What Is Rockism ?

it's never Twenty-One Pilots, DJ Khaled, the Chainsmokers, and Posner who get grief from pieces like this – it's Swift and Beyonce.

because the perception is that pop critics don't rep for these musicians like they do Taylor Swift & Beyonce. it's almost as though Taylor Swift & Beyonce have, like, star power or something

yeah this is kind of my point, the bros of summer, who got to where they are because of halsey and phoebe ryan and emily warren

(the latter of whose PR sends me about two emails a week pleading with me to acknowledge her existence, because the chainsmokers barely are)

Not good enough. If your flute isn't a hand-carved femur, I don't want to hear it.

Neanderthalist

that billboard cover is horrifying

Take sides: Neanderthalism or Australopithecism?

how has m@tt never posted on ILG before aren't you a professional nerd?

how has m@tt never posted on ILG before aren't you a professional nerd?

― flopson, Thursday, May 11, 2017 3:28 PM (two seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i guess i could now cuz i'm not anymore but i didn't want to leave a "paper trail" for reddit weirdos or neogaf junior gaming journalism sleuths to dig up because i tend to jest a lot on ilx

also i guess i felt like if i had thoughts abt games i should have written them for the site or mag

I don't post on ILG either, I mean

lol gamers

whiney OTM that the strain of poptimism currently in vogue is a rockist abomination of the poptimistic ideal of a race-to-the-bottom to contraristan for the lowest common denom pop trash.

call it 'market poptimism' because that's what it is — a response to the internet allowing the market's id to turn into a dictator

imo it's a 'teach a man to fish' type of thing. poptimists eight years ago were like 'it's okay to like Beyoncé!!!' but instead of internalizing the more general lesson of openmindedness to the beauty and craft of lcd pop and awareness of our bias against it, ppl just became rockists who also like Beyoncé now

who?

or are you paraphrasing the article?

OTM. Need to go back to when music was real, with musicians who could actually read playing real unamplified instruments under the direction of conductors who were really feeling it.

joking but true. there was a time when music only existed on paper, when every house had a piano, when you could get a job in a local orchestra, when pop music culture intertwined with folk culture and family traditions. recorded music killed so much.

a time when songs were alive, dynamic, constantly morphing, taking in regional differences, changing with the times. now songs are dead, a deceased corpse legally defined and restricted to one official version and only officially-approved variations

You and your grave robbery

there was a time when music only existed on paper, when every house had a piano, when you could get a job in a local orchestra, when pop music culture intertwined with folk culture and family traditions. recorded music killed so much.

When I interviewed Derek Bailey, he went on a tangent about all the different jobs he'd had as a working musician - playing for burlesque dancers, playing at factory workers' picnics, playing in a million different social contexts that required music. He was a pro before he was the God of Improvisation, and he was a pro before there were jukeboxes in every bar. I wish I still had the full recording, but it was on a long-lost microcassette that I never digitized.

xps- haven't read the article but i agree with what whiney said:

Like I said before, there is no true poptimism right now.

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.

feel like a true poptimist critic would best be drawn from the ranks of out-of-work conservative pundits. how do you "criticize" something that has essentially no intellectual component whatsoever?

...

trump

feel like a true poptimist critic would best be drawn from the ranks of out-of-work conservative pundits. how do you "criticize" something that has essentially no intellectual component whatsoever?

― increasingly bonkers (rushomancy), Thursday, May 11, 2017

certainly you troll as well as somebody in NRO World.

ok, i'll walk it back. i guess there's as much need and value for flo rida thinkpieces as there is for nickelback thinkpieces.

Criticism and "need" have had nothing do with each other in a capitalist society.

whiney OTM that the strain of poptimism currently in vogue is a rockist abomination of the poptimistic ideal of a race-to-the-bottom to contraristan for the lowest common denom pop trash.

okay but are beyonce and taylor swift and harry styles really making "the lowest common denom pop trash"? are all the critics who loved Lemonade or 1989 or whatnot just deluded? cynical? lying? are those really the worst records in all of pop?

like, this is my exact problem with the article, as soon as one makes the tiniest puncture of conditions in music writing then all the old shit floods back in, because it never went anywhere in the first place.

also if it was really rockist then writers would give more of a shit about the music and its writers/performers but we're still stuck in "who is Max Martin?" baby land

those artists aren't lcd pop trash, they're perceived as a cut above and make Prestige statement releases, that's the point

tbh, aside from maybe rolling teenybopper thread 2006, im not sure poptimists ever lived up to the ideal

Criticism and "need" have had nothing do with each other in a capitalist society.

― the Rain Man of nationalism. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

for that matter art and "need" have nothing to do with each other in a capitalist society. so... the whole thread is rearranging deck chairs, no?

That Ned Raggett on rockism thread was a good one.

It was! And now your comment's been immortalized again.

for that matter art and "need" have nothing to do with each other in a capitalist society. so... the whole thread is rearranging deck chairs, no?

― increasingly bonkers (rushomancy), Thursday, May 11, 2017

It's your ship.

Criticism is art.

Says the critic.

https://media.tenor.co/images/80a1533cd59f394429938ffa9bb83417/tenor.gif

criticism of any art form is the real lowest denom trash

There's at least an extended essay's worth of thoughtful commentary on this topic strewn across a dozen ILX threads, over nearly seventeen years - you could probably assemble the definitive examination of the issue by curating and collating them.

So it's a bit deflating that every time these conversations are revived it's like we're starting on the ground floor again.

as Mike Rutherford wrote, every generation blames the one before

What is rockism?
I don't know, huh!
Rockism is a hamhock in your cornflakes, yeah

What is rockism? Hehhehheh
I don't know
Huh
Rockism, rockism is the ring around your bathtub

What is rockism?
I don't know
Huh, uh
Rockism is a joint rolled in toilet paper

it's particularly deflating being on the writer's side of it, when every year or so comes a brand new indictment about how you (collectively) are terrible and ruining music writing

also has anyone posted the guardian's "nine lives may be a film about kevin spacey being turned into a cat, but it speaks directly to donald trump" headline in here

xpost I have no hard evidence for this but I'd be willing to bet that it was "poptimists" like you, Maura etc. who were the first to actually diagnose how clickbait-driven celebrity journalism is negatively impacting on music criticism.

i.e. it's the people who are invested in thinking and writing interestingly about pop music who are the first to see and call out the external developments which interfere with that, rather than the revanchists who take every development as more proof that they were right to be boring and inflexible thinkers all along.

also has anyone posted the guardian's "nine lives may be a film about kevin spacey being turned into a cat, but it speaks directly to donald trump" headline in here

the twitter thread that article was based on was funny imo, its adaptation into a guardian article seemed a less successful but I can't really begrudge that guy getting some money and exposure though

I've been putting this off for a while, but it's time we had a serious talk about the most important film for understanding Trump's America. pic.twitter.com/gCqj1BuLrv

— Jack Bernhardt (@jackbern23) May 3, 2017

It's your ship.

― the Rain Man of nationalism. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

why did you put the guy who's trying to sink the ship in charge of it

the best music critics i've known have been other musicians, specifically in whatever music scene i happened to be in

musicians don't necessarily need outsiders who most of the time are literally music-illiterate analyzing their music, maybe this only applies to jazz, but i guess since rock musicians generally can't read music either, it turns into a free for all

it's not like musicians aren't expected to develop thick skin and put up with all the negativity either, so to quote gloria estefan, it cuts both ways

now conga baby

words get in the way

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrIiLvg58SY

my highfalutin thoughts fellas

reductive as all hell, but this feels like a music criticism relocation of the Adorno-Benjamin back-and-forth about taking "trash culture" seriously that Alex Ross revisited a few years ago

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/15/naysayers

i'm all on the side of "poptimism" here, but i will say that (good) criticism of such poptimism is just as necessary. this isn't that, obviously, and Tim's right to point out that good critiques of pop writing are more likely to come from people well-versed in the form.

also, i will that in this piece it seems like there's a general lack of understanding of the structure of the bubblegum pop economy? pieces like this one seem to assume that all bubblegum (or whatever it thinks is "pop") gets popular, but if you listen to Who? Weekly or simply follow something like Popjustice (or The Singles Jukebox), you'll know that there's plenty of "good bubblegum" that doesn't get the time of day because of the whims of the economy and industry. isn't rectifying (or, at the very least, pointing out) imbalances that emerge because of that the literal job of good criticism?

The problem with poptimism as taxonomy and theory is that any critic who writes about popular music has written about music that tops the charts (lest I be misunderstood, I exclude genre specialists). Why does a term exist now for a phenomenon that's existed since the late '60s? It's a redundancy. Critics who write about acts who want to sell records will listen to good records, OK ones, and bad ones. The nature of criticism is to examine. Assuming that good criticism of popular music accepts the hegemony of Beyonce, unexamined as if by PR department fiat, is the article's most crippling flaw.