OK, is this the worst piece of music writing ever?

1. Don't insist that pop be hip. A good chunk of mainstream music gains inspiration from more cutting-edge stuff — always has. (Remember when The Monkees went psychedelic?) But plenty of it plays by other rules: It could be rooted in Christian contemporary music, emo, or soft rock. That doesn't make it less meaningful; it just takes work to understand these other legacies. It's cool if you find John Legend corny, but respect that for millions his grounding in group harmony singing and Bacharach balladry signals sophistication. Respect values other than your own.

2. Understand that selling records is the point. The major players in creating mainstream pop don't care about integrity, in the restrictive sense. They're collaborators, and they're interested in making money. So yes, Dr. Luke encourages his ingénue protégés to trade in feminine stereotypes (sometimes in highly questionable ways), and Avicii goes for obvious beats. Great pop sneaks in subtleties to enrich and even sometimes undermine the obvious elements that make a song pop out of the radio. Appreciating that requires an adjustment of one's aesthetics. Recognize the value in familiarity and big gestures.

3. Acknowledge that the assembly line is a cornerstone of pop. Since the days of Tin Pan Alley, pop's spirit has been one of energizing collaboration and seat-by-the-pants innovation. There's little room in this game for purist notions of artistic integrity. "We Can't Stop" has seven writers and was originally intended for Rihanna. What's interesting about the song is how it transformed in the process of becoming Miley Cyrus's signature. Know the limits of this kind of production while also noticing where the soul can slip in.

4. Physically connect with the mainstream, but don't presume you know what its different corners are all about. Lindsay Zoladz recently wrote on her Tumblr about attending a Miley concert and realizing that — at least sometimes — she wanted to write for the Bangerz, Miley's devotees, not for her fellow Pitchfork nerds. I applaud her insistence that music obsessives need to look outside the confines of their own tribe and learn from non-fetishists. But the desire to identify can sometimes obscure that "otherness" you mention, even for poptimists. As enriching as it is to feel good in a crowd of strangers, it's equally useful to go where things are less comfortable. For every charming fan you might meet at a non-hipster show, there's a drunk one, and one whose political views are really different than your own, and one who (if you go see Kirk Franklin or Mary J. Blige) might ask you to pray with them. As you've said, encountering the other can be difficult — for poptimists too. It should be difficult. Insight comes from wrestling with the awkwardness.

5. Go beyond Beyonce. I think we all need to acknowledge that King Bey is not your average diva-bear, and that putting her on a best-list is not an adventurous move. Assignment for all poptimists: have an opinion about the Jason DeRulo album that drops today.

I've rambled on with my unsolicited advice, and now there's no room to talk about rock! I hope we can take that up in the next round. One thought: in his excellent feature on EMA — whose album The Future's Void is one of my 2014 faves — Sasha Frere-Jones almost calls her music rock, but instead says it's a "hairy, occasionally digital beast." I like that phrase. It sounds like what Jimi Hendrix would play now. In other words, to trace where rock went, we have to agree on what it is. And that isn't easy.

Enlighten me,

AKP

I think this is good, but at the same time I feel a kind of paradox in it, in that it prescribes a very detached and above-it-all style of engagement with music that is almost exclusively going to be the domain of critics, and hence detached from the way most people, even "music fans", engage with music. It also doesn't really leave room for an ideological position against pretty much anything at all in music, which in turn just leaves you with voracious consumerism as the default ideology.

But yeah, it's certainly not "worst music writing" it's quite good -- both of them are quite good.

hot garbage

"Wrestling with the awkwardness" and respecting non-hip values brings me back to another few thoughts about shame, music and identity. Perhaps it's because music as an art form is so fundamentally abstract — a vibration in the air that produces a sound in the brain, rising almost like a thought — that it makes us feel so tentative and unsure about its status and its meanings. So it gets surrounded with visible signs like fashion and photographs, ranked by charts every week and annual lists, straining to make a form so ineffably mobile to hold still.

you guys can say something is "good" but that doesn't make it good

are you in character right now or what

oh no music makes me tentative and unsure

*rubs hands together, sobs*

waterface making us all realize the emperor has no clothes

*takes off his bathrobe*

thinking "rockism" is a valid concept to discuss doesn't instantly validate "poptimism" any more than "racism" validates the idea of "reverse racism"

i always thought of 'poptimism' as a tongue-in-cheek ILM/freaky trigger joke and find it mildly horrifying to see that become the official branded term for not being rockist or w/e

i find the popism/rockism debate kind of stifling and restrictive so i have no stakes in that article, but waterface you are basically offering no argument besides saying "this sucks." i'm guilty of doing that often enough but i just wanted to point that out.

If music makes people tentative and unsure in it's meanings, b/c it's so abstract, maybe we should spend less time trying to understand what it all means through long boring articles and more time enjoying it. charts and lists trying to "make" music hold still is totally a silly and stupid concept. you're not making it hold still by ranking your favorite albums.

Well, no, he took off his bathrobe.

read the wilson/powers convo now, it's really good. def not just rehashing the r*ckism debate but actively trying to go beyond it a bit.

^^i'm talking about the last quote I pulled

also the concept of feeling shame for liking something is something i cannot deal with. like what you like.

Perhaps it's because music as an art form is so fundamentally abstract — a vibration in the air that produces a sound in the brain, rising almost like a thought...

this strikes me as maybe the most upside down idea ever. the author thinks music is more abstract than visual art? has he been to a live show? in hearing music, you sense the collision of particles with mass. it's like the artist is throwing shit at you. this is more abstract than looking at a sculpture?

also telling that as tired as we find that debate, how many official texts do we even have on it? let's talk about love and that sanneh essay and, less explicitly, tom ewing's columns. that's pretty much it?

1,000,000,000,000,000 ILM threads

haha

Hermann von Helmholtz was otm in "On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music" when he wrote it in the 19th century.

how many official texts do we even have on it?
official texts? what are you, a rockist?

the poptimist manifesto by marx and engels

the 'journo chat' format, gross

i always thought of 'poptimism' as a tongue-in-cheek ILM/freaky trigger joke and find it mildly horrifying to see that become the official branded term for not being rockist or w/e

― posi riot (some dude), Tuesday, April 15, 2014 1:45 PM (29 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah back when these things were being hashed out it seemed to be one variety of non/anti-rockism, alongside, idk, dissensus, reynolds, marcello's blog, k-punk (but he wrote more about politics and theory eventually), the voice music page in toto. and none of them got along!

wow that's a pretty anglo list isn't it.

to say nothing of the huge range of rap crit and the writers that came out of that

I can't even with discussions of "rockism" and "popism" in 2014...

Pretty much every critic under 35 just sees pop and rock as two acceptable types of music that you get emails in your inbox about and then turn into content for traffic. The identity politics stuff about "ROCK BANDS PLAYING REAL ROCK MUSIC" is for comment section people and olds. No one gives a fuck about this crap anymore

editors who are aiming for the conflict=pageviews thing do
how quickly you forget young skywalker

"anymore"

like, i saw maura's NYT is fulla shit article passed around a lot in the past week or so and, while it's a well written piece, i think the main draw for virality there is FITE

I'm back from lunch. What'd I miss? Problem solved?

yeah, forks, nyt really scoring a slam dunk by riling up the 100 people in the rock critic jerk. deft use of noisey's editorial strategy. david carr is rap game mr burns wringing his hands and saying excellent that he got a katherine st asaph tumblr post and a @maura twitter rant, the sound of cash registers ricocheting in the background

its so disheartening to see people even READING, let alone ENGAGING with the NYT article. It's a 10-year-old argument about a thing that doesn't even exist w/r/t all the working critics who know how to use the internet, i.e., the ones who will still have a job in 5 years

Going back to that strawmanning thing, I understand the general sentiment Wilson's expressing here:

"We still have this spectacle of people (mostly straight white men of a certain age) angry that we treat music made with drum machines, or for dance floors, or with rapping (unless it's 'political'), or by Beyoncé with the same respect and depth of thought we'd devote to anthems sung by bands of guys with guitars.")

But I think that painting with such a broad brush doesn't do his argument any favors rhetorically, and actually overlooks a specific facet of "rockism." Which is this: rockist critics ALWAYS had time for a handful of R&B/pop/hip-hop artists, whether it was Motown in the late 60s or Timbaland in the late 90s. But that didn't mean that these genres or the artists who worked in them were getting anywhere near the critical analysis in mainstream publications that they deserved.

But when Wilson or whoever describes rockist types as only liking rock music, it makes it super-easy for people like Austerlitz to counter with, "Here's a list of dance-floor friendly things I'm on the record as liking!"

i haven't thought this through in detail, but is the insipid thing in that piece not just that it takes up the ethical aspect of the rockism/poptimism/etc. debates in the same post-neoliberal-web-academic-privilege-questioning framework that everything (esp. at npr) is taken up into now? which is tiresome in connection with rockism/poptimism because it fritters away the artistic/aesthetic core of those ideas and supposes that they're really just coded moral postures that need a good dose of genteel thoughtfulness to be suitably broadened, to dissipate the conflicts about them.

i feel like there's an almost compulsive re-framing going on throughout too.

there'll be jobs in five years?

mostly making quizzes about what grimes songs are you

or how rockist you are

or, you know, aggregating things

Also, from upthread and otm:

He doesn't seem to consider the methodology aspect. You can have a rockist reading of Beyonce or a poptimist reading of the Strokes. To SA, poptimism = liking mainstream pop.

― What is wrong with songs? Absolutely nothing. Songs are great. (DL), Monday, April 7, 2014 1:42 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

How Rockist are you? quiz would get smoe clicks. Somebody oughta get on that.

I'll delete the post. Sorry I said anything.

there, deleted. please let me know what is and is not acceptable as a topic to write about on my blog in my spare time.

oh come on, k, your post was great

katherine that was one of my favorite things i've read about music criticism ever

crazy xposts hooboy whiney i think you of all folks would get that conflict, regardless of investment in either side of the argument, draws attention outside of rock critania.
questions about whether this stuff MEANS anything, well i dunno. the argument one way or another about crusty rock vs. glitterpop are pretty meaningless to me as a listener and as a publicist, most of the people I know who like the most kawaii k-pop are also scandimetal nerds. as a principled argument, i'm against purism and segregation as a point of faith.

i'm against purism and segregation as a point of faith.

haha so are most accused of being rockists

its so disheartening to see people even READING, let alone ENGAGING with the NYT article

Pretty much every critic under 35 just sees pop and rock as two acceptable types of music that you get emails in your inbox about and then turn into content for traffic. The identity politics stuff about "ROCK BANDS PLAYING REAL ROCK MUSIC" is for comment section people and olds. No one gives a fuck about this crap anymore

mmm pretty sure there's a very popular Lorde song specifically about this crap

put your piece back up, katherine, #noshots

katherine you always bring the real shit

i haven't thought this through in detail, but is the insipid thing in that piece not just that it takes up the ethical aspect of the rockism/poptimism/etc. debates in the same post-neoliberal-web-academic-privilege-questioning framework that everything (esp. at npr) is taken up into now? which is tiresome in connection with rockism/poptimism because it fritters away the artistic/aesthetic core of those ideas and supposes that they're really just coded moral postures that need a good dose of genteel thoughtfulness to be suitably broadened, to dissipate the conflicts about them.

i feel like there's an almost compulsive re-framing going on throughout too.

― j., Tuesday, April 15, 2014 3:42 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Just wanna say I think this is a good post and describes something pretty well that I haven't been able to put my finger on. In a slightly oblique way it reminds me of that article I read about how the Google execs handled a disruptive protest calmly through "mindfulness" techniques.