thread to track Poptimism 2.0

The economics of streaming make this very tricky anyway because the charts just aren't especially reliable as a pop window any more - a sale used to count once regardless of how many times it was played, now the charts are skewed because of people playing that one Chainsmokers song again and again, or just listening to it by default because it's there in all the playlists. OTOH it's also an excuse for every middle aged dude to blame "algorithms" as the reason why they feel alienated from modern music, as opposed to the more old fashioned "getting old".

There's definitely a nostalgia WRT how to pop *used* to be at play here, a kind of millennial version of the old "we only like 80s Madonna" indie-pop crowd. It also helps that pop stars like CRJ and I dunno people like Robyn before her are able to pitch directly to that constituency and prolong their careers after the charts have lost interest.

Actually successful pop stars who don't fit into any of Whiney's initial three categories - Dua Lipa, Selena Gomez, Camila Cabello.

>>> the old "we only like 80s Madonna" indie-pop crowd

sounds like my crowd.

I'm sympathetic to people losing touch with music but don't see how you can blame 'algorithms'. Listen to what you want to.

I don't think algorithms can have much direct influence on what I hear, though some kind of indirect influence no doubt. Most of what I hear is a) radio and b) Bob Dylan: The Bootleg Series.

Camila Cabello has made some problematic racist comments in private Twitter DMs if I recall? I mean the chatter around her is that she's generally perceived as being a bit of a snake in her personal life.

(and none of this seems to have affected her solo career)

The CRJ thing fascinates me. E•Mo•Tion is a good album and Kiss is a slightly better album but the former seems wildly overpraised by virtue of its unambitious competency.

I suspect one person's unambitious competency might be another person's bouncy pop bliss but maybe this theory is too simplistic

I dont think the two things necessarily have to exist seperately - I do like CRJ a lot! But lets be real here: her image of playful girl-next-door and her 80s pastiche pop is expertly executed without reinventing the wheel.

A question for The Pinefox: Are you an Indie Poptimist?

Indie Poptimism
http://everynoise.com/engenremap-indiepoptimism.html

i reckon Pinefox would be unfamiliar with many of these artists.

Selena is an interesting case because her biggest hits in the last year have been pop-EDM songs she was glommed onto.

Dua Lipa also came up via YouTube! Her record is very good. Refreshing even. I haven’t listened to the Camila (X Factor spawned) but “Havana” is also a breath of fresh air on the radio, even if parts of it were created by some of the usual suspects.

I mean one of the differences between rock and pop is that rock looks backwards to retain relevancy whereas pop has to innovate - compare the overuse of "futuristic production" as a positive signifier for pop music vs "classic rock and roll" and the pride of influence in indie/rock narratives when those styles are undergoing a popularity boom. (Eg "Toxic" vs The Strokes fifteen years ago).

Its not that innovation or retroism are inherently positive/negative attributes. But i think as a listener i would find it limiting if pop was to live in thrall to a golden era of nostalgia.

xp

The rise of fan armies also fuels the “this person is problematic” fire - lots of people devote their free time looking for “receipts.” And also... how many *music* writers are we talking about here? How many of the sloppy yet conversation-informing pieces being referenced are actually by writers for say Bustle (which gets way more traffic than any music outlet), and who don’t have time to engage with the music because they’re on a Content Production Pace, so they reach for the low hanging fruit that also allows them to shut off the possibility of engagement?

Probably worth noting too that multiple people (men) in editorial management have told me that discussing music and how sounds work / gear works / etc is too “academic” for a general audience

but it's always a dialogue. probably the case with "rock" music too, in the loosest sense. and a kind of fake dialogue at that because innovation and revival can't be separated too neatly.

rockism at its heart refers to that privileging of false binaries, one way or another.

xp

Speaking of false binaries and distinctions, what about Nicki Minaj (and to a lesser but notable extent, Rihanna) who release singles chasing different audiences deliberately? "Pop" is a broad church and i always thought it was strange that someone with the level of talent and charisma as Minaj has had to lend her vocals to as many sub-par Guetta singles as she has rapped brilliant verses.

Lorde fits into both category A and category C fwiw.

I'd also say that the influence of Eurohouse and EDM post-2007 or so has led to an objective shift in how pop songs are written and constructed and how they develop both melodically and harmonically. Being slightly reductive, the critically beloved pop music of the early/mid-00s pop boom is built around four main areas:

- Timba/Neptunes shiny futurism (and also futuristic-classicism, all those recycled and reskinned Jacko and Prince and Marvin moves)
- Retro-80s synths, recycled glam riffs, kitchen sink maximalism (that whole Xenomania/Richard X/Girls Aloud/Sugababes/Rachel Stevens Popjustice Brit axis)
- Punk pop (Avril, Kelly Clarkson, Ashlee Simpson etc)
- Repurposed dancehall beats and Sean Paul turning up all over the place

Most of those don't really exist in the current pop market, with the exception of some watered down Timba/Pharrell stuff, and dancehall which has only really crept back into the mainstream over the past couple of years. There are some pretty strong rockist or nostalgic reasons for glomming onto all of that (and also frankly Taylor, Beyonce, Lorde etc) that I think explain why critics would go wild for all of that and not, say, an off-the-peg Guetta or Kygo production, even with a famous name attached. (I'm excluding autotune rap here b/c that's no really what we're talking about here). It also makes sense that Bad Liar (which is equal parts Talking Heads, Paul Simon and 90s Madonna) is the Selena Gomez song that became critical catnip.

Odysseus: I would need a definition of the term to know. It's quite an ingenious twist on the term, though.

Is that the real DJ Martian? Is he still alive ??? :O

I don't know the artists in his (?) link.

Of the people mentioned in the OP, Carly Rae Jepsen is the only one whose music I know, thanks to an ilxor giving me some of it. I listened a lot and quite liked it!

odysseus is dj martian's alt

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/FCDqWYkl8-I/maxresdefault.jpg

L-R: Martian, Odysseus

Xp dont forget the Winehouse/Duffy/Adele axis of retrosoul

wouldn't that be forks on the right?

Yeah I think Winehouse and Adele don't count for the same reason that, say, the Kaiser Chiefs don't. I did forget Britney/Xtina etc though - I don't think any of this invalidates my theory that critics went wild for early 00s pop because it represented the entryism of things *they already liked* into a (predominantly) manufactured pop context.

infinite xp, will catch up later, but the single best thing I was told during undergrad was my literary criticism professor telling me not to read more adorno

- Retro-80s synths, recycled glam riffs, kitchen sink maximalism (that whole Xenomania/Richard X/Girls Aloud/Sugababes/Rachel Stevens Popjustice Brit axis)

This was never a thing in the US so I've always kind of mentally filed it under the "pop that critics love that isn't actually pop" category

I think now both Adele and Winehouse dont count but at the time you also had things like Pixie Lotts first few singles, that "always remember me" single by a young girl whose name I forget but i just heard playing on the work radio, Gabriella Climi, etc

But I remember a very dodgy interview with the Pet Shop Boys around the time of the first time of the first LP basically slating them for not being OUT and PROUD like Bronski Beat or whoever.

ah yes the Andy Gill piece, I believe.

Pixie Lott's first single was released in 2009 - way after the period I'm talking about.

crütxgau

Was it as late as that? Christ I'm old

it was John Gill

yes that's him

(I love a man in a uniform!)

(john gill never wrote for the nme, so i am confusing two different things upthread i think)

I think ppl are really forgetting how crazy the post-Manson late 60s early 70s was in terms of radical politics intersecting with pop music

I mean Altamont happened because the Stones a) were shamed into doing a free concert to prove they weren't capitalist pigs and b) hired Hell's Angels instead of real security because the Dead told them to

This is what I had in mind. I cited it in a Pitchfork mag piece a couple years ago.

(the comments are a delight)

I remember John Gill as a music critic for Time Out in the 80s. Neil Tennant mentions the book here in this online diary:

Jill [Wall, manager] phoned upon Friday to say there's a journalist called John Gill who used to work for Time Out and who has got a bee in his bonnet about us has written some book where he stags us off as being hypocrites all the way through. I think it must be a son of gay book - he's using us a kind of touchstone for all that's hypocritical and bad. Anyway, of course the publishers won't give Murray [Chalmers, press officer] a review copy, because there arc review copies about and Murray had heard about it, so he's trying to dig out a review copy, so we'll see what all that's about. That's kind of interesting. But potentially rather boring. To be honest. I don't want to waste a lot of energy on that.

https://www.petshopboys.net/html/literallys/literally_14/literally_14_page_1.html

so critics should only write about the music that no one actually listens to? hmmmmm....

― human and working on getting beer (longneck)

if you're going to write about music it seems like the value in that is to point out things that are non-obvious about that music, to respond to things on a level beyond the immediate. if someone is genuinely capable of praising the chainsmokers once their music is looked either more broadly or more deeply, or within a larger musical context, they're certainly welcome to do that, but i've yet to see anybody who can authentically do that.

yes, moralizing is rife in pop criticism (again this is not inherently bad), but we can if we want dissociate this view from moral value judgments, as well as from the dreaded spectre of Rock Music. it is neither wrong for someone to listen to and enjoy music that is superficially appealing, nor is it wrong for the critic to fail to respond to that music on the basis that superficial appeal does not withstand critical scrutiny.

john gill wrote about his experience with that review here

oh xp to alfred, i found the google books cite

Alfred Soto 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."

If I say to the average person who wants to know what and why I write about certain things, and I say I'm interested in Walker Hayes records or other pop-country stuff, they reply, that's beneath notice, mere commercial trifles, not worthy of study. Rockist. Yet they valorize the "good old stuff": Tammy Wynette's "He Loves Me All the Way," one of the most "poptimist" records ever made (in 1970). Teams of songwriters, a controlling producer, a song ruthlessly edited for brevity, no solos. Meanwhile Walker Hayes is a kind of rockist, he's in control of his art from start to finish and wrote and conceived it himself. I don't know if this situation in country is analogous to those in other fields; perhaps country is just the most extreme example.I believe you can obviously still make distinctions among these grades of poptimist work and still be able to make judgments about ultimate quality without simply saying, all that is popular is therefore good or great. Some pop-country stuff does one thing very well or in an interesting way while lying inert on the laminated particle-board floor in other states, like a fucking gas turning back into liquid. Taylor Swift does some things well, other things she doesn't do at all because she, obviously, is not proficient enough or interested enough in music itself to do them. So she plugs into whatever it is and has at it. Her music is ultimately, of course, in my opinion, unsatisfying as music. As text, great, as something interesting she may have a handle on sociologically, even better. But it's devoid of nutrients. This is a rockist attitude I don't mind admitting.

(and yeah, Hayes uses co-writers and a producer, Shane McAnally. but he's still more of a rockist than a poptimist, in my book, and I cite him because, as Chuck Eddy recently wrote, his Boom is one of the best country-oid records of last year and has universally reviled by critics who want to keep country...rockist.)

adorno roxx literary critics r gay

xp Would you say that the reception of male country artists right now is similar to the way female pop artists have been traditionally viewed? Seems like a lot of mildly popular country acts led by a guy that either debuted or leveled up in the last year - Walker Hayes, Lanco, Midland, Thomas Rhett - gets at least one "not authentic" sneer, although I might not be looking in everyplace. If my perception is correct, though, I wonder if it's because of the way men so dominate country radio?

Adorno's writings on Beckett and Kafka are pretty solid.

ah ok, i think i've solved my confusion: i suspect the 1986 nme piece I'm thinking of spun off from discussion of Gill's (also 1986) Time Out review (as discussed in that 1995 book). Time Out was one of the London listings mags (the other was City Limits): both were highly political, and tended always to deal with music (and the other arts) through a political lens -- as well as setting the agenda politically for London media (which included NME, by then the only rock weekly that was still in any sense political).

(Andy Gill was one of the senior editorial who left NME in 1985.)

Boring pedantic self-involved sidetrack ends.

Yeah, it seems like it's been that way for at least a few years. A disjunction exists between the coverage and good press given the Miranda Lambert gang, Brandi Carlile, etc and the so-called himbos who dominate first-week sales and country airplay.

I've not read it - I'm not mad - but this Dominic Sandbrook book on British popular culture seems to come at the "choices of the market are necessarily aesthetically interesting" angle from a right of centre, trust-in-the-market angle - perhaps some Poptimists here or elsewhere have engaged with it more diligently:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/14/the-great-british-dream-factory-by-dominic-sandbrook-review

Most of those don't really exist in the current pop market, with the exception of some watered down Timba/Pharrell stuff, and dancehall which has only really crept back into the mainstream over the past couple of years.

um, what? leaving aside dancehall, which is obviously everywhere:

- Timba/Neptunes shiny futurism (and also futuristic-classicism, all those recycled and reskinned Jacko and Prince and Marvin moves)

...the... weeknd? and all of the post-"Get Lucky" shiny nu-'80s-cocaine-funk tracks from the past couple years, many produced by Max Martin; every time I think it's dying out it goes fuckin' one winged bateman

- Retro-80s synths, recycled glam riffs, kitchen sink maximalism (that whole Xenomania/Richard X/Girls Aloud/Sugababes/Rachel Stevens Popjustice Brit axis)

maybe not the Xenomania variety, but "retro-80s synths" describes huge swaths of the pop charts at any given point and has so for about a decade.

- Punk pop (Avril, Kelly Clarkson, Ashlee Simpson etc)

this is the one entry on the list that isn't on the charts per se. but it's not that it's gone -- a lot of these people have just become songwriters. Sarah Hudson is a good example here. (given the market economics, a lot of what might otherwise have been a pop-punk or pop-rock song in another era turns into an EDM topline.)