I Keep Writing the Same Poptimism Piece Because Nothing Ever Changes

Golly!

This is, I acknowledge, just a celebrity saying something very stupid. But honestly, in the context of contemporary culture, it’s barely exaggerated compared to the norm. The assumed ideology in 21st-century American life is that your personal and political virtue is expressed in your consumer choices, that you reveal your innermost ethical self not through your actions or even your utterances but with the consumerist cultures you labor to broadly associate yourself with. I liked Barbie just fine, thought it was very entertaining, but I also think that it’s a movie and people can like or dislike movies and that’s OK. That’s just personal taste. But as you’d expect it takes just a moment of searching to find people saying that if you don’t like Barbie, it’s evidence of internalized misogyny, or maybe externalized misogyny, and either way you’re generally evil. It’s the same energy here, only in movies there’s at least still some notion that quality exists independent of politics. (And what we take to be the politics of a given creative work, at this point, is really just a broad referendum on its popularity.) With music, there is no longer any sense that some external reality exists at all. In 2023 music is only its presence in other people’s opinions. And like everything else that happens in musical culture now, this is a vestige of “poptimism,” a critical mindset that has reached a place of total hegemony within the world of professional music commentary - largely through exactly this kind of faux-political condemnation of anyone who doesn’t toe the right line.

I don’t have much patience for the idea that we live in a simulation, but I sometimes change my mind when I think about Taylor Swift. Because I occupy the world that I occupy, and I see that it’s one in which absurd hagiography about Taylor Swift is published literally daily, and I note a cultural reality in which anyone who says a critical word about Taylor Swift in any context will get their house set on fire by her fans, and I think to myself that it must be impossible for any human being to possibly believe that Taylor Swift is insufficiently respected, honored, or protected. And yet I find that I occupy the world with another sentient being who has thought to herself, “Why doesn’t Taylor get any respect? Must be hatred of women,” and this prompts me to consider whether my universe is real at all. Real or not, we must always go deeper in the worship of pop icons. And so misogynist, once a term used for men who repeatedly beat their wives or who pushed a sexually aggressive “PUA” agenda, now accrues to those of us who don’t find much to love in the music of Taylor Swift.

This attitude, while crude and extreme, is not without precedent. Ten full years ago, music critic Ernest Baker wrote “If you don’t like the new Beyoncé album, reevaluate what you want out of music.” This may lack the implied threat of Ratajkowski’s comments, but it’s no less direct: there’s a right way and a wrong way to like music, and if you don’t worship our pop queens, you’re doing it wrong. And you’re probably a bad person.

This desire to be on the right side of history, when it comes to proving your political bona fides through reference to pop culture ephemera, appears to be overpowering. (Or, really, the desire to not appear to be on the wrong side of history.) There’s this new mini-genre where repentant aging music critics go back in the vault to perform the ritual ablutions of re-evaluating a song in line with current mores. I’ve already discussed Pitchfork’s re-scoring article, an object of magisterial self-involvement where they came oh so close to admitting the obvious, that music itself simply has no purchase in the Pitchfork universe and functions only as an instrument for personal branding. These re-scorings, some of which literally do not mention the music at hand, all point in one direction: pop is good, other things worse. (Also Grimes was to be derided because at the time she was engaged to Elon Musk, but now that they’ve split up I’m sure a re-re-scoring is in the works.) A lot of people are retroactively getting with the program in this fashion. Here’s Tom Breihan of Stereogum, writing about one of my all-time least favorite hit songs, “I Kissed a Girl” by Katy Perry.

When Katy Perry’s “I Kissed A Girl” was new, the song annoyed the fuck out of me. As someone who’d been charmed by Jill Sobule’s “I Kissed A Girl” as a teenager, the Katy Perry song seemed crass and pandering and obnoxious — a forced attempt at titillation that treated same-sex attraction like it was a party trick. I wasn’t the only one, either. I don’t remember any music critics admitting to liking Perry’s “I Kissed A Girl.” Idolator called it the worst song of 2008. Fifteen years later, though, the outrage has faded, and so have the Jill Sobule memories. Now, Perry’s “I Kissed A Girl” sounds like a platinum-plated steamroller, an unstoppable engine of glam-pop dominance. It also sounds like effective marketing.

Interesting! The whole premise of Breihan’s column is that he’s re-evaluating number one hits, and anyway he’s entitled to change his mind. To me, that song still sounds like an overproduced piece of garbage with an unlistenable chorus, an incredibly amateurish desire to court controversy, and shaky vocals from a woman desperate to escape her Christian rock past. The difference is that while Breihan’s embrace of the least-inspired pop idol of her era can just be a matter of evolving music taste, my disdain for the song amounts to evidence of a lack of personal virtue. The very concept of taste as taste appears to be dead.

Poor Jill Sobule catches a stray here, but she has to - because she wasn’t ever as purely poppy an artist as Katy Perry, she is the pig who must be casually, offhandedly slaughtered in the commission of proving that dad/music critic Tom Breihan is down with the youth and, you know, feminism or whatever. This stuff wallpapers the internet. Nobody wants to appear to be a “rockist,” a category that literally no one self-identifies with and a term that describes a theoretical figure who could not possibly be more culturally marginal. (The only accusatory identifier that’s thrown around more casually than rockist is fascist, and I think there are some fringe dweebs who actually embrace the latter mantle.) White-haired hifi guys you meet at Record Store Day are careful not to appear to be rockists, now. Poptimists, I promise, the day is yours. Stereogum is a poptimist publication. So is Pitchfork, and so is The Fader, and so are rockist temples like Rolling Stone and Spin, and so is everywhere else. I will countenance any and all arguments against what I’m saying here, but for this: poptimism has hegemonic control of music criticism. There are no challengers.

Were the argument just that pop music is better, I could live with it. I’d think that argument was reductive and dumb and wrong, sure, but it would be a point worth disputing. The problem with the poptimist argument is that, as an actual argumentative phenomenon, it treats preferring other types of music as actively wicked, pathological, disordered. I can’t find the piece now, but Rich Juzwiak once responded to a member of a traditional band who talked about the joy of listening to real instruments, as opposed to those manufactured in a computer, by accusing him of rockism. And I think that’s a really good gloss on this whole enterprise: poptimism in practice, as it actually exists as a force in the world, is simply a matter of one group of people telling everybody else what they can and cannot like. That’s it. You are not allowed to prefer live instruments; that is not a preference you can hold as a good and enlightened person. You see, because native-digital music has some vague and broad associations with pop music, and pop music is somehow simultaneously the most powerful force in the industry and this incredibly fragile thing that could collapse at the slightest whiff of disrespect, good people can’t like the way an actual wood-nylon-and-steel violin sounds or simply want to reward music made by real human hands.

And this ultimately is what poptimism really is, not the intellectualized poptimist ideal but poptimism as a social practice: a theocracy of taste. As much as they squawk about just wanting equal respect or being taken seriously by critics or whatever, lurking behind every poptimist take is resentment that other people like music they don’t. Scratch a poptimist and beneath the thin veneer of critical equality and artistic populism you’ll find someone who resents the possibility that there are other aesthetic values than their own. This resentment is driven by what I’ve been writing about for years - people who lack a sense of self and have mistaken their pop culture consumption for their personalities, and who thus cannot coexist comfortably with the notion that other tastes are equally valid. If you are what you like, other people’s tastes are terrifying.

The sad thing about all of this is that the simplest expression of poptimism is more or less fine. Kelefa Sanneh’s famous anti-rockist essay (which, it happens, does not contain the terms “popist” or “poptimist”) is old enough to vote now and seems quaint along multiple dimensions. The basic notion that pop music deserves to be taken seriously like any other kind is of course entirely correct. The relationship between artistic popularity and artistic quality will always be complicated, but yes, it can happen that some people turn against the popular in general, for being popular, which is senseless. Opposing that tendency is noble even if the tendency itself is trivial. The trouble is that, first, the poptimist sausage gets made by talking about a time when pop artists simply would not be taken seriously, by anyone, and this time period never existed. Go back and read old issues of Rolling Stone, the supposed epicenter of rockism. You’ll find rapturous reviews for some of the poppiest artists imaginable. This is true of every artform, ever - the most popular stuff can always find an agreeable critical accounting somewhere. Not uniformly positive, but if literal uniform positivity in critical reception is the demand, then we’re truly at sea. (More on that at the end.) Can it really be a credible fear, that popular music won’t get a fair shot? The poptimist attitude is utterly indistinguishable from that of the aggrieved Star Wars fan - the rage of the already enfranchised.

Yes, there existed and exist dudes that didn’t take pop music seriously. But pick any genre out there, and you’ll find lots of people who don’t take it seriously! Do you think if I went to the parking lot after a Beyonce concert and started blaring Napalm Death from my car stereo, the people walking by would bop their heads and say “Oh man, I respect you so much”? Of course not; they’d tell me to shut off that noise, and there isn’t a professional music critic alive who would judge them for doing so. But if you reverse that scenario, and a grindcore fan judged Beyonce fans for their taste in music, suddenly they’ve committed some sort of horrible crime against taste, a moral and political crime. And this is the truly aggravating element of all of the populist posturing we get in pop culture these days, the lack of solidarity across difference. I’ve said before that I could respect (say) the angst of resentful Marvel comics fans, convinced that they get no respect, if their feelings of marginalization inspired them to express support for the ballet and orchestral music and experimental theater fans whose beloved artforms are dying out. But they never do; they just whine about being oppressed while supporting the biggest entertainment juggernaut of our generation. It’s the same way with poptimists. They could look at metal fans crowding into shitty small venues and cheering for bands that will make a total of $700 on a ten-city tour and see something to admire. But they just want other people to say their tastes are the right tastes.

The second fundamental problem with the idealized version of poptimism is that the edict “take pop music seriously” in practice has always become “don’t subject pop music to critical evaluation.” But of course, being unwilling to subject a genre to real, unsparing critical appraisal is the opposite of respect, the opposite of taking it seriously. And I can tell you from personal experience that pop music fans take the existence of any negative reviews as proof-positive that the world is out to get them. When I publish this piece, some pop fan is going to send me some obscure blogger saying he doesn’t like Dua Lipa and treat the existence of that opinion as evidence that poptimism doesn’t exist.

I’ve reached a state of disinterested bliss about all of this; I know you can’t puncture this cultural wall with words. Sanneh’s big paradigm-changing essay came out in 2004. We had poptimism talked about as a dominant critical mode nine years ago (and again) and eight too and reflected on ruefully by Sanneh himself, all of it in the Obama administration. Hell, in 2006 Jody Rosen wrote “many of my colleagues, like me, have embraced the anti-rockist critique with particular fervor as a kind of penance, atoning for past rockist misdeeds.” And yet if you go to, say, Tumblr and look at the spaces where this stuff is debated, you’ll find that most people still act as though poptimism is a plucky underdog, still waiting for its day. Julia Kristeva wrote that the category of woman did not exist; she was always in the process of becoming. Poptimism is kind of the same except, you know, bullshit. I say that nothing ever changes with this topic because the kind of Enlightened Pop-Respecting Music Dudes who got mad at my last poptimism essay never, ever acknowledge that they are in fact part of an overpowering critical order, one which is so dominant that I can’t name a single challenger to the crown. Certainly not “rockism”; what fool would be so misguided as to make that their calling card? Until the Tom Breihans and Pitchfork staffs and assorted music reviewers of the world admit that this is a thing that is actually happening, there’s no chance for reform. And they have no incentive to stick their necks out that way.

I mentioned the concept of a genre that never receives negative reviews at all, and here I leave you with a challenge: before you get mad at this essay, go find negative reviews of K-pop albums. Find any! I defy you to find critical reviews of K-pop albums on any professional site, anywhere that boasts a five-figure or more readership. I defy you. Go look. Go. K-pop fans themselves find this condition weird! So tell me: if there’s no possibility that an entire genre of music will ever be called bad, what does it mean when people call it good?