Poptimism and Type-of-Guy Anxiety

You may have noticed some of the recent coverage of the “Performative Male,” a new pitiable stereotype that people with too much time on their hands are (performatively!) mocking. You may also have noticed how bizarrely overcovered the story has been relative to its actual social importance. This stems from the media’s love of Person Guy stories, that is to say, when large groups of people are reduced to broad stereotypes for the purpose of ridicule, such as with the Nice Guy or the LitBro or any number of other constructs. The reason for this fixation, in turn, is that approximately 98% of people who work in media are two standard deviations above the mean in personal insecurity and it makes them feel good to reduce the rest of the world to clumsy generalizations while they maintain their self-conception as unique and beautiful individuals. “Everyone else is an easily-mocked stereotype!” is the sort of thing you believe when you’ve spent too much of your life staring out of windows, stewing in your anxiety. You can accuse me of doing the same in this paragraph, but that only underscores the point.

I’m more interested in a basic reality of human life that should be perfectly obvious in the internet age, but which people refuse to learn: every effigy the internet makes of a type of person they don’t like will result in an equal and opposite type of person, who they very well may like even less. All of these people making fun of Performative Males right now are ensuring that a lot of the dudes who are aware of the meme will push hard in the other direction, trying to be the opposite of a Performative Male, and they’ll probably end up being something worse. That’s how people work; as a species, we are unfortunately malleable in the face of peer judgment. Right now a ton of impressionable too-online dudes are absorbing the Performative Male critique and resolving to be the opposite, and in the near future a bunch of women who right now chortle along to the Performative Male meme are going to be asking themselves why these anti-Performative Males are so toxic. You know the story, but nobody seems to want to learn the lesson.

You can see the hand of Type of Guy fears in the long-dormant poptimism wars, dormant because poptimism won in an essentially uncontested rout fifteen years ago. Matt Yglesias has an interesting piece on poptimism’s victory that gets some things right but is guilty of a common flaw, for the same reason that people can’t predict the ultimately impact the Performative Male discourse will have - he can’t wrap his mind around the fact that the very critiques he’s making have spawned a counterreaction that is now demonstrably far more potent than the original. Poptimism is of course the absolutely dominant music critic ideology now, to the point where there legitimately is no alternative, though because poptimists have adopted a code of omerta about all this they’ll neve admit to that. (More on that in a minute.) Yglesias is savvy to underline the professional incentives in media as a key force in the poptimist turn:

The media industry moved firmly online in the wake of the Great Recession, and the predominant business model was ad-supported media on the free web. Succeeding meant getting a lot of clicks, and getting clicks meant getting shares on Facebook or search traffic from Google. And in the cultural domain, this entailed what was practically a 180-degree reversal of the primary role of cultural writing.

The key value-add of a newspaper critic — whether focused on books, music, movies, or TV shows — was to draw readers’ attention to things they wouldn’t otherwise have heard about. If you were lucky, your hometown paper employed one or more critics whose taste you respected and who covered areas you were interested in. You could then read those people in hopes of them recommending something you loved.

The logic of the ad-supported web inverted this…. Critics were now incentivized to write articles about the things that people already knew they wanted to read about…. Readers wanted positive, respectful, validating coverage of the most popular acts in music, and so such coverage started rising to the fore.

The death of the critic as a guide to things you don’t already know is one of the most lamentable elements of the evolution of cultural criticism in the past fifteen years, and that’s in a context where just about every element of that evolution is lamentable. You might say that nobody needs such curation in the age of the internet, given that anyone can access anything, but… we need curation in the age of the internet, given that anyone can access anything. But the concept of showing cool new stuff to your readers became declassee in the poptimist era; to suggest that there was something else readers might like, other than what they already liked, would be to suggest that there was some sort of work to be done as a fan, and that’s verboten in a poptimist ideology which forbids ever suggesting that music should be appreciated at any other level than whim. Sharing knowledge in this way is also often represented as a kind of priestly esotericism that places the music critic above the common fan, and we can’t have that. You can say I’m exaggerating, but move past the more sober discursive spaces in fancy magazines and into online-only communities dedicated to poptimism on Reddit or Tumblr and I assure you that you will find people passionately arguing that to attempt to evangelize for more-obscure music is a vestige of vile rockism, and thus of racism and sexism.

Anyhoo - what does Yglesias get wrong? Like so many, he rehearses a very common critique and then acts as though none of the people who are the target of that critique have the internet. Says Yglesias

The other factor is that, history aside, the particular demographic group that I belong to — college-educated white guys — is both the demographic group that was most into indie rock, and has also historically punched way above its weight in terms of representation in jobs like magazine editor or movie director or television showrunner. As a result, our idiosyncratic niche culture had a tendency to worm its way into aspects of mass culture.

This is the most sacred contention in the poptimist bible, that rockism is the domain of stodgy old white men, and that is why it ultimately ruled, because poptimism’s ascent tracked the rise of a crude identity liberalism that left savvy people scrambling to decry whiteness and maleness (in ways that had no ability whatsoever to actually erode structural white and male advantage). Yglesias does not state the obverse, but it has been asserted relentlessly in this discourse: if rockism was the domain of the aging white guy, poptimism was correspondingly a project of young women and people of color, who were fighting the white male establishment to get critical acclaim for the pop acts that (in this fantasy) represent the rebellion of the marginalized, a blow against patriarchy and racism.

Of course, this should prompt an immediate question: is it actually true that most of the writers behind the poptimist fatwa were young women and people of color? And the answer to that question is, no! Not at all! Not even close! The prime movers of poptimism were Carl Wilson, Jody Rosen, Rob Sheffield, Sasha Frere-Jones, Chris Richards, Rob Harvilla, Al Shipley, Chris Molanphy, Rich Juzwiak…. The face of poptimism, to me, is Nathan Hubbard, a former ticket sales executive turned podcaster who’s been locked in a performance as the most sycophantic pop evangelist you can imagine for like a decade now. The poptimist revolution would never have happened at anything like its level of current dominance if not for the white men who became its most performative, enthusiastic champions. (Yes, you can point out that it took white men for a supposedly white male-skeptical critical ideology to flourish, and you would have a point.) We could also talk about poptimism-adjacent voices like Chuck Klosterman or Stephen Thomas Erlewine etc. Or you could just exist on the internet and see what a huge percentage of poptimism evangelists (particularly the most aggressive among them) are haughty white dudes with Warby Parkers. If we expanded from just white dudes to dudes of any race you’d be capturing like 90% of the poptimist voices out there, including people like Jon Caramanica and Craig Jenkins and Hua Hus and all manner of other bros.

What’s particularly notable is the number of white male converts there are to poptimism, guys like Tom Breihan who were conspicuously not of this lineage at first but who were gradually beaten into the poptimist form by shouty online types and the profound difficulty of making a living writing about music. You could even add Yglesias here; exactly a year ago he was complaining about poptimist tyranny. Sooner or later, they all fall. It’s just not pleasant to be called racist and sexist online, for most, and many people simply find their artistic tastes to be too ephemeral to be worth risking it. One thing that the 2010s proved is that progressive-leaning white people will almost universally fold to any argument that might result in them being accused of racial insensitivity, no matter how frivolous that argument might be. So they all came to love Big Brother.

You might look at Rolling Stone in all of this. The magazine is the baby of Jann Wenner, who has all of the Boomer attachments that people love to mock. And Rolling Stone was frequently cited by poptimist critics as the temple of rockism. As is typical in this discursive space, that impression was exaggerated at best; it simply wasn’t true that the magazine systematically handed out lower review scores to pop artists, and many major pop acts received rapturous evaluations in Rolling Stone. (Fun thing to do: look at how often Robyn has been cited as an example of an artist who didn’t receive her due because of rockism, then actually go into the archives at various music publications to read the largely-laudatory reviews she actually received pre-poptimism.) But even if we accept that critique, today’s Rolling Stone has sprinted as hard away from rockism as it possibly could, and now serves as one of the most relentless and hectoring advocates of poptimist hegemony we have. This arc was even more true of Pitchfork, which went from exemplifying 2000s music snobbery to being the 2010’s most ruthless enforcer of poptimist dominance we have. In both of these eras, of course, we see the hand of the limitless insecurity of smart kids.

But why? Why is it that poptimism is a discourse driven by white men who insist that it’s a movement of women and people of color? And why is it a hegemonic force in its cultural space that insists that it’s a plucky underdog? I think in both cases it’s Type of Guy stuff. Most people are just deeply sensitive to being forced into a suit that they don’t feel fits. Of course, you don’t have to be forced into anything; you can just not give a shit what people online are calling you. But the average guy, it appears, can’t function that way. This is the internet era, and most people seem to lack the sense of self necessary to believe that they have a real nature that exists outside of public opinion about them. I hate to again invoke this explanation, but there’s my usual observation that in the recent past the people that should be the least insecure (highly educated urbanite meritocrats) became the most insecure. And if there is one holy principle that people in media specifically adhere to, it’s that there’s nothing worse in life than being owned online; to be owned online is a fate worse than death. And they see people chuckling about the Litbro (which only ever actually encompassed maybe twelve guys) or the Performative Male and they say, that’s not gonna be me.

Well, poptimism’s core tactic is a Type of Guy tactic - if you like Radiohead or jazz or think music should have any ambitions other than momentary dopamine release, you must be an aging white man, a reviled figure in 2010s Twitter discourse. The fact that so many people invoking this particular syllogism were themselves aging white men proves the point: there is nothing more terrifying, to many, than the shock of self-recognition. And the only way to feel comfortably immune to the accusation of being an aging white man was to loudly, ostentatiously embrace the musical discourse that was supposedly the domain of the opposite of the aging white man. Due to the way the internet works, that meant attacking other white men for perceived rockism, which was implicitly and explicitly tied to various identity crimes that had come to be seen as particularly ugly. In this way, the formation of a crude stereotype became the primary means through which a particular aesthetic philosophy was enforced, and it was very effective despite the fact that none of this makes any sense.

All of this is what Nate Patrin calls “taste policing, where people attempt to assign these personal, arbitrary values to cultural phenomena that they then use to alternately empower or diminish people just for being into those things….the way people categorize things, talk about the things they like, and subsequently go to war with each other over some of the most subjective displays of taste.” Patrin goes on to specifically discuss Type of Guy-ism, this seemingly insatiable need to force others into procrustean identities while maintaining the belief that you yourself are a singular and uncategorizable bird. Patrin refers to the death of tastemakers, but what we’ve really seen is something far worse, which is the death of taste; under the relentless peer pressure that the internet enables, the idea that every individual should be in possession of a deeply personal and highly idiosyncratic taste that they are willing to go to war to defend has become deeply unpopular. In the place of taste, we have more and more people who insist that a work of art’s quality is entirely commensurate with its popularity. Which of course means that there should be no musical criticism or appreciation at all, just a single sad counter that tells us how many times a song has been played.

I’ve listed some prominent critics, but in terms of someone who exemplifies the particular best-defense-is-a-good offense school of poptimism is Jack Hamilton, a Slate music critic and professor at the University of Virginia. Hamilton is one of the most aggressive, theatrically sneering poptimists in the business, and that is a very crowded field. He is a white man. If the conventional poptimist vision of the world were correct, we might expect Hamilton to be “rockist,” a term no one ever embraced and which people now flee from with the same panic that they might flee from being associated with NAMBLA. But like so many white men in his milieu - that is to say, culturally progressive spaces like media and academia - Hamilton is relentlessly fretful about not appearing to be down, and thus he takes the basic poptimist case and turns it up to 11. His method of engagement is almost universally blank derision; he rarely argues, which might make his targets seem worthy of argument, and instead crafts the kind of affectedly dry bon mots that the internet should have gotten over years ago. Again, this has all been remarkably effective from the perspective of spreading the movement. Whether it’s been similarly effective for Hamilton’s self-conception, who can say?

There’s a new Kelefa Sanneh piece about poptimism, more or less, which is something I’ve been waiting for with great anticipation. Sanneh, I think, is a good symbol for the best of poptimism and also for its inevitable corruption. I 100% believe that Sanneh never intended that poptimism would become about enforcing a particular taste, but anyone who was remotely aware of the nature of human aesthetic movements should have been able to predict that. I 100% believe that Sanneh never wanted for poptimism to contribute to so much fan harassment of music critics - you’ll notice that negative reviews of Kpop albums simply don’t get published - and general lunatic behavior, but anyone who was remotely aware of how stans act should have been able to predict it. I 100% believe that Sanneh didn’t want poptimism to become the all-consuming cultural kaiju it became, but anyone who knew that ultimately commerce rules over aesthetics should have been able to predict it. Sanneh does not quite express the regrets that I hope he might, but the piece is wistful enough that I feel somewhat satisfied. More than anything, what I have asked for of the poptimists for the past decade is simple: acknowledge that all this has happened. Admit that you won. We are about to embark on another grinding period of mandatory Taylor Swift worship. Would it hurt you so much to be gracious in victory? Sanneh gives me the closet thing to such an admission that I’m going to get.

The basic for negative criticism about pop or any other genre persists. At one point, Sanneh asks, “why commit that [negative] judgment to print, when, instead, I could wait to see whether it will grow on me, as awkward-seeming albums sometimes do?” The answer, of course, is that without the regular presence of the critical conclusion “this is bad,” the critical statement “this is good” has no meaning, can have no meaning. This is basic wisdom that has been lost.

The politically-motivated, not-really-reviewing-the-book-at-all user reviews of my new novel are starting to appear. That’s OK. Coordinated efforts by the usual suspects to bury my book by media people who don’t like me were always in the cards. It was always inevitable, they were always coming; I knew it, my agent knew it, Coffee House knew it. I have faith that it will find its audience, and I can only hope that reviewers at publications that still cover books will have the integrity to review the book and not its author. It’s interesting to see that tactic that’s been taken so far (almost universally by people who cannot yet have read the book) on BlueSky and similar. It appears to be mostly the usual dude-writes-women complaints, sex scenes too flowery, women too horny. This kind of complaint depends on directly misrepresenting what’s in the book; for example, the idea that it contains cringy sex scenes is weird, given that there is one sex scene that is contained within a single sentence and lasts for fewer than 20 words, and it’s written with the same clinical detachment I used for the whole text. And hypersexuality is a core symptom of bipolar disorder, particularly among women; I’m sorry if that’s unpleasant, but then that’s kind of the whole point of the book, right. That’s a fact that you could have Googled.

Then again, this is a book that has already been accused of being a special snowflake story when the core observation of the protagonist is that she is deeply ordinary, and one which has been said to have blurbs from Andrew Sullivan and Pamela Paul, two people who as far as I know have not read the novel and who are correspondingly not on the book’s cover at all. The critique itself, though, is just classic Type of Guy stuff; the cringey male novelist who writes overwrought descriptions of women’s desire is a prominent stereotype. You can anticipate my question: is it true that contemporary male novelists write a lot of novels that feature such a thing? And I would say, from my admittedly limited perspective as just one reader of contemporary literature, that the answer is no, obviously no. I would argue, in fact, that most male novelists are exquisitely sensitive to that stereotype and run as far away from it as they can. Because they have the internet! Two different early readers of the manuscript of my novel said that they thought it was good but that I should change the protagonist to a man because the aggravation of the Dude Who Writes Women stuff just wouldn’t be worth it. I declined that advice. But the fact that it exists should tell you something, right? It’s just like with the Litbro: whatever your opinion of the salience of that critique, the fact is that when it blew up, bookish dudes sprinted away from saying they liked David Foster Wallace and started bragging about their love for Toni Morrison, to be anything but the Litbro. That’s just how people work.

I don’t know why this simple reality is so hard for people to grasp: when you invent a Type of Guy, you ensure that people will go to great lengths not to be that Type of Guy. And the pitiless march of poptimism to utter critical dominance was, to a significant degree, underwritten by exactly that anxiety.