thread to track Poptimism 2.0

Going to combine a lot of the conversations we're having in other threads surrounding Timberlake into this one

Here's an excerpt of something I posted last year

An actual poptimist critic would be riding for the pop music that America actually, actively embraces and enjoys like the Chainsmokers, Meghan Trainor, Twenty One Pilots, Lukas Graham, Flo Rida, Mike Posner, Shawn Mendes, etc.

Instead artists who work in the pop genre just started releasing albums and "statements" like rock musicians do and we look at them through that rockist lens because there's no fucking rock bands any more. The end.

I really do think the way a "pop" artist can be critically loved right now really does mirror classic Rockism. For a lot of them You need to either:

A) Releasing a big album statement like a rock band (Beyonce, Rihanna, Kesha)
B) Basically *be* a rock band (The 1975, Harry Styles, Paramore)
C) Be a not-as-famous underdog people can champion like an indie rock band (Carly Rae Jepsen, Jason DeRulo, Jeremih)

Lorde doesn't track into any of these, but she's pretty big too.

I think the way a "pop" artist can be hated right now is, as Jordan pointed out, is even the slightest perceived dip in quality – Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Eminem, Justin Timberlake, Miley Cyrus – is now license to do flying trampoline dunks on their career, even though critics really got behind all of them not all that long ago...

I dunno, I definitely feel like the critical window w/ what pop music is "good" is becoming increasingly narrow, it's interesting to watch.

no way sna

Are people still listening to Lukas Graham at all?

B) Basically *be* a rock band (The 1975, Harry Styles, Paramore)

i guess i should note this doesn't map onto fall out boy (who prob are closer neighbors to twenty one pilots here anyway). i also don't think the 1975 are really *there* yet, or at least in my experience there's been heavy resistance

Doesn't the "flying trampoline dunks"-approach extend beyond pop, and is more media jumping on and off the hype train? Arcade Fire got the same treatment (perhaps for going pop; though their quality dip was more than slight)

xpost Ned, I guess I could update that list to be, like, Ed Sheeran, Halsey, Imagine Dragons, Chris Brown and Charlie Puth

Where does Bruno Mars fit in all of this?

when was the last time critics were behind eminem

I'm also confused as to what point critics were actually behind Katy Perry, as I remember her first two albums getting relatively negative reviews at the time.

all i remember is the Teenage Dream title track showing up on a few EOY lists in 2010

Doesn't the "flying trampoline dunks"-approach extend beyond pop, and is more media jumping on and off the hype train?

ah yeah this does remind me of clowning on movie trailers

Yeah, that's fair re: Katy P

I feel like Ariana Grande is a decent counterpoint to this though - her singles and her last album have been generally well liked by critics and she isn't any sort of underdog nor is she making big album statements

We are in an an era of unprecedented chartpop conservatism imo. The algorithms have churned out Imagine Dragons and they'll keep churning out similar

this thought experiment brings up a question i've had for a long time: does poptimism imply a kind of classically liberal stance, in which the choices of the market are necessarily aesthetically valuable, or is it a populism that doesn't necessarily match up with chart trends? the former seems like it's got support in various industry trendpieces like Carl Wilson or Chris Molanphy's stuff, whereas the latter feels like it's the driving force behind the rise of semi-pop artists like CRJ and Charli XCX, not to mention Allie X or MUNA.

the former also feels like it's less music qua music criticism and more cultural criticism, while the latter is a developed aesthetic stance that i think Tom Ewing summed up well in this piece, regardless of what you think of its surrounding argument https://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/jun/16/can-pop-music-survive

this thought experiment brings up a question i've had for a long time: does poptimism imply a kind of classically liberal stance, in which the choices of the market are necessarily aesthetically valuable, or is it a populism that doesn't necessarily match up with chart trends? the former seems like it's got support in various industry trendpieces like Carl Wilson or Chris Molanphy's stuff, whereas the latter feels like it's the driving force behind the rise of semi-pop artists like CRJ and Charli XCX, not to mention Allie X or MUNA.

"the choices of the market are necessarily aesthetically valuable" seems like a slightly loaded statement to me, but I guess it depends on what sits behind it. I'd say Wilson, Molanphy and Ewing have all done work that assumes "the choices of the market are necessarily aesthetically interesting" - i.e. that popularity itself is worthy of study, whilst not being any kind of mark of quality. Both Chris's 'Why is X Number 1' column and Tom's 'Popular' series assume that songs that get to number 1 get there for a reason (or reasons), but don't assume as a starting premise that those reasons have to do with aspects of the song the writer privately considers valuable, attractive, "worthy" etc. (though they might!).

yeah, "interesting" definitely is a better word than "valuable"—although i think the slipperiness between the two is the foundation of the confusion around what poptimism is that seems to have pervaded.

re: the quoted text in the first post, my understanding of the nebulous term 'poptimism' was simply that it asks critics to put forth the slightest modicum of effort required to avoid having a kneejerk reaction against music just because it was successful or marketed to people that typical (white male) rockcrits don't see as credible, i.e. women, poc and young'ns... not that a 'poptimist' must have the exact set of tastes equal to the mythical median "target audience" consumer, who therefore enthusiastically and earnestly recommends virtually everything that is successful.

so not quite sure what is different about poptimism 2.0!! not that i had a particularly strong grasp of what 1.0 was

anti-rockism was always a more useful notion to me than poptimism tbh, i saw it as pretty much a shortcut to catch untrained undereducated music critics up w/ arts/literary criticism broadly

"it" = poptimism or anti-rickism?

er rockism

anti-rockism

Lorde definitely fits into Whiney's category C; she's a one-hit wonder whose latest album is almost entirely propped up by critical goodwill.

otm

I'd say Wilson, Molanphy and Ewing have all done work that assumes "the choices of the market are necessarily aesthetically interesting" - i.e. that popularity itself is worthy of study, whilst not being any kind of mark of quality.

It amazes me that critics who write about pop have to clarify this point over and over; it should have shut up those trolls who cock eyebrows wondering why pop music critics don't write treatises about The DaVinci Code and Transformers.

im trying to imagine if any of the rappers i'd written about had a career trajectory like hers, how quickly they'd be tossed out by the critical apparatus ... waiting x years to drop a follow up album

anti-rockism was always a more useful notion to me than poptimism

― Listen to my homeboy Fantano (D-40), Monday, February 5

otm

i mean, ppl who took a 'poptimist' approach to the genres i liked def helped me look at them in a new way but a lot of times they were just as much invested in "scenius" & the relationship between the local and underground + national and commercial just in other genres

I'd say Wilson, Molanphy and Ewing have all done work that assumes "the choices of the market are necessarily aesthetically interesting" - i.e. that popularity itself is worthy of study, whilst not being any kind of mark of quality. Both Chris's 'Why is X Number 1' column and Tom's 'Popular' series assume that songs that get to number 1 get there for a reason (or reasons), but don't assume as a starting premise that those reasons have to do with aspects of the song the writer privately considers valuable, attractive, "worthy" etc. (though they might!).

But, in practice, an e.g. post-Adorno writer who enjoys avant-garde art music and thinks that the most popular music is interesting and worth studying because it is so culturally damaging wouldn't be called "poptimist", right? Or even someone who thinks it is worth studying from a technical standpoint in order to cynically craft commercially successful music? Iirc, Tom (and a lot of early-00s ilxors) loved "Baby One More Time" and thought we were living in a Golden Era of Pop Music, not just that the music was interesting in an abstract sense. What is the "optimism" in the term about?

But, in practice, an e.g. post-Adorno writer who enjoys avant-garde art music and thinks that the most popular music is interesting and worth studying because it is so culturally damaging wouldn't be called "poptimist", right?

This person would be called "a fiction."

the early 00s seem like a golden era of pop music in comparison to the 2017 charts

But, in practice, an e.g. post-Adorno writer who enjoys avant-garde art music and thinks that the most popular music is interesting and worth studying because it is so culturally damaging wouldn't be called "poptimist", right? Or even someone who thinks it is worth studying from a technical standpoint in order to cynically craft commercially successful music? Iirc, Tom (and a lot of early-00s ilxors) loved "Baby One More Time" and thought we were living in a Golden Era of Pop Music, not just that the music was interesting in an abstract sense. What is the "optimism" in the term about?

― No purposes. Sounds. (Sund4r), Monday, 5 February 2018 11:33 PM (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think this goes back to what austinb refers to above as the "slipperiness" between the propositions that popularity is interesting and that what is popular is good.

This is a slipperiness that need not exist - it emerges from sloppy thinking as follows:

1. Hypothetical pop music critic says (or implies) that "popularity is interesting in itself."

2. That same hypothetical pop music critic says "this particular pop song (currently at number one on the charts) is great!" <-- Although pointedly does not claim that all commercially successful pop songs are great, or that her enjoyment of that particular pop song emerges from its commercial dominance.

3. Observer of hypothetical pop music critic complains: "Your approach to music criticism assumes that pop songs are great because they are popular."

4. Hypothetical pop music critic seeks to clarify: "No, that's not what I'm saying. You're conflating two separate propositions. Allow me to expl-"

5. Observer cuts in: "Sorry, I've stopped listening, a magazine has accepted my pitch for a hot-take on how the orthodoxy of populism has come at the expense of critical appreciation of less popular artists, and I've got a deadline to meet."

^^ they should teach this post in schools

i think you could argue that some poptimist proponents also bought into this faulty logic

like, what poptimist thinkers thought became what was cool think, and if this small group of influential people gravitated towards a particular school of Pop music, ppl would gravitate towards particular styles of pop as being representative of this theoretical argument, and now x years later we have carly rae jepson

those two posts are making slightly different points i realize

But, in practice, an e.g. post-Adorno writer who enjoys avant-garde art music and thinks that the most popular music is interesting and worth studying because it is so culturally damaging wouldn't be called "poptimist", right?

This person would be called "a fiction."

― morning wood truancy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 5 February 2018 11:34 PM (nineteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Alfred is correct here, I think. People tend to conflate any handwringing about the state of popular culture with Dialectic of Enlightenment, but (at least in part because it would be so exhausting "in practice" for anyone not so profoundly invested in negativity as Adorno was) there's no such thing as a music critic who both considers that popular music en masse should be viewed first and foremost through the frame of how it is culturally/socially damaging and is actually interested in writing about it in any detail.

If I had to name the critic that springs to mind in response to the question "who do you think has written the most and most thoughtfully about the problems with the current composition of commercially successful pop music" my answer would be Maura, and that is no surprise: it is precisely because Maura is open to the prospect of commercially successful pop music being good that she has both the interest and the capacity to write thoughtfully about how and why it might not be.

i think you could argue that some poptimist proponents also bought into this faulty logic

― Listen to my homeboy Fantano (D-40), Monday, 5 February 2018 11:54 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Any professional music critics, though?

there was a period where i found myself really put off (pre-streaming service era) by the coverage of "popular music" that seemed like it was undercounting hip-hop, or not recognizing its cultural breadth bc it was invested in this sorta discourse of the pop as populist marketplace & center of the teen zeitgeist ... some of the stuff ann powers (a critic i do respect on a number of levels) was writing around this time for example, the hollowed-out sounds of like 00s/early 10s "pop music" have aged awfully in many cases imo (not talking about taylor)

*late 00s/early 10s

i think whiney's characterization of poptimism in the op is subtly at odds with my own, but also recognize what he identifies as poptimism 2.0 as a thing

There was a conversation in early 2012 i'm thinking of (w/r/t Ann)

Year-End Critics' Polls 2011

i'm not sure i was right back then, but i think i was getting at something that felt kind of 'off' about a perceived poptimist status quo

like it felt like the way we wrestled w/ "pop" was very detached from earnest enthusiasm & was almost anthropological and dispassionate cataloguing of what teens listen to

i am possibly being hugely unfair to ann but i think there was something there that has been validated by the way the streaming economy completely shifted the sound of the 'pop charts' in something akin to the 80s/90s soundscan moment

I think that for most (especially young) people who would self-diagnose as "liking pop music" in some concrete, active sense, the actual commercial performance of any given piece of pop music is of decreasing importance - i.e. Carly Rae Jepsen and Rihanna and Lady Gaga and Charli XCX and Ariana Grande and Katy Perry and Meghan Trainor are all competing on broadly the same terrain for stans, which competition could broadly be boiled down to two zones of possible success (you need to succeed on one, but ideally both):

(a) quality x quantity of bops

(b) fierceness of instagram/twitter feed

In this sense "pop music" in the sense of genre has become detached from the charts and even commercial success to a much greater degree than whiney's opening post suggests - carly and the chainsmokers are much more aligned than they are opposed.

On basically every single possible level of this debate, the transformative impact of social media (which has become the space in which the enjoyment of popular music is performed) simply cannot be overstated.

t swift notably unfierce, which might explain the sudden critical volte-face at the first sign of weak bops

Looking back on that thread i think both you (deej) and lex were right, or perhaps rather the truth was the combination of your respective positions: "pop" moved from being what "just folks" listen to becoming a smaller, activated niche with a much more concrete sense of genre identity.

However, this is not a problem with criticism, IMO, but rather a real reaction to the fact that the patterns of music engagement are so much more decentralized than they used to be such that talking about what "just folks" listen to now is just not as relevant or meaningful: it's very difficult to point to a community of people who are primarily invested in "chart music".

i think ive veered slightly from the original convo but this was the post i was thinking about when you asked the question, tim, if there were actual professional critics who'd allowed the distorted version of poptimism to shape their work:

yeah i mean i don't mind the shopping at whole foods thing, or that she's writing to a generalist audience, i guess it's more that I don't get a sense of what she likes as much as a sense of what she thinks she needs to cover, all of which she's vaguely enthusiastic about, and as a result the coverage is of a fairly rote series of artists I guess? idk I guess I'd just like to see some more personality in it or something

idk I'm probably being unfair. at a certain pt. the job is covering what people are likely to care about. although i'm not sure that explains the tuneyards thing which is p niche right?

― Regional Thug (D-40), Wednesday, January 4, 2012 8:31 PM (six years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haha, that was until last week the last time tune-yards was something i might talk about in an ilx post

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/a-few-indisputable-points-about-poptimism

absolutely not

it takes a brave man to say such unspeakable truths as, “things are different from 20 years ago”

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

Yeah pretty much the only options for being a music fan are carrying on with Indie Rock or stanning unpopular pop music.

What the fuck was that. At least his writing is gripping, I couldn’t help but to read to the end.

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

o rly?

Wow. As he's aged his brain has turned to cold broccoli.

Turned?

Remind me how he got (in)famous?

assumed this would be unreadable but it's actually extremely, albeit unintentionally, funny. "As one of the oldest Millennials" you said it boss!

weird conflation of the concept of poptimism in criticism with stan culture. Poptimism was about criticism, fandom, especially these days, not so. also, a million false binaries thrown about.

you could write a refutation of nearly every sentence, it's kind of impressive!

I would be impressed if you did

Remind me how he got (in)famous?

― the talented mr pimply (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, July 26, 2024 10:10 AM (nineteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

He made up some sexual assault allegations against someone he was arguing with.

I would be impressed if you did

― Paul Ponzi, Friday, July 26, 2024 10:30 AM (fifty-six seconds ago)

I'll do it in 2044, when it makes the most sense to do a line-by-line exegesis of something written about the contemporary

he really is a horrible misogynist prick though, like wtf is this: "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"

"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."

Ah yes, those dastardly poptimist essayists, using dog whistles to weaponize pop fans. Insane thing to say. His brain is entirely smooth.

to wipe the palate clean from that eye-watering fdb piece, this v enjoyable piece on mcfly, containing some thoughts on some of the risks and pitfalls in poptimism, got shared on tom ewing’s bluesky feed the other day.

i did subsequently try to listen to some mcfly for the first time in one thousand years but had to nope out fairly rapidly.

DeBoer is one of the absolute worst writers (and worst human beings, to be clear) around right now. Some writers I like, who actually know their shit, share his work regularly and it makes me reconsider what I like about them.

He and I once wrastled on Twitter; it was like rolling around with a baboon.

my primary assoc w/ fdb is him getting utterly clowned by/on Tiger Beatdown what feels like a century ago. good to see that didn't affect him at all lol

I have to admit, advanced degrees in english do let a person make bad arguments rather eloquently.
What undercuts it all is the vein of meanness that runs through his writing: he seems to have a lot of contempt for a lot of people.

it takes a brave man to say such unspeakable truths as, “things are different from 20 years ago”

I can’t objectively say that “check out the new sad pop girl” is better or worse than when mags were doing like Hiroshima-level word counts every time the National put out a new album but it just seems FDB is sad he has to read Tumblrs or something

it just seems FDB is sad he has to read Tumblrs or something

But the cultural marketplace is so atomized, he has to seek that stuff out in order to get mad/sad about it! It's like the old joke about a guy who walks into a bar holding a pile of dogshit in his hand and saying, "Look what I almost stepped in, you guys!"

Yeah, it’s ALL atomized! Even pop music. I have yet to even hear either big Sabrina Carpenter song, and I don’t even know what the imagined “good smart music for 37 year old dads” is supposed to be.

it isn't atomized for those still in the habit of visiting their old online haunts like Pitchfork several times a week, which I'm assuming FDB does, possibly expecting to see an interview with Wolves in the Throne Room or something

As a 37 year old dad, I'd say it's Brat?

And even P4k has been riding for crazy shit like Still House Plants and Kali Malone and all that batshit internet rap Kieran Press Reynolds somehow enjoys

I searched the Espresso song on YouTube, watched the video once through, and I have absolutely no memory of how it sounded.

He is right about some things. 2004 was indeed 20 years ago, and that is a long time. It follows from there that an essay written in 2004 might seem out of date today.

He is wrong about all the particulars. Can't find popstars older than 28? Taylor Swift is 34, Charli XCX is 31. Brat is among other things about aging, losing old friends, thinking about becoming a parent. Pop took over the critical establishment by becoming more like rock: Focusing more on the album, and pretty much everyone is writing their own songs now. A lot of things conspired to put pop at the center of the music crit world, sure, blame capitalism or wokism, or whatever, but also a lot of really remarkable pop albums came out at the beginning of the last decade, and being into MBDTF, Yeezus, Beyoncé, Lemonade, Red, 1989, Norman Fucking Rockwell, Pop 2, etc, just seemed a lot more fun than keeping up with The National, Bon Iver, or whomever.

I do think the golden era is over, though. Killed by tortured poets. I've said it before, but that album was Be Here Now level bad, and should have brought the whole thing down. Combine that with the downfall of Drake and Kanye West, and yeah, the time might have come for a recalibration. But I don't think everyone is going to say the next Foo Fighters album is a masterpiece.

gee I wonder why everything is all one girl and protools instead of four people with expensive gear and a van

There wasn’t a “golden era” Frederick so technically it cannot be over.

We’re really getting into Dua Lipa all over again at my house lately.

This guy is the master of “this thing that annoys me on the internet is a world-historical problem” writing

It’s so strange reading stuff like this. Genuinely feel as if music breadth-of-consumption and education is at an all time high— if perhaps skewed toward radio and sync favourites. And remuneration for music creators is at an all time low. Idk what this stuff is about. Wish good-style bad-ideas guy would shit on DSPs instead of “Jessica”

not liking Metal enough is the greatest crime some lads can imagine tbf

Also, I don't like this shit either but I really would love one of these "scourge of poptimism" people to tell us what they SHOULD be covering right now on all the magazines and websites.

Like what is all the drooling Chappel Roan and Charli XCX coverage displacing? Vampire Weekend and Cindy Lee? OH THE HUMANITY!

The hostility to criticism/not liking something he talks about is baffling as an old person and does feel more prevalent with pop artists (and superhero movies) but it's not like I encounter a million post-reunion Pixies fans on Twitter who can get mad if you say the new albums suck. 2024 Frank Black stans may well be just as bad, they just lack the mass to be annoying.

As usual for a piece like this, it elevates the apparent prominence and causality of the issue FDB feels he can speak about - music criticism and what he, personally, does and does not like - over all the factors which maybe, just maybe, have had an impact on how music is consumed, disseminated and discussed: streaming, social media, identity discourse, the way in which artists and celebrities engage with (and are engaged by) their fans etc. etc. etc.

FDB writes, “ 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.”

Hmm, perhaps this would be a more interesting piece than the one he actually wrote?? It might get closer to the heart of whatever he’s struggling to articulate??

Too bad that apparently he’s too exhausted by online references to Chapell Roan to actually attempt that piece. And, as well I guess, it might prompt some difficult questions for FDB as to whether his overarching critical practice of conflating “the state of music and music criticism today” with “how white millennials feel about themselves and what they listen to” is actually a useful critical frame,

I am not gonna get tricked again. Several times I have clicked on FDB links and every time he is making a passionate argument about some state of the world he perceives, which as far as I can tell is not the actual state of the world at all, but something he's talked himself into while looking at the world through a thick gauze of grievance. The writing is pretty good and the argument would be interesting if... it referred to real things and people and situations instead of things and people and situations that exist only in his head!

Yeah the first footnote is curious because FDB talks about how it is endemic for people to wrap themselves in narratives of victimhood, even when they are not and were never victims, and I simply cannot work out whether we’re supposed to conclude that he understands the performative irony here.

Everyone here is far smarter, wiser and more charismatic than FDB and this thread should be about something else by now.

He’s just such a waste of oxygen

yes in case it wasn’t clear that this article is not about poptimism but is just using that concept to wage a more general culture war, check out some of his more recent writing

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/the-case-for-forcing-the-mentally-ill-into-treatment.html

<reads url link> yeah I’m not reading that. I’m happy for you though, or sorry that happened.

Bizarre where you find references to Popt.

"Although Davenport is undoubtedly encyclopedic in many ways, it’s also worth noting what he omits—the most noticeable absence is any trace of pop culture. So many essayists today who claim a unique style (particularly those who aspire to “creative” or “literary” nonfiction) often seem duty-bound to rope in contemporary culture—Taylor Swift, say, or the latest Internet ephemera. Today, the poptimism wars are over (or, to put it differently, the “unpacking” of cultural ephemera as seen in Barthes’s Mythologies simply became the dominant form of cultural analysis), and pop won."

https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/guy-davenport-geography-imagination/