Starting around 2023, a whole bunch of digital journalists got laid off, and the world is already beginning to heal. As the world-famous Taylor Lorenz has recently noted, the LA Times recently laid off 115 employees, Buzzfeed News totally shut down, Time Magazine laid off 15% of its unionized staff, Sports Illustrated got rid of all their writers, NPR has been gutted, a bunch of writers for all the companies owned by Conde Naste (which controls Vanity Fair, Vogue, GQ, etc.) are on strike, and more! But perhaps most heart-warming news of all is that Pitchfork, the music web site also owned by Conde Naste, has laid off a ton of writers, soon won’t be a standalone web site anymore, and will be folded into some section of GQ, which is probably going to be the last step before its ultimate demise. Whenever the subject of Pitchfork comes up, someone inevitably turns it into a discussion about poptimism, a word that has become nearly synonymous with the Pitchfork brand. I regularly see people, including quite a few internet pals of mine, complaining about the scourge of poptimism, something so apparently foul you’d think it was the cultural equivalent of the black death. So I’m going to take this momentous news as an occasion to make an observation that desperately needs to be made: poptimism simply never mattered. It never meant a damn thing. Rather than a disease that infected indie music criticism from the outside, it was instead spawned from the same indie music criticism it purportedly opposed. It was indie music criticism’s very own bouncing baby, and I gotta say, the apple did not fall far from the tree.
Brief History of Music Criticism - From Expertise to Vibes
Let’s start with a question. What exactly is the point of music criticism? Its role has certainly shifted over time. The job of the professional critic began during the enlightenment. Before the 18th century, there was no such thing as a critic. The reason that critics showed up was that literacy had grown tremendously, the bourgeoisie was becoming a force of powerful intellectual strength, and music was being freed from the royal courts and opened up to the bourgeoisie. People were able to purchase keyboard, string, and wind instruments, learn sheet music, and play them. The symphony was the quintessential bourgeois art form. It was music for the people, because anybody could write one, and many tried. Composers like Mozart would have to sell their sheet music since the record player didn’t exist, and unsurprisingly, Mozart’s most impressive and demanding chamber music wasn’t all that popular. Essentially, the proliferation of music exposed the gap between the learned and the unlearned even as it promised to fill it.
So in that context, the critic came along to act as a kind of medium between elite and non-elite audiences. The critic understands music. The critic can play music. The critic has access to live music. The critic has been listening to it for quite a while. The critic, in sum, is there to help someone still learning to understand what’s actually good and what isn’t — what makes something genuinely impressive and what makes something amateurish or absurd. And the results, from the very beginning, were mixed. When you read about the most influential composers and then learn about what contemporary critics thought of their output, you’ll find that for the grand sum of great works, there’s no meaningful correlation whatever between critical opinion and a given work’s historical significance. Just simply none; you’d want to be satisfied knowing that the critics have always been wrong, or right, or wrong about some particular type of thing while right about others, or whatever, but there’s just no particularly compelling pattern to be found. It’s a giant mess. So criticism has always had its problems, and it never had any predictive value for determining which works could stand the test of time. But there was at least originally a compelling rationale for why critics should exist.
When the twentieth century rolled around, the critic retained that role to a certain extent, but he took on a new role as well: he’s now there to inform you about what might be the best purchasing decision, given your preferences. This new role is created because when the twentieth century arrives, a gigantic explosion of purchasing options arrives with it, essentially turning every individual into a miniature patron of the arts. This is the state of affairs that aggressive liberals like Ortega y Gassett found so offensive. While some styles and genres were easier to understand than others, and thus not everything needed the voice of an expert to explain its value, the potential consumer needed some way to determine what might be worth his while in the first place. For more complex styles of mass-market music, critics played a particularly influential role, since they still retained their original purpose from the enlightenment and operated in both the old role and the new one.
Take jazz, for instance, which is more complex than pop. One of the most influential jazz clubs of all time was the Five Spot Café in New York. It’s where Thelonious Monk got a recurring gig that changed not only his career but his cultural reputation, it’s where Cecil Taylor got his first major appointment, and it’s where Ornette Coleman made his now-legendary New York debut in 1959, which caused his career to explode with controversy. The Five Spot changed jazz history, and yet it seated no more than 75 customers. So its power didn’t come from the quantity of the patrons in attendance, but rather the quality. The critics could decide which artists get buzz and which don’t, and this could make or break a career (see Herbie Nichols for an example of a brilliant pianist who wasn’t recognized by nearly any of the critics in his lifetime and thus never achieved any financial success). The critics always had their own preferences, though, and both the fans and musicians always understood this, which could lead to some critics criticizing other critics, sometimes engaging in full-blown willful struggles about how the art form ought to be narrativized. So a great deal was at stake financially, and we’re talking about artists who were regularly struggling in that area. The reason much as at stake was that the critic really had an elevated position, knowing what he knew about the history of jazz standards and ostensibly a thing or two about playing them.
For a good while, most music critics at least had to pretend that they understood the formal elements of music, but I believe this changed in the 1960s when rock’n’roll began its reign of dominance and critics embarked on the project of legitimizing it as a serious object of study. At that point, concerns for music’s formal elements became purely optional for critics. In the 70s, progressive rock enjoyed a brief moment of mass cultural relevance, but critics tended either to be hostile or indifferent to it, and as soon as punk rock came along, they reveled in the idea of attacking all the upper-middle-class pretentious fuddy-duddiness that characterized prog, instead bathing in the raw and bland “authenticity” of punk’s three chord song structures — never mind that the Sex Pistols was assembled by an entrepreneur in much the same way that boy bands like N*Sync and the Backstreet Boys later were. Around this time, criticism was conducted pretty much completely on the basis of vibes, and that’s where it remained. If you were the kinda person who vibes this way, you read this critic and trust his opinion. If you’re vibing that way, you read that one. Of course, part of the process of elevating crude music like rock’n’roll was elevating all other crude music with it, including pop bands that didn’t fit into the rock idiom. But this part of the story often gets left out.
Indie music and alt-rock critics followed suit entirely in the 1990s: everything was vibes, and serious talent was if anything a hindrance to achieving the perfect vibe. Let’s pose another question. Was there ever anything particularly musically impressive about Sonic Youth? Fugazi? Hum? Nirvana? Pavement? Blonde Redhead? Built to Spill? Archers of Loaf? Elliott Smith? Bright Eyes? My Bloody Valentine? Neutral Milk Hotel? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, and no. Some had slightly more interesting lyrics than others, to be sure, but we were never dealing with anything intellectually or technically mind-blowing. What all of these artists had the ability to do was capture an affect, a kind of feeling associated with being young and having a low bench press max. They managed to attract the attention of frustrated smart kids who felt alienated from the jocks and just wanted to experience some good wholesome suburban fun with a cute and mousey but also misunderstood girl with dark hair and glasses who lives down the street. Beavis & Butthead called this sort of thing “college music.” They were right. But there was never anything intrinsically smarter about it than, say, Iron Maiden, Morbid Angel, or King Diamond. That indie became “college music” while metal became “retard music” was borne of nothing but convention. Listen to a Mahler symphony or a Bach fugue, come back, and it all sounds about equally mediocre.
Still, the college music fans did indeed go to college, and some went to grad school, and so as time unfolded, they decided to use their newly-discovered grad school jargon and creative writing experimentation to try and insist upon the cultural relevance and/or deep philosophical implications of their favorite bands. They took the business of earlier rock critics and deepened it, using their sharpness and verbal acuity to become the ultimate arbiters of coolness and sophistication. This is essentially what Pitchfork was all about, and it worked incredibly well. As time went on, reviews got “freer” and more literary, all acting as coolness barometers that could make or break a record’s reputation entirely on the basis of arbitrarily-chosen zeitgeist qualities. And for reissued records everyone already knew and loved, the reviews functioned as a kind of uninformative, substance-free lens through which a listener might listen to them. Looking back, it is actually quite astounding to read how seriously Pitchfork fans would take the reviews from just that one web site. One poor bastard actually got a score of zero, and despite getting lukewarm reviews in other publications, that Pitchfork zero ruined his career and apparently traumatized him (though again — we are dealing with quite sensitive people).
Rockism vs. Popism - A Meaningless Debate for People with Meaningless Lives
So Pitchfork’s vibe-based approach was one that you’d find in rock criticism from before, only it was a bit more precious. But people eventually began to notice some underlying assumptions subtending the reviews, and they theorized that the privileging of rock music was what all these assumptions had in common — never mind that Rolling Stone always had reviewed pop as well as rock from the beginning.
Thus, twenty years ago in 2004, Kelefa Sanneh published “The Rap Against Rockism” in the NY Times, which is now considered some sort of manifesto for poptimism. It’s one of those articles that starts with some solid points but then goes off in a rather silly direction. Sanneh is against the “rockists,” who don’t merely enjoy rock music but treat its own distinct criteria as the same criteria through which we ought to judge everything. Rockists believe in authenticity (e.g., artists playing their own instruments, behaving on stage as approximations of who they really are, etc.). They believe in the distinction between “guilty pleasures” and true classics. They’re always looking back to the past for inspiration rather than looking toward the future. And they take their own music far more seriously than it deserves to be taken. All fine points, but the problem is, today’s pop fans all do the same thing. True, their “guilty pleasures” are judged differently (a morally corrupt artist like R. Kelly, for instance, is now a guilty pleasure), as is their understanding of authenticity, but their sense of superiority is the same as it ever was. Sanneh does make some great comments, almost despite himself, though. At one point, he says, “A rockist is someone who reduces rock 'n' roll to a caricature, then uses that caricature as a weapon.” This is a well-put characterization that agrees entirely with how I understand virtually all identity formation in the age of the internet. But that’s exactly the problem: it’s the norm for everyone. Simply substitute “rock’n’roll” with whatever a given person is into, and you’ve more or less described how they critically engage with everything around them. The description isn’t just for rock’n’roll critics; it’s nothing less than the clay that molds the quest for identity.
(By the way — I’m not the only one to notice the meaninglessness of the distinction between rockism and popism. You can see similar arguments here and here.)
Anyways, the climax of the article occurs when Sanneh finally gives us his vision for what he wants:
The challenge isn't merely to replace the old list of Great Rock Albums with a new list of Great Pop Songs -- although that would, at the very least, be a nice change of pace. It's to find a way to think about a fluid musical world where it's impossible to separate classics from guilty pleasures. The challenge is to acknowledge that music videos and reality shows and glamorous layouts can be as interesting -- and as influential -- as an old-fashioned album.
When you think about it, this ought to be understood as saying, “The challenge is to create a world in which the profession of ‘music critic’ is utterly obsolete.” Because why, after all, should anyone bother to write about any of this stuff when, as the author surely realizes, it’s all more or less equally ephemeral, small in its scope and ambition, and merely good “in its own way”? And if that’s what he had meant, then I think most people would have been entirely on board. But that’s not what he meant. He really thought you could have a world in which petit digital journalists all write about the greatness of Mariah Carey alongside the greatness of, I don’t know, Modest Mouse — all people whose albums you could easily just download and listen to without consulting a middle man — and keep getting paid forever and ever. A “fluid” musical world is one without distinction, and a world without distinction alleviates us of the need for any criticism to waste our time reading.
But this “fluid” world never happened, nor could it. Instead, we got the same pretentious writing that characterized all of the indie music reviews from before, only now transposed onto pop acts appealing to broad audiences. And make no mistake: the process of this evolution was gradual and slow-going. The funniest thing to me about today’s endless whining regarding “poptimism” is that while Sanneh was writing his editorial, Pitchfork was publishing reviews for both indie rock and non-mainstream pop albums in roughly equal measure, and the indie music scene was filled with bands who all wanted to imitate pop music. I remember paying the occasional visit to Pitchfork around this time, and off the top of my head, I can recall good reviews for the following pop-influenced acts: Ratatat (2004), Annie (2004; she was a 100% pop act, by the way), Junior Senior (2005), M.I.A. (2005, another 100% pop act), and Glass Candy (2007). There are probably way more of these acts than I could ever hope to remember. And this is to say nothing of blatantly pop-influenced “dance punk” bands like The Rapture (2003). There is no question that at this time, Pitchfork had plenty of female readers who wanted to listen to music that sounded like pop artists such as Britney Spears or Justin Timberlake but maybe just a bit less sexually attractive (read: scary, ego-threatening). And, sure enough, there were many singers who weren’t too attractive and bands who realized that they could appeal directly to this audience. Would you like to know how many indie rock dorks complained to me about this trend at the time? Zero. Not a single one.
As time went on, I stopped paying attention to Pitchfork altogether, but it came as no surprise when I found out much later that they were reviewing Gucci Mane mixtapes and Beyoncé albums with all the seriousness, discernment, and grad school language that they once reserved for bands like The Flaming Lips and The New Pornographers. And it didn’t strike me as a grand departure from what the site used to represent, not at all; instead, it looked like yet another stage in a straightforward evolutionary process. In 2004, acts like Charli XCX and Kim Petras would have been treated as indie-pop pioneers had they debuted then, and no one would have batted an eyelid.
Additionally, around the 2010s when Pitchfork’s “poptimism” supposedly took off, websites like Upworthy, Cracked, and Buzzfeed were producing desperate clickbait articles to try and drive engagement by any means necessary. It’s clear that by reviewing completely mainstream pop albums, Pitchfork was playing its own game of engagement-driving, but no ideology of “poptimism” was required to initiate the shift. Pitchfork remained true to the critical style that it pioneered as well as the aesthetic that indie music was already headed towards anyway. Only in 2017 or so did I even learn what “poptimism” was. It seemed like a phony and contrived concept to me then. All the more, now.
Not A Single Criticism of Poptimism Can’t Be Said For Indie Music Criticism From Two Decades Prior
When you read denunciations of “poptimism,” it mostly just seems like the attackers are working through their own psychological problems and projecting them onto phantasms. One of the most vocal, incessant critics of poptimism is the socialist and DSA activist Freddie DeBoer, and his articles all pretty much say the same thing. If you’ve read one, you’ve pretty much read ‘em all. His most recent is called “I Keep Writing the Same Poptimism Piece Because Nothing Ever Changes.” In it, he leads with a quotation of the fashion model Emily Ratajkowski. Somewhere, I’m not even sure where, she has recently said,
I was not a Swiftie and now I'm like, "You know what that means? That means I was a misogynist that I didn't f*** with Taylor Swift" Because I went to her concert and I was like, "This person is an incredible songwriter, an incredible performer, and anybody who says anything else? Like, they have issues. And actually maybe not a very sophisticated palette.” If you don't like Taylor Swift, then, like, you don't understand things.
DeBoer begins his piece by responding, “This is, I acknowledge, just a celebrity saying something very stupid.”
Yes, that’s exactly it! That’s all you need to say; the article should end right there. Dumb celebrity, dumb comment, that’s it. An open-and-shut case. This would’ve been a five-star piece if he had saved everyone several minutes of their time and made it just that one sentence
Alas, he continues.
But honestly, in the context of contemporary culture, it’s barely exaggerated compared to the norm. The assumed ideology in 21st-century American life is that your personal and political virtue is expressed in your consumer choices, that you reveal your innermost ethical self not through your actions or even your utterances but with the consumerist cultures you labor to broadly associate yourself with.
That’s a reasonable point, but it’s exactly the assumption that indie music culture was always predicated upon. In fact, it has been the dominant state of affairs since the 1960s, and it’s what prompted Marshall McLuhan to observe that the electronic media landscape has caused people to take on corporate identities. He was thinking of the hippies when he said this.
With music, there is no longer any sense that some external reality exists at all. In 2023 music is only its presence in other people’s opinions. And like everything else that happens in musical culture now, this is a vestige of “poptimism.”
Again, some great points about popular music criticism… for the past sixty years. It is not a “vestige” of poptimism. It was the absolute essence of indie music criticism, and before that, the essence of mainstream rock criticism. None of these critics can tell the difference between a harmonic minor scale and a screwdriver. It was always vibe-based tastemaking.
Ten full years ago, music critic Ernest Baker wrote “If you don’t like the new Beyoncé album, reevaluate what you want out of music.” This may lack the implied threat of Ratajkowski’s comments, but it’s no less direct: there’s a right way and a wrong way to like music, and if you don’t worship our pop queens, you’re doing it wrong. And you’re probably a bad person.
At this point I have to wonder: did he even live through the 90s, or was he in a coma the entire time? Because I did, and I can say with full confidence that there were more people who were absolute snobs about underground music than there are pop music snobs now. Back then, if you enjoyed something these little dweebs didn’t approve of, you would never hear the end of it, and if you didn’t like their favorite band, they would conclude far worse than “you don’t understand things” or “reevaluate what you want out of music.” To this day, such snobbery is what everyone immediately thinks of when the word “hipster” comes up, and for good reason.
Reverse-snobbery is annoying in its own way, without question. But I also have to acknowledge that today, it does not give off anywhere near the level of second-hand embarrassment I’d get when talking to some hipster doofus who wasted his life collecting vinyl records and C60s of mediocre trash, thinking that his album-buying hobby somehow imbued him with a gift to judge sophistication and authenticity for all of time when in reality, he merely glorified obscurity for its own sake, had absolutely no formal understanding of music and a shallow historic perspective at best, and was thus no more qualified to make aesthetic judgments than a fifth grader. Nowadays I see people actually get nostalgic for these bloviating little turds. They actually want to return to this moment in time, it’s simply mind-blowing. But a memory is a precious thing, and I remember these pseudo-elitist dingleberries very well. They sucked then, a few of them still exist, and they suck now. Good riddance!
Anyways. DeBoer also talks about how ridiculous and absurd it is that Pitchfork changed its old review scores to say nicer things about Liz Phair going pop, and other such albums. And again, not new: Rolling Stone gave bad reviews to Black Sabbath’s self-titled album as well as Led Zeppelin’s, and then they went back and changed those, pretending as though they loved them all along. But the reason Rolling Stone originally disliked both bands was that Sabbath and Zeppelin were the “pop” of their time, and the reviewers were trying to be discerning while trying to elevate the material they felt was most original, authentic, enjoyable to listen to, etc. If Pitchfork had been around long enough, they probably would’ve changed their earlier reviews, too, before “poptimism” ever existed.
And DeBoer’s article just goes on like this, rehashing the same points, saying the same stuff. I would feel guilty to keep quoting it all the way to the end. At this point, I have a hard time believing that these arguments are being seriously made, and I can’t help but start parsing his thought process for what it reveals psychologically. I get the feeling that what DeBoer and the other anti-poptimists are really attacking is nothing less than people who remind them of themselves from twenty years ago, only expressing the attitude through a reversed semiotics. They’re finally catching a glimpse at individuals who behave in the same ridiculous way that they once did, only with different clothes, different rhetoric, different mannerisms, and maybe slightly different politics, but with the same air of utterly baseless self-satisfaction… and they don’t like what they see.
They should realize that they’re attacking their own children.
Conclusion
I realize at this point that it may seem like I’m saying all music criticism is worthless. I assure you, I’m not. It’s better to understand music criticism as inevitable, and indeed a potentially valuable tool. As long as music exists, people are always going to take it seriously enough to write about it, and this is a good thing. Wonderful, even. But I do think we ought to reevaluate the whole enterprise of professional music criticism from the invention of the phonograph onward, because it has always been fraught with problems of legitimacy, and now is an excellent time to carry out such a task. In the past ten years, we’ve reached a point in which
no one pays for music anymore, and thus criticism has entirely lost its role of acting as a purchasing guide
unpaid fan reviews offer a free and easy look at how a broad, lay audience sees any given work and are often more honest about their own judgment criteria than professional ones (and unsurprisingly they’re often considered more useful)
no one wants to pay for music publications anymore, so their existence has largely depended upon ad revenue from clicks and engagement (we’re now seeing that edifice undergoing a collapse, as I stated at the beginning of this piece)
young people are apparently rediscovering complex music in a stunning reversal of everyone’s most pessimistic predictions
In light of the first three conditions, it’s easy to see why “poptimism” happened and how little the thought process behind it actually mattered. But it can also be taken as the final signal that criticism really should stop being about vibes, coolness, authenticity, and other such airy-fairy things. The wrong step wasn’t taken ten years ago. It was taken long, long before that.
The primary role of the critic is to act as an aid to the artist, and the best reviews are the ones in which you actually learn something. If a piece is musically complex, a good critic can help show you why. If a song’s lyrics are rich and intelligent, a critic ought to be able to show how, with some depth of knowledge informing his thought process. Ezra Pound once wrote that one function of criticism is “the ordering of knowledge so that the next man (or generation) can most readily find the live part of it, and waste the least possible time among obsolete issues.”1 In order to order knowledge, a critic must have a hierarchical understanding of what he knows. If his knowledge is entirely “rhizomatic,” it’s worthless. It is possible to be an excellent music critic and write nothing but positive reviews over and over again provided that the discussion is rich. But good criticism, while not sacrificing readability, should look more like informative scholarship than yet another vibe check. And if there’s nothing that urgently needs to be brought to the listener’s attention by way of the written word, then wonderful! No discussion is necessary. The work is done.
Given the uselessness of most critics in the area of transmitting real knowledge over the past several decades, it’s easy to understand why Devo sang that “teachers and critics all dance the poot,” and John Zorn wrote a tune called “Perfume of a Critic’s Burning Flesh.” If you think there ever was some wonderful golden age of indie music criticism, I have some news: you’re part of the “poptimism” problem. And in the same way that Sonic Youth instructed you to kill your idols, you should kill your nostalgia. Moreover — and this is really quite important — if the trend continues of young people’s appetites growing for classical music and jazz, then you know you really have no business trying to teach them about the hauntological implications of synth-wave or whatever the fuck. A better world is being created. Join it, or get left behind.
In “Date Line,” from Literary Essays of Ezra Pound.