In October, these words appeared in Pitchfork. My opinions on these matters are well-known, at this point, and they are of course contestable. It’s also the case that this kind of framing has become so ubiquitous that it barely seems to reference the real world at all. And yet I would hope that anyone would be able to understand the confusion I felt when I read this. By which I mean, what are indie records? What is “indie”? Which acts are indie acts? What is being referred to, here? Indie rock no longer exists, in 2024. There is no scene. Williamsburg at this point is like a neighborhood-sized artisan coffee shop where the napkins are ethically sourced and the labor non-union. There are no cool clubs anywhere keeping the flame burning, not sufficiently to produce albums that people actually listen to, anyway. No remotely plugged-in person under the age of 50 who’d like to be perceived as fuckable would openly claim to like “indie records.” In the mid-2020s that’s like saying that you’re a fan of the Confederacy. Someone recently emailed to say that when I write about poptimism, I’m just grinding out culture war the way I accuse others of doing. But as I said to him, “culture war” implies multiple sides. Culture war
I think your confusion about the “indie record” thing can be resolved once you recognize that it is a quote from Taylor Swift “We are Never Ever Getting Back Together”. Of course, that isn’t going to make you any happier .,,
I think it's axiomatic that Pitchfork had an audience, of white bearded indie dudes who agreed Daydream Nation was the best album of the 80s, then turned against that audience. And this can never be a good idea. In Britain the music newspaper Melody Maker did the same thing with the late 70s turn from prog-rock to punk. The audience only partially responded, continuing to vote Genesis albums their favourites right into the 80s, but they continued to buy Melody Maker because back then it was a source of information on gigs, releases, new bands etc. Today there's no need to go to Pitchfork for that information. And so their audience stopped and the new audience they were so assiduously courting with pieces about Beyonce being the mother of House Renaissance (what, you can be queer by acclamation now?) never turned up.
I think I've said this here before, but when I originally read Pitchfork's Best Songs of the 90s and they put Pavement's Gold Soundz at the top, I went off to listen to it. I hadn't heard it before, this was new information, I was interested. Didn't like it but whatever. When they revised their list and put Mariah Carey's Fantasy at the top I didn't go off and listen to it because I already knew it; everyone knows it. It was one of the bigger hits of the decade. It's far closer to my taste, I listen to Carey all the time, but there was no point in telling me. It's not new information. It's useless. And if you're useless, if you're only able to point your readers to stuff that's popular already, you have no purpose even if I agree with you.
For various reasons tied to the death of criticism generally, I agree that people defending the need for serious writing about pop music, or positioning themselves against rock music as if it's some immovable obstacle is sort of weird now.
But I think you're wrong to conflate the questioning of rock music's position at the centre of what constitutes serious music with 2024 poptimism.
The increasing questioning of "rockism", for want of a less stupid word, was as much to do with encouraging people to take metal more seriously as it was with asking whether some manufactured pop might be more interesting than whatever then critically acclaimed rock music was.
It was also about establishing the idea that other genres are no smaller than rock music in the volume of what is produced, nor the validity of discussions about their depths, whether techno, or jazz, or ambient music, or country or whatever.
The reality was that all best albums of all time lists, of the kind that I suppose you don't see as often now that music criticism is basically dead, were the same rock albums and a weird cursory nod to arbitrary rap, techno or jazz albums, usually the same ones each time, not that anyone involved was ever really listening to these or they even made sense in such an isolated context. (I feel sorry for all the rock kids who got told to listen to "Kind Of Blue" when it appeared in NME's top 100 albums ever list yet again, when Miles Davis in the seventies is so obviously the best starting point for a rock kid.)
While whatever is left of day to day internet discourse may be dominated by the kind of poptimism you describe, that doesn't mean that the essential idea that what is ultimately valuable in music is mostly rock music has gone away.
Those ideas are deeply rooted. They are inherent in how people think about songwriting, image, instruments, and technology. For most people, rock is the entire solar system and instrumental music, or jazz, or techno, or music with lyrics that aren't in English, or flamenco or whatever, these are just little planets at the sides.
This will never change. I don't really care, as I get older, because discovery is part of the love of music for me, but when I worked as a music writer I cared a lot because it was frustrating working against a canon.
In the end, the only real change that this movement of anti-rockism or whatever achieved was the victory of poptimism, which I think mirrors the kind of "victories" we see a capitalist society allowing in other parts of life.
I’m about as divorced from modern popular music trends as possible (I was shocked that Andre 3K made an album tailor made for me). But even I have noticed how weird it now is to watch concert footage from the late 60s and 70s and see all the young women so enthusiastic about rock music.
Totally agree with the general thesis and thoughts that are in this piece -- as someone who is younger (21) I've never cared about Pitchfork or considered them to be relevant when it comes to the kind of music that I am interested in. I am curious, however, about when you say that there isn't indie music in 2024. I've seen a lot of people lamenting that rock is a dead genre, it doesn't matter anymore, no one is making rock music or whatever, and I guess I'm just kind of confused by that rhetoric. There are lots of smaller artists making interesting, underground, and independent music that isn't overly commercial or concerned with massive success. And while they might not be getting nods from publications like Pitchfork or Rolling Stone, there are still people who are invested and enthusiastic and rolling out for basement shows and standing room only small venues. I guess as someone who goes to a lot of concerts, some of them big stadium shows but a lot of them 200/300 capacity type deals, I feel like when people opine the death of rock music/underground culture it strikes me as melodramatic/overly pessimistic. Music is hellishly commercial but people were saying that same shit in the 90s. Art and passion persist regardless.
The weirdest thing about the modern criticism landscape is when they decide to throw a metal band a bone for no particular reason. E.g. when Sleep came out with their first album in many years, Pitchfork and NPR did glowing reviews. Which is good, I guess - The Sciences was a pretty good album. But when I'm reading this stuff it seems more like marketing that criticism. I wouldn't mind the tone if unadulterated aw shucks gee whiz what neat metal men these Sleep boys are if it was coming from some individual blogger or big fan of the band, but I think music criticism should try to approach its subject with some approximation of a "view from nowhere," using aesthetic principles and the writer's knowledge of song structure etc. to come up with an analysis.
I'll never forgive them for giving Hobo Johnson's best album such a low score because he's an incel, as if writing music about desperation and trouble getting dates has inherently less value.
"Williamsburg at this point is like a neighborhood-sized artisan coffee shop where the napkins are ethically sourced and the labor non-union."
I can't shake the feeling that indie is no longer cool because the popular image of the left is no longer cool. It's just old, tired and beat to death--the inevitable fate of anything that descends into cliche.
You pretty much summed it up. A major reason behind Pitchfork's demise after the fervent editorial turn towards poptimism is that this basically removed its reason for existing. Pop music needs no champion, no editorial page, no grizzled tastemaker to pass an opinion on it. It already is popular and has the full force of the market behind it. Poptimism was theoretically and in practice the self-destruction of Pitchfork.
I have to admit, Poptimism dovetails very closely with neoliberalism's dictate that whatever wins in the marketplace is inherently the best. That what sells the most has arrived at the position via merit, who are we to argue with the superior understanding of capital. To be cynically about it, Pitchfork's ham-fisted attempts to slap a progressive veneer on this dynamic amount to little more than putting a coat of paint over it. Sadly, this mirrors the general trajectory of centrist liberalism in the 21st century, putting a progressive veneer on things completely divorced from any material or economic understanding.
I know I mentioned this in earlier responses, but it remains fascinating to me that the market for music criticism has essentially died over the last 20 years, while criticism of TV and movies has flourished on the internet, to the point that aggregator sites like Rotten Tomatoes have huge influence on the industry. The same seems to be true to some extent when it comes to books, FWIW. I've seen guides to prospective authors to look for comp titles on Goodreads, for example. But it seems part of the wider shift of the public away from music. Youth culture during my teen years in the 1990s was defined, in large part, by what music you listened to. It is no longer. Music taste is now for middle-aged people.
A bit of an aside, but if anyone wants to see poptimism done right, you should check out Todd in the Shadows on Youtube. The dude is an uncool straight dude pushing 40, and sincerely evolved in the aughts to have a genuine love of pop music, and will give good ratings on everything from hip-hop tracks to pop-country. That doesn't mean that he uncritically loves all pop music though. He will rip terrible pop tracks, regardless of the devoted fan bases of the artists, and laud good tracks from problematic artists (he rated one Morgan Wallen song as #5 on the top pop songs of 2023). And he's funny as hell (Lindsay Ellis's ex, FWIW). Everyone who is a lover of music will find something interesting in his back catalogue of videos.
"Feeling disenfranchised and hopeless about achieving real material change, while empowered within the cultural and intellectual industries, a lot of young liberals became emotionally overinvested in the positive potential of treating artistic consumer tastes as political acts in and of themselves."
That is the story of academic musicology (the field in which I have an ancient A.B.D.) over the past thirty years; they just apply it chronologically backwards as well as forwards. That is also why I can't listen to music--any music, pop or rock or classical or what have you, any more. It's all so overcommitted.
I think your confusion about the “indie record” thing can be resolved once you recognize that it is a quote from Taylor Swift “We are Never Ever Getting Back Together”. Of course, that isn’t going to make you any happier .,,
Rihanna is, like, an actual billionaire, right?
I think it's axiomatic that Pitchfork had an audience, of white bearded indie dudes who agreed Daydream Nation was the best album of the 80s, then turned against that audience. And this can never be a good idea. In Britain the music newspaper Melody Maker did the same thing with the late 70s turn from prog-rock to punk. The audience only partially responded, continuing to vote Genesis albums their favourites right into the 80s, but they continued to buy Melody Maker because back then it was a source of information on gigs, releases, new bands etc. Today there's no need to go to Pitchfork for that information. And so their audience stopped and the new audience they were so assiduously courting with pieces about Beyonce being the mother of House Renaissance (what, you can be queer by acclamation now?) never turned up.
I think I've said this here before, but when I originally read Pitchfork's Best Songs of the 90s and they put Pavement's Gold Soundz at the top, I went off to listen to it. I hadn't heard it before, this was new information, I was interested. Didn't like it but whatever. When they revised their list and put Mariah Carey's Fantasy at the top I didn't go off and listen to it because I already knew it; everyone knows it. It was one of the bigger hits of the decade. It's far closer to my taste, I listen to Carey all the time, but there was no point in telling me. It's not new information. It's useless. And if you're useless, if you're only able to point your readers to stuff that's popular already, you have no purpose even if I agree with you.
For various reasons tied to the death of criticism generally, I agree that people defending the need for serious writing about pop music, or positioning themselves against rock music as if it's some immovable obstacle is sort of weird now.
But I think you're wrong to conflate the questioning of rock music's position at the centre of what constitutes serious music with 2024 poptimism.
The increasing questioning of "rockism", for want of a less stupid word, was as much to do with encouraging people to take metal more seriously as it was with asking whether some manufactured pop might be more interesting than whatever then critically acclaimed rock music was.
It was also about establishing the idea that other genres are no smaller than rock music in the volume of what is produced, nor the validity of discussions about their depths, whether techno, or jazz, or ambient music, or country or whatever.
The reality was that all best albums of all time lists, of the kind that I suppose you don't see as often now that music criticism is basically dead, were the same rock albums and a weird cursory nod to arbitrary rap, techno or jazz albums, usually the same ones each time, not that anyone involved was ever really listening to these or they even made sense in such an isolated context. (I feel sorry for all the rock kids who got told to listen to "Kind Of Blue" when it appeared in NME's top 100 albums ever list yet again, when Miles Davis in the seventies is so obviously the best starting point for a rock kid.)
While whatever is left of day to day internet discourse may be dominated by the kind of poptimism you describe, that doesn't mean that the essential idea that what is ultimately valuable in music is mostly rock music has gone away.
Those ideas are deeply rooted. They are inherent in how people think about songwriting, image, instruments, and technology. For most people, rock is the entire solar system and instrumental music, or jazz, or techno, or music with lyrics that aren't in English, or flamenco or whatever, these are just little planets at the sides.
This will never change. I don't really care, as I get older, because discovery is part of the love of music for me, but when I worked as a music writer I cared a lot because it was frustrating working against a canon.
In the end, the only real change that this movement of anti-rockism or whatever achieved was the victory of poptimism, which I think mirrors the kind of "victories" we see a capitalist society allowing in other parts of life.
I’m about as divorced from modern popular music trends as possible (I was shocked that Andre 3K made an album tailor made for me). But even I have noticed how weird it now is to watch concert footage from the late 60s and 70s and see all the young women so enthusiastic about rock music.
As has been chronicled here, that Pitchfork re-ranking piece from a few years back is one of the great signposts for where we are as a culture.
Totally agree with the general thesis and thoughts that are in this piece -- as someone who is younger (21) I've never cared about Pitchfork or considered them to be relevant when it comes to the kind of music that I am interested in. I am curious, however, about when you say that there isn't indie music in 2024. I've seen a lot of people lamenting that rock is a dead genre, it doesn't matter anymore, no one is making rock music or whatever, and I guess I'm just kind of confused by that rhetoric. There are lots of smaller artists making interesting, underground, and independent music that isn't overly commercial or concerned with massive success. And while they might not be getting nods from publications like Pitchfork or Rolling Stone, there are still people who are invested and enthusiastic and rolling out for basement shows and standing room only small venues. I guess as someone who goes to a lot of concerts, some of them big stadium shows but a lot of them 200/300 capacity type deals, I feel like when people opine the death of rock music/underground culture it strikes me as melodramatic/overly pessimistic. Music is hellishly commercial but people were saying that same shit in the 90s. Art and passion persist regardless.
The weirdest thing about the modern criticism landscape is when they decide to throw a metal band a bone for no particular reason. E.g. when Sleep came out with their first album in many years, Pitchfork and NPR did glowing reviews. Which is good, I guess - The Sciences was a pretty good album. But when I'm reading this stuff it seems more like marketing that criticism. I wouldn't mind the tone if unadulterated aw shucks gee whiz what neat metal men these Sleep boys are if it was coming from some individual blogger or big fan of the band, but I think music criticism should try to approach its subject with some approximation of a "view from nowhere," using aesthetic principles and the writer's knowledge of song structure etc. to come up with an analysis.
I'll never forgive them for giving Hobo Johnson's best album such a low score because he's an incel, as if writing music about desperation and trouble getting dates has inherently less value.
"Williamsburg at this point is like a neighborhood-sized artisan coffee shop where the napkins are ethically sourced and the labor non-union."
I can't shake the feeling that indie is no longer cool because the popular image of the left is no longer cool. It's just old, tired and beat to death--the inevitable fate of anything that descends into cliche.
Can always count on Freddie to punch through the b.s. and speak truth to power. Thank you, Freddie. This is why I pay you.
You pretty much summed it up. A major reason behind Pitchfork's demise after the fervent editorial turn towards poptimism is that this basically removed its reason for existing. Pop music needs no champion, no editorial page, no grizzled tastemaker to pass an opinion on it. It already is popular and has the full force of the market behind it. Poptimism was theoretically and in practice the self-destruction of Pitchfork.
I have to admit, Poptimism dovetails very closely with neoliberalism's dictate that whatever wins in the marketplace is inherently the best. That what sells the most has arrived at the position via merit, who are we to argue with the superior understanding of capital. To be cynically about it, Pitchfork's ham-fisted attempts to slap a progressive veneer on this dynamic amount to little more than putting a coat of paint over it. Sadly, this mirrors the general trajectory of centrist liberalism in the 21st century, putting a progressive veneer on things completely divorced from any material or economic understanding.
I've always wanted to say in one of these comments sections: I am a rockist and I'm not apologizing for it.
I know I mentioned this in earlier responses, but it remains fascinating to me that the market for music criticism has essentially died over the last 20 years, while criticism of TV and movies has flourished on the internet, to the point that aggregator sites like Rotten Tomatoes have huge influence on the industry. The same seems to be true to some extent when it comes to books, FWIW. I've seen guides to prospective authors to look for comp titles on Goodreads, for example. But it seems part of the wider shift of the public away from music. Youth culture during my teen years in the 1990s was defined, in large part, by what music you listened to. It is no longer. Music taste is now for middle-aged people.
A bit of an aside, but if anyone wants to see poptimism done right, you should check out Todd in the Shadows on Youtube. The dude is an uncool straight dude pushing 40, and sincerely evolved in the aughts to have a genuine love of pop music, and will give good ratings on everything from hip-hop tracks to pop-country. That doesn't mean that he uncritically loves all pop music though. He will rip terrible pop tracks, regardless of the devoted fan bases of the artists, and laud good tracks from problematic artists (he rated one Morgan Wallen song as #5 on the top pop songs of 2023). And he's funny as hell (Lindsay Ellis's ex, FWIW). Everyone who is a lover of music will find something interesting in his back catalogue of videos.
"Feeling disenfranchised and hopeless about achieving real material change, while empowered within the cultural and intellectual industries, a lot of young liberals became emotionally overinvested in the positive potential of treating artistic consumer tastes as political acts in and of themselves."
That is the story of academic musicology (the field in which I have an ancient A.B.D.) over the past thirty years; they just apply it chronologically backwards as well as forwards. That is also why I can't listen to music--any music, pop or rock or classical or what have you, any more. It's all so overcommitted.