there’s some sort of major development. And until and unless someone who is perceived to have a great deal of credibility on this issue puts out some big piece in some big publication, I think we’re going to rest in this bizarre cultural and critical space, where tons of bright and credentialed adults continue to traffic in the utter absurdity of saying that pop music is critically disdained. Somebody has to say that the emperor has no clothes, and nobody appears willing.

The 20th anniversary of the Sanneh piece is coming up on Halloween. Might be a good pitch for the NYT magazine, for the ambitious among you. Although I doubt they have the guts to run any such thing. One thing you definitely learn, when you’ve been in this business as long as I have, is when the business itself doesn’t want certainly stories to get published. This is definitely one of those topics.

Perhaps I too will embrace the numbing power of substituting consumption for the self. So many people can’t be wrong! My body is a decaying vessel over which I have less and less control with each day that passes, all around me those I love and admire grow old and die, if I’m lucky my time on earth is already half gone, I am no longer part of a coveted marketing demographic, my hour approaches. BUT AT LEAST I LISTEN TO CHAPELL ROAN.