What Is Rockism ?

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.

Writing for The Singles Jukebox, I never know for example what's katherine's going to say about a Harry Styles single; each week is a fascinating motley. And we Jukeboxers who write for other publications, we think, don't write for Sony's PR department.

hard agree. more broadly, i understand and support the critical project of seeking and highlighting art that does more than reinscribe aesthetic and commercial boundaries, but i don't understand why, in stuff like this, that always has to be complicit in a fetish for authenticity that feels itself regressive, even if it's become detached from the folk/bard-derived man with a guitar archetype.

What particularly bugs me about the Beyoncé example is that when she was just a pop star she was largely disliked by critics - too professional, too ambitious, too "cold" etc.

The milestones that have contributed to her critical rehabilitation and eventual dominance are, if anything, a weird marriage-of-opposites between celebrity culture and quite rockist-flavoured authenticity narratives.

I don't really see how critics falling in love with an artist who makes "visual albums" liberally quoting Warsan Shire is a sign that the pendulum has swung too far away from rockist ideas.

how will those critics respond when Twenty-One Pilots releases their recitations of Wallace Stevens poems over harmoniums

You laugh now, but.

Tim F gets it, thank you

can people stop bringing up Twenty One Pilots, I'd rather they not exist

you was stressed out

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?

I don't know. I'm not familiar enough with black music criticism from the period. Black music was covered in rock outlets like Rolling Stone, but only to a certain extent and if you look at the top pop hits of every year from the early '70s, there's plenty of stuff there outside of their purview.

Although, looking now, Christgau seems to have reviewed everything.

Here's the discussion on reddit if you dare look at that echo chamber:

https://www.reddit.com/r/indieheads/comments/6akg8f/is_poptimism_now_as_blinkered_as_the_rockism_it/

Half of the top comments didn't read the article at all.

that went from "this is the same train of thought of this thread" to "oh, a hillary/bernie debate" pretty fast

these threads serve an important function in allowing me to update my butthurt rockist dorks spreadsheet

I think there's several overlapping problems with this article:

1. The understanding that there's a clear distinction between "rockist" and "poptimist" positions and their objects. (That is, its possible to appreciate Beyonce say from a highly rockist perspective that values "authenticity", the crafting of an idiosyncratic authorial position, etc.)

2. The assertion that poptimists ultimately believe in the market-as-arbiter with respect to taste.

While I do think its fair to say that poptimism appeared as an odd appendage of the rise of 90s third-way-ism (it can't be denied, I think, that buried in poptimism's central assumptions, is the idea of the marketplace as a filthy playground for inventiveness, free of the constraints of artistic aspirations). Poptimism does seem to simultaneously foreground and dismiss the proximity of cultural and capitalist production with respect to pop music, both as a way of deflating loftier rockist discourses, but also in a somewhat celebratory sense. If you look at the poptimist canon though, I think this has never been an embrace of the power of the market to decide. My sense of the poptimist canon, Cassie, Girls Aloud, Britney's "Blackout," etc. Is that it is full of "minor" works. There's a general sense that these are things that are artifacts that are tarnished by the market, that wear some aspect of the cruder dimensions of capitalist involvement in pop-production as key to their meanings. I don't see Adele, Lemonade, bloody Ed Sheeran, or an of the other big name pop stars around as really having much to do with this. Apart from the fact that they seem to me to be so dreary whenever they get foisted on me at work (often). I don't think this is about poptimism's ascendance to hegemeony, but rather, as has been pointed out, the convergence of a poptimist rhetorical line with celebrity-driven clicktainment and the absorption of rockist "prestige," into an easy line that collapses the distinction between criticism and marketing.

Twenty One Pilots fandom is part of my poptimism

Great post plaxico

I think an implicit presupposition of poptimism is that market forces are always already infecting narratives of distinction, such that it's better to acknowledge them rather than strive for a fake purity.

That inevitably introduces the risk that "acknowledging market forces" elides into "uncritically accepting market forces as an arbiter of value". But all music criticism is at risk of collapsing into intellectual laziness.

When I think of the critics who have given market forces the greatest prominence in their writing - Tom with Popular, Chris Molanphy, Maura, Carl Wilson - there is a mixture of deep scepticism and thoughtfulness which directly contradicts the notion that acknowledgement leads to uncritical celebration.

There's a whole bunch of stuff in the article I disagree with, for example:

Poptimists argued, once, that the disposal and the shiny were as valuable as the self-consciously worthy. They argued that the single was as worthwhile as the album.

The idea that "the single" actually even is a construct is silly in itself. As is the idea that poptimists are the only ones who'd argue in its favour. Albums are made of songs.

That said - if the general thrust of the piece is "it is tiresome to have to keep reading deeply fawning or grandiose critical takes on the work of massively popular, powerful, omnipresent people" then yeah, agreed. It is suffocating. But it's prob not the fault of anything other than social media churning all this stuff up constantly.

I never find it particularly stifling tho because nobody comes round my house and forces me to read cold takes at gunpoint

true - but if you use twitter it is genuinely hard to avoid even tweets that link to cold takes.

NV OTM.

there's a weird thing sometimes on ILX when a lot of us are into the same new album e.g. the last Kendrick and you kinda feel "this thread is just a bunch of unnecessary gushing now" but I still think unnecessary gushing is less of a grind than "let me blow your mind by telling you I don't like this thing that a load of people like. at length. repeatedly."

xp yeah LG I know what you mean about the shoving it in your faceness of Twitter, Facebook etc

kind of feel like almost every version of "this thing that you like is shit and here's why" is less instructive/interesting/entertaining than some form of praise, maybe because the former comes from a place of less engagement, maybe cos it feels easier, maybe cos fuck a hater idk

(it can't be denied, I think, that buried in poptimism's central assumptions, is the idea of the marketplace as a filthy playground for inventiveness, free of the constraints of artistic aspirations).

I might have a go at denying that! Or at least refining it - I'd be more inclined to say that poptimism* places greater emphasis on artistic affect than artistic aspirations, and tends to interrogate the assumption that artistic affect is more likely to be found in those places where the artists are expected to be more self-consciously serious.

Artistic aspirations can be found all over the place, and a playground for inventiveness is a really good place to look for them.

*usual "it's not one thing" caveats apply here; it's not one thing, any more than pop or rock or art is one thing, and (as you say, Plaxico) one of the main failings of the article is a failure to tease out the different strains of poptimism.

xpost NV otm as usual. Also: if you've gotta dorklist I wanna be on it.

They argued that the single was as worthwhile as the album

^^^this was specifically an argument punk brought to the picnic

"being forced to read" is the (not-unjustified) whine of the professional editor -- you have to keep up with stuff, check the competition, you also have to proof the garbage you're handed by your contributors (needn't be garbage but if you're bad at choosing yr contributors it will, and others keep pitching things), plus, if yr a down-tier editor, as music-section editors on papers like the guardian always will be, yr probably being pressured a lot to cover stuff you really don't want to personally (which can be corroding over the years)

but I still think unnecessary gushing is less of a grind than "let me blow your mind by telling you I don't like this thing that a load of people like. at length. repeatedly."

agree 100 per cent.

i guess i sort of feel... it's easy for people to imagine a bunch of critics are all saying the same thing, all bludgeoning you to death by hyping an artist that you've already heard hyped a thousand times, in the same way. it's probably an illusion or an assumption. but that is generally how we all felt about your mojo/q etc whenever this place first got going. it's not bad to acknowledge where the power might lie, or to undermine that or run away from it.

kind of feel like almost every version of "this thing that you like is shit and here's why" is less instructive/interesting/entertaining than some form of praise

this is exactly my critical philosophy. many negative reviews are just someone misunderstanding something, you can compare the language used even.

(ps when i was an editor i did none of these things, and spent most of my time rewriting my contributors' copy so that it was actually more or less publishably ok)

For me Rockism manifests itself most egregiously in the open contempt for the musical tastes of young women and complete lack of interest in the musical tastes of POC, and that's still everywhere. Imagining that it's all in the past now because it's fashionable to like Lemonade is just utter head in the sand nonsense.

xp Tim

I wonder if the problem for poptimism is that it took the existence of the marketplace too much for granted. Contextually this made sense, particularly as a way of dismantling the self-valorising semantics of rock criticism. But Poptimism can seem a realist perspective that sortof closes the loop. In becoming so entirely pragmatic about markets, it makes it impossible to think about, as an example, folk traditions and cultural production that emerges from a more communitarian or even utilitarian context.

Hm - I took your post above to be saying that poptimists were not entirely pragmatic about the market, in so far as they, as a tendency, don't tend to be terribly interested in Sheeran and Adele...?

Poptimism, in whatever form, has not made it impossible to think about anything. Which isn't to say that all poptimists think well about everything.

No, sorry, I'm doing what I was criticising the article of doing in an effort to be brisk.

I think poptimism introduces a certain pragmatism wrt to the marketplace. It introduces and foreground the idea of the marketplace as a contextual marker which is part of the meaning-making of certain types of pop music. So rock music tries to present itself as free from the exigencies of marketing, sales, etc. but becomes boring, stable and hegemonic. Whereas there's a certain stream of wicked pop inventiveness that navigates the precariousness of marketplace and has to become incredibly inventive in this context. These are the "cheap tacky souvenirs" that poptimism gets very excited about.

There is definitely an abundance of "Beyonce's new album is Black Lives Matter," type of thing all over the internet now. Stuff which defined by an unquestioning pragmatism regarding the market, rockism's "prestige" rhetorics, and some poptimism-derived social justice concerns. (recast as entirely aesthetic questions of "representation" or "cultural appropriation," set free from any concern for the material bases of these ideas and in particular their relationship to said markets)

So what's hard is that poptimism, does have a sortof legacy, in that it's been cannibalised by this other content-industry which preserves certain of its features if not their intents.

Poptimism, in whatever form, has not made it impossible to think about anything. Which isn't to say that all poptimists think well about everything.

this is more or less the beginning and end of the argument, or at least the "waaah Poptimism is the new orthodoxy stop making me listen to music I don't like" bit of the argument

I'd be more inclined to say that poptimism* places greater emphasis on artistic affect than artistic aspirations, and tends to interrogate the assumption that artistic affect is more likely to be found in those places where the artists are expected to be more self-consciously serious.

^^ excellent. Perhaps "greater emphasis on artistic effect" too!

there's definitely an element of poptimism - which I wouldn't necessarily use to describe all "rockism is silly" discourse but here we are - that ties in with my own aesthetic feelings about the whole notion of the aesthetic belonging to the perceiving subject rather than innately within the object of perception

xp to Plaxico: If the effect of Poptimism is to say that the politics in Beyoncé's work is treated with the same seriousness* as (say) the politics in The Clash's work, EVEN WITH the acceptance that the art is being made inside and with a full knowledge and acceptance of the entertainment arm of capital, then I'm all for it.

*NB: I don't think it is, yet, although I hardly have an extensive overview of pop coverage these days.

thinking about what plax said I feel like that kind of PR gush has always been with us, there's always been that branch of semi-advertorial unquestioning promotion of the popular because it's popular, it's just a question of the internet bringing us too much of everything

For me Rockism manifests itself most egregiously in the open contempt for the musical tastes of young women and complete lack of interest in the musical tastes of POC, and that's still everywhere.
― Camaraderie at Arms Length, Friday, May 12, 2017 5:31 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Again, who are these people and where do they hang out? Not anywhere I go. Are you talking about my sexagenarian twice-divorced uncle who chain smokes Camels and longs for the halcyon days of seeing Blue Oyster Cult for only four dollars and getting three cartoons and a few shorts before the movie even started, maaaan? Because he's more relic than rockist and wouldn't know Adele from Enya

wish I lived in a utopian commune of freethinkers

it's not as if on one side we have pop music and on the other everything else. pop is hardly some free open world that promotes us living as we choose.

who are these people and where do they hang out?

i think both sides should answer this question, to be honest: actually *name* some active poptimists who behave as charged? and ditto rockists, among ppl who have critical heft among us -- this vaguely handwaving of "those ppl over there do a bad thing which makes them reactionaries" is the fkn epitome of bad critical thinking politics

(rockists is always easier bcz bob lefsetz, but let's agree he doesn't really count)

there's a distinction between working journalists and my mates down the pub who think I'm taking the piss when I tell them I like Sean Paul I guess

Wimmels's uncle sounds OTM.

i think both sides should answer this question, to be honest: actually *name* some active poptimists who behave as charged? and ditto rockists, among ppl who have critical heft among us -- this vaguely handwaving of "those ppl over there do a bad thing which makes them reactionaries" is the fkn epitome of bad critical thinking politics

agreed.

hard to name names as i don't keep tabs on critics i don't like, and this is more of an aggregative phenomenon than the fault of any specific group of writers

an imagined fear, in other words

poptimism's central assumptions, is the idea of the marketplace as a filthy playground for inventiveness, free of the constraints of artistic aspirations

this is beautifully put. the freedom of pop's cynicism-nihilism-relativism is a huge point of attraction, for this poptimist, at least