Carl Wilson Should Give Himself More Credit

the pro-pop respect effort of the past two decades has been indisputably successful in changing culture; what more could any critic want?

Let me embrace the oldest cliche in essay writing: I actually agree with more of this Carl Wilson Slate essay on poptimism than you might think! To profoundly different effect, of course. But the points of agreement are there. Let me in particular endorse this paragraph and the subsequent one:

Like pretty much everyone else’s hopes about the internet, ours have come back to bite us in the ass. What we’ve gotten instead is indeed a click-based media economy, in which publications do try to produce as many headlines about a handful of big names as they can and are more hesitant to pay critics to write about new discoveries or obscure favorites, because they won’t get any views. There are still many specialty music sites where that work does happen, thankfully, but more and more of it is unpaid labor.

Matt Yglesias made this point ably, recently, that the poptimism debate makes ideas seem like currency when in fact only currency is currency. Base determines superstructure; music coverage chased the shrinking pool of money in cultural commentary, and that meant covering Post Malone instead of Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs. As Wilson says, “that’s because of eyeballs. It’s because of money.” So it is! And so it goes.

I do have my objections to Wilson’s essay, obviously, in which I am specifically named as a particularly deluded charlatan. What I object to most strenuously is the essay’s branding: it’s illustrated by an image of a literal strawman, which is meant to suggest that the poptimist figure I and others have written about many times is one that does not exist. In fact I think that figure is very real, and Slate is guilty of doing what so many do when it comes to the term “strawman”: suggesting that an argument does not exist when in fact it just isn’t a given writer’s preferred version of an argument that very much does. Wilson has his defense of pop music, other people have theirs, critics of poptimism have mostly responded to the latter, and this annoys him. I know how he feels.

I’ll start by copping to something that I have long struggled with in the discursive reality of the 21st century: argument is ambient now. I write plenty of pieces that respond to individual essays - that’s what I’m doing here - but to a remarkable degree, our ideas about politics and culture and everything else are dictated not by individual longform arguments but by tweets, TikToks, YouTube comments, group text diatribes…. Surely, the day-to-day drip of shortform opinion does more to shape our understanding of music and its place in culture than any essay in a legacy publication might. Wilson himself refers to this reality as “the digital thickets.” I doubt he’d contest my point that, in fact, those thickets are where the real action takes place, argumentatively, now. And it’s there that the poptimist he dismisses as a strawman really lives. There are many, many very loud voices in the digital thickets who act in exactly the way I’ve complained about in the past - aggressively rejecting any criticism of any pop acts for any reason, deriding the skeptics as racists or sexists or similar, and acting as though those critics deserve to have their lives ruined for their opinions. I don’t blame Wilson for not wanting to be grouped together with those people. I certainly do blame him for working so hard, in his essay, to avoid acknowledging their existence.

Here is a reality that never shows its face throughout Wilson’s long essay: vast numbers of internet denizens sincerely believe that here in 2025 pop music is a marginalized, disrespected subaltern that receives no positive coverage from music critics. If you exist on whatever’s left of Tumblr, you’ve encountered that attitude. If you have a TikTok account and pay attention to music commentary there, you’ve certainly come into contact with it. If you spend a lot of time on BlueSky, you’ll hear it. A lot of people sincerely believe - after years of pop artist dominating year-end Best of lists at the stodgiest publications; after Taylor Swift’s 2023, in which everyone decided that it should be illegal to criticize her; after Kendrick Lamar received the Pulitzer along with every other possible award and acclaim human beings have to offer; after they stopped bothering to broadcast the Best Rock Album award on the Grammys; after every softening middle-aged dad you know has spent years insisting that he just loves Chappell Roan or Sabrina Carpenter or whoever else makes him feel the least old - that pop just can’t get any respect. And that, folks, is insane. Insane! Wilson doesn’t advance that attitude himself because he’s too smart to say something so obviously wrong. But he also doesn’t acknowledge that so many people out there profess to believe this or how it might affect music criticism as a 21st-century culture. Am I not entitled to say “Hey, a lot of people passionately believe things about music media that are absolutely, 100% untrue”? Personally, I think I should be extended that right. The digital thickets matter.

Wilson writes

Here’s what poptimism was not. It was not a belief that pop music is inherently better than rock or any other kind of music, including the most obscure and eccentric. It did not say that popularity equals quality, that everything on the charts is good, or that the most popular music should get the most attention. It was simply open to the idea that it might be good, perhaps even hopeful that it was.

This gets thrown out there a lot, the idea that whatever poptimism is, it’s not a hierarchy of taste with pop on top. And what I and a few other contrarians have suggested is that in practice, as a lived philosophy, this is precisely what poptimism has become, a hierarchy of taste with pop on top. That’s how the defense of pop music operates in most instances in the real world, as an assertion of the superiority of not just pop music but the pop music being released today, right now. I suppose that the philosophical question is whether you throw in with Wilson and other thoughtful essayists and define poptimism in those terms or whether you accept that poptimism exists in the social media ether now. Either way, you should acknowledge that the latter world exists. If we’re going to talk about poptimism in a way that’s honest, we have to talk about the TikTok telling everyone that you’re racist because you think Madison Beer is an industry plant.

Wilson praises this Michael Hann essay, but that very essay’s subtitle says that “every pop release is hailed like the coming of a prophet,” which is exactly what I and others have been complaining about!

That’s what I find so aggravating about Wilson’s piece, which has the usual poptimist gloss of mildly-aggrieved condescension: it operates in this weird fantasy reality instead of the real world, where people are accused of bigotry every single day for disdaining Taylor Swift, where K-pop fans regularly dox those unwise souls who criticize their favorites, where if you dismiss Chappell Roan as an annoying Astroturf media phenomenon it means you’re MAGA, where simply saying “I prefer music that is made with real instruments rather than a computer” is represented as some sort of horrible slur, where you’ll be dogpiled for expressing anything other than total deference to the pop music of right now, this very minute. I know Wilson is sufficiently plugged in to realize that these things are happening. And I get the annoyance that comes with seeing people take a wronger, more exaggerated, less-defensible version of an argument you generally agree with. But it just is true that a lot of people out there in the big 2025 think that critics of contemporary pop should just not exist.

Well, I am a wretched soul: I think that the pop music world I grew up with as a child in the 1980s and 1990s was much better than the pop music now. I accept the stereotype and I embrace the nostalgist cliche. Forget about Bob Dylan unplugging at the Newport Folk Festival or when Seattle grunge came in and made music real again, man, all of those nostrums associated with rockism. Let’s stick to pop across the years rather than to pitting genres against each other. Comparing pop purely to pop, I think the era of Madonna and Michael Jackson, and the era of Boyz II Men and Mariah Carey and TLC, were better than the Jack Antonoff-Max Martin overproduced Reich we’ve been living through. I think the music was better. I don’t think, actually, that all popular music exists at the exact same register of quality throughout history, and I happen to hate the focus-grouped slurry of hyper-compressed beats and plastic vocals of the 2020s, engineered more for TikTok loops than for anything resembling actual musical integrity. Or, to embrace an attitude Wilson specifically holds up to derision, I do think albums are more important and more enduring statements than singles. Sorry! Wilson, and everyone else, is free to disagree! What is not debatable is that my opinion on these things is routinely treated as a crime against social justice.

It’s not possible that Wilson isn’t aware of all of these tendencies; certainly, he knows the pro-contemporary-pop Stasi is out there, as do all of the pro-pop evangelists. “Ask not what Taylor can do for you, but what you can do for Taylor,” is how he himself characterizes the Swiftie autocracy we live under. But he doesn’t want to acknowledge the larger reality because doing so would make his work much harder. If he acknowledge that, to pick the most glaring example, in 2023 the entire internet decided that those who criticized Swift deserved to have their lives ruined, he might have more sympathy for me and others who are just sick to death of the endless performance of popular music as a downtrodden culture of the oppressed. I understand that Wilson wouldn’t act the way those lunatic K-pop fans act, I get that. But neither he nor the other people who till this particular soil want to admit that such behavior actually exists, and that is endlessly, endlessly tiresome. All of us are living every day in the shadow of the threat of absolutely batshit insane stan armies who will move to crush whatever mild dissent they encounter. Is that really not worth talking about?

Would it have cost Wilson that much to spend a little more time saying “Of course, the notion that pop music is an underdog in 2025 is clearly absurd”? Would that have been so hard? Simply to give us poptimism skeptics the most important thing we’ve been asking for, which is some basic recognition that things have changed? To say that, no matter why it’s happened or if the change has been a good one, we no longer live in the reality described by Kalefa Sanneh in 2004 - the “knee-jerk backlash against producer-powered idols who didn’t spend years touring dive bars,” the world of critics “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”? This is the part that, I think, the poptimists (or whatever name Wilson and his allies would prefer) decided to skip, in the past two decades, to the detriment of basic sense: the fact that whatever else is true, we live in a world where rockism is an absolute dead letter and where the basic assumptions of poptimism are something like the basic philosophical architecture of modern music criticism. I have asked for this over and over again, and to the degree that Wilson glances in that direction, he does so haughtily, grudgingly, and in parenthetical. But things really have changed. We live on Planet Populist now, in the arts, the world of Marvel Cinematic Universe domination and chin-stroking coverage of Zelda games in The New Yorker. Attention should be paid to that reality!

The refusal to acknowledge just how much things have changed frequently leaves pro-pop music writers in ridiculous positions. The most embarrassing passage in Wilson’s whole piece, where it demonstrates itself to be a master class in missing the forest for the trees, is here:

when Rolling Stone and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame founder Jann Wenner was caught on tape in 2023 talking about how female and Black musicians didn’t have what it took to be “philosophers of rock,” it was a reminder how often the field had gone astray. Every mission statement needs a refresher from time to time.

Hey, Carl - you get that he doesn’t run the magazine anymore, right? Because the actually-existing Rolling Stone of the 2020s isn’t just a dedicated poptimist publication; it’s an almost self-parodic vehicle of poptimist excess, a relentless celebration of non-philosopher music. That picture at the top isn’t a collage! It was the actual front page of Rolling Stone on the day of the release of Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl, an execrable album from a bored billionaire who lives a life of utter luxury and celebration and yet spends all her time burning with rage at perceived slights against her. That is Rolling Stone in 2025. Yes, the magazine was the very picture of sad Boomer rock gravitas, for a long time; I’ll never forget laughing in my local public library when I saw that the magazine gave the 2001 Mick Jagger solo album Goddess in the Doorway five stars. (His bandmate Keith Richards, in contrast, referred to it as “Dogshit in the Doorway.”) But 2001 and 2025 aren’t the same; Rolling Stone isn’t the same magazine anymore. They’ve been very explicit about changing their news coverage, too, going from a groovier and less-confrontational middle aged liberalism to more explicit social justice messaging in an effort to court the youth; the same goes for their poptimist leanings. They’re trying really, really hard to leave the past behind, and I think that’s notable! I wish Wilson would bother to note it.

Indeed, precisely because the magazine has always been the beating heart of the “rockist” tradition, Rolling Stone now works so damn hard to be aggressively poptimist. This is exactly what happened with Pitchfork: being an snobby indie music fan was the thing to do for socially competitive overeducated Brooklynite shithead writers in the early Pitchfork days, so that’s what Pitchfork was, and then the culture turned (in part because of Wilson!) and so Pitchfork became the opposite, and they started publishing embarrassing horseshit like this comically overwrought group master’s thesis on a Rihanna music video. This is what I keep saying about all the aging white dads I know. The stereotype is that aging white dads all sit around in their garages listening to Smashing Pumpkins and House of Pain. But speaking as a 44-year-old white dad myself, I can tell you confidently that at least half of the other white aging dads I know are the kind of guys who absolutely will not shut the fuck up about how much they love Taylor Swift. And that is the exact same social phenomenon as Pitchfork going from being the quintessential indie rock snob fuckface publication to the most stereotypical sneering poptimist publication imaginable; both are motivated by the profound fear of appearing to fit into a disfavored cultural stereotype. Nobody wants to be a caricature. I’m guessing Carl Wilson knows exactly what I’m talking about! I wish he would stop being defensive for a minute and write about it.

I mean, really… Jann Wenner? Jann Wenner was born in the Truman administration. Wilson even says that he was “caught on tape” saying those things, meaning that there’s an already-existing assumption that his position was retrograde and disreputable. It’s just so patently phony, so obviously grubby and ridiculous, to act as though his dumbshit opinion is as important or influential as whatever the Swifties are screaming about on TikTok today. But Wilson has to keep reaching into a bag of dusty Boomer opinion because that is the only move the poptimists still have, pretending like nothing has changed since the bad old days, when in fact the whole world of music criticism has spun around completely.

Wilson insists that arguments that very much do exist don’t exist. He writes, “please point me to the critic who is against live shows” in a blast against Saul Austerlitz’s 2014 anti-poptimist piece. Well, it’s been lost to the death of Gawker and the subsequent linkrot involved, but Gawker staff writer and consummate poptimist Rich Juzwiak did in fact write in that very prominent and influential publication that a preference for live music was a vile rockist sentiment. That opinion, inconvenient though it may be for Wilson, actually exists, was published somewhere that very much mattered at the time of publication, and can be regularly encountered in the digital hinterlands today. You can’t just keep hiding in the “strawman” construct forever.

I understand that, when you’ve manned the battlements of a particular culture war as long as Wilson has (and he has, no matter how much time he spends in his essay dismissing the idea), it’s difficult to admit that you’ve won. I’m sometimes guilty of similar impulses. But times change. And the thing I don’t get about Wilson or other writers who are sensitive about poptimism’s influence is that, if anyone has ever won anything in culture writing, they’ve won! A couple years ago I got invited to Northeastern University to speak to students in a journalism class. After telling them that they should do literally anything else unless they felt truly compelled to go into journalism, I took questions. A young woman in the class said that she wanted to know how often I felt like my opinion had made a difference. I told her the truth: literally never. Doing this because you want to see the fruits of your efforts out there in the real world is an exercise in futility. You have to write what you think is true and operate on the hope that, maybe, a single person will read what you’ve put down and for the briefest moment consider whether you have a point. If you want to be able to look out into the world and see the value of your work, be a public school teacher. But the poptimists have had a truly outsized and lasting influence; they’ve actually changed culture. I don’t know why they can’t just enjoy it. Honestly. Why can’t Wilson enjoy winning? Why can’t Sanneh? Why can’t any of them? I truly don’t get it.

Wilson says

there probably was a subgroup of critics who specifically valorized pop qualities including showmanship, artifice, production, image, brightness, humor, and catchiness. (This is closer to some of the original U.K. “popists.”) Some of those same people might also have disliked the trappings of some kinds of rock. I don’t think many made it a dogmatic article of faith, but even if they did, as far as I’m concerned that’s not poptimism so much as personal taste. Which, contrary to the anti-poptimism myth, everybody’s also allowed to have.

I don’t know, man. I don’t know. I don’t know how someone who lived through the great Pitchfork Poptimism Flip Flop or watched Rolling Stone do its young person pop-fan minstrel show can say that there was “probably” a phenomenon like the one he describes. I don’t think he actually thinks this is a “probably” kind of deal. I think, like all the rest of us, he’s deeply annoyed when people make an argument to the one that’s superficially similar to one that he makes but in a dumber, clumsier, more easily-critiqued version, so he pretends this is all in the world of “probably.” I feel his pain. But Carl - Hilton Als suggested that PJ Harvey is as vital and important of an artist as Lauryn Hill, and twenty years later, Wesley Morris is still raking him over the coals for it. Is the New York Times not a big enough deal for you to notice? I ask Carl Wilson and also other pro-pop critics and also the poptimist throngs on social media and also you, my dear enlightened readers: is it not time to simply recognize that popular music does not need defending, and never did? To admit that the commercially dominant do not need rabid critical defense and never really did?

What I would ask Wilson to sincerely consider is the possibility that some of those who have suffered the worst from poptimism’s influence have been pop fans themselves. Critical coverage sharpens taste, builds community, and emboldens defense. I would contend, to pick my own particular well-ground axe, that fans of Liz Phair’s execrable self-titled album were in better shape before Pitchfork gave it a condescending pity-boost in its bizarre rescoring exercise. (On the list of written work that I would be most embarrassed to be associated with, there’s Mein Kampf, and there’s The Turner Diaries, and then there’s the Pitchfork rescoring exercise.) What’s more fun or more satisfying for a music fan, than playing the lone defender of a reviled album against the horde? The beauty of subjective aesthetics is that you get to speak as loudly as I do. When I say that Lia Phair is an impossibly cynical album that corrodes the legacy of her earlier, massively-influential and deeply personal work like Exile in Guyville, its fans get to say that the pretentious metal I like sanitizes the spirit and energy of less-hip metal subgenres for snobs like me, so that we get to posture as angry young men while still looking smarter than everyone else. (The worst music-related insult I ever endured came from my friend Jason, who likes decidedly uncool metal bands, who pointed out that I like bands 10% more if they’re from Japan and for no other reason.) This is how you define yourself as a consumer of music! This is part of what makes it fun! But you have to take as much as you give. That is the way of things: the joy of liking art has to live forever in the shadow of other people’s derision. That can hurt, but it’s better than the alternative.

For good or bad, sensibly or senseless, we define our tastes by what they are not as much as by what they are, and we build our musical identities by who rejects our choices as much as by who shares our loves. Pop fans today are spoiled for positive coverage, but they also live in a mushy aesthetic space where everyone just kind of likes everything, without any of the sharp cultural edges that help us discover who they are and who they aren’t. When Pitchfork decided to spend thousands of words exempting pop and hip hop artists from the sincere criticism of their past, it was of course a work of galactic condescension against those very genres. But it also robbed those fans of the ability to define their tastes negatively, which just is a big part of having taste. And this, more than anything else, has been what I have advocated for: a return to taste, the cultivation of a profoundly individual aesthetic, the incomparable joys of just being you and you alone, artistically, musically, critically. In a poptimist world, there is no room for the cultivation of a truly individual aesthetic, because no one will ever cop to disliking anything. And what a loss, there. What a profound loss.

Here I particularly want to again invoke the many Pearl Jam fans I have done battle against in my life. (Apologies for repeating myself, especially to Pearl Jam fans.) I have always, always hated Pearl Jam, since I was 10 years old. And I’vesaid to many a Pearl Jam fan, over the decades, “Pearl Jam sucks.” I’ve said it lustily, proudly, indiscriminately. You know what they say back? They say “Fuck you.” They say the music I like sucks. They just fight back! They fight back. Now, try going on your average social network and saying that Ariana Grande’s music is a boring, generic, shallow exercise in corporate brand-making. (Which, in fact, I believe it is.) Do you know what her fans will do? Will they say “Yeah well, fuck you, whatever,” the way the Pearl Jam fans do? Will they fight back by making fun of your favorite artist? No. They’ll contact their HR representative. They’ll say that you committed a hate crime. They’ll talk about generational trauma. They’ll say it’s racist, somehow, thanks to her carefully-cultivated post-Italian ethnic ambiguity but also because poptimism has created this weird condition where criticism of white pop artists can be called racist. Those Ariana Grande fans will lose their shit, in a way that’s going to cause them genuine distress. And I’ll ask again: which is healthier? Which is more sustainable? Which better reflects the basic reality of liking things in a subjective world where we all live as individuals?

And what I would ask Carl Wilson to genuinely think over is this: isn’t it better, and healthier, and more realistic, to act like one of those Pearl Jam fans? To understand that taste is subjective, and also a battlefield, and that it’s perfectly common - that it’s inevitable - that some people are going to hate the things we love? I would submit that it’s better for everyone, if Ariana Grande fans learn to be more like Pearl Jam fans. I would further argue that critics like Wilson, whether you want to call them poptimists are not, are the ones that taught Ariana Grande fans to be that way. And I would ask Wilson if, maybe, in Taylor Swift’s America, it might be time to teach them a different way to exist?

Me, personally, I’m beyond saving. I am, of course, pro-snobbery, pro-gatekeeping, pro-authenticity. I think selling out is real and bad. I think the values embraced by 90s musicians regarding commercialism, however hypocritical and easily abandoned, were the right values. Wilson suggests that the anti-poptimist voices like me, on my little low-readership newsletter, want to “reinstate the high-culture/low-culture hierarchy of the past.” And, well… yes. Yes, I do. Because I think the death of that hierarchy has left us in this awful place, a world of Disney adults and Funko Pop collectors, a world with 10 million screaming TikTokers complaining about “film bros” who dare to advocate for the middlebrow work of PT Anderson and Martin Scorsese, a world where the New York Times publishes deranged hero-worshipping pieces about Taylor Swift. I personally would like to try something else. Wilson is entitled to prefer the cultural discourse we have now. But he doesn’t get to pretend that it’s something other than what it is: a populist boot, stomping on a human face forever.