Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: poptimism, rockism and sloptimism.
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Poptimism, Rockism and Taylor Swift
Taylor Swift has released The Life of a Showgirl to great fanfare. Poptimism still reigns as the dominant sensibility in music criticism.
What is “Poptimism”?
Poptimism is Anti-Rockism. Poptimism is “a more inclusive sensibility that critics might adopt instead [of rockism],” writes Kelefa Sanneh in an essay from August. It is “earnestly concerned with justice and representation.” It focuses on praise, rather than negative critique:
The idea of poptimism sometimes bled into a broader belief that it was bad manners to criticize any cultural product that people liked, whether it be a pop song or a superhero movie or a romance novel.
What is “Rockism”? From “The Rap Against Rockism,” Sanneh’s seminal 2004 essay:
A rockist is someone who reduces rock ‘n’ roll to a caricature, then uses that caricature as a weapon. Rockism means idolizing the authentic old legend (or underground hero) while mocking the latest pop star; lionizing punk while barely tolerating disco; loving the live show and hating the music video; extolling the growling performer while hating the lip-syncher.
Briefly: a rockist will laud Dark Side of the Moon, Exile on Main St., and Led Zeppelin II. A poptimist will say that “Billie Jean,” Lemonade and Taylor Swift are just as good.
What Does All This Have to Do With Taylor Swift?
“Poptimism really came of age in 2014, led by the unlikely figure of Taylor Swift,” wrote
ten years ago. “Making the transition out of Nashville, Swift’s latest album, 1989, is a poptimistic curve ball that ignores the dance-urban trend and replaces it with something more ambitious.”Poptimism Demolished Rockism.
writes: “Taylor Swift had won a flawless victory, an unqualified victory, long before she decided to start re-recording albums. ‘Indie rock’ would have signaled an unconditional surrender but there was no one left around to do so.”Holdout. Scholar Camille Paglia wrote a big essay criticizing Taylor Swift’s music — back in 2015.
Rolling Stone gave Life of a Showgirl five stars.
Why Did Poptimism Triumph?
A recent debate.
The Medium is the Message.
discusses the structural reasons behind the triumph of poptimism:
The logic of the ad-supported web inverted this. […] Critics were now incentivized to write articles about the things that people already knew they wanted to read about. […] Readers wanted positive, respectful, validating coverage of the most popular acts in music, and so such coverage started rising to the fore.
“Type of Guy” Anxiety.
responds that Yglesias ignores the social dynamics behind poptimism’s triumph:
… poptimism’s core tactic [is that] if you like Radiohead or jazz or think music should have any ambitions other than momentary dopamine release, you must be an aging white man, a reviled figure in 2010s Twitter discourse. The fact that so many people invoking this particular syllogism were themselves aging white men proves the point: there is nothing more terrifying, to many, than the shock of self-recognition.
What Good Music Is. Also responding to Yglesias,
of worries that poptimism means the end of aesthetic judgment:
… it’s not like rockism didn’t have reactionary tendencies. … But even if we right those wrongs … this does not necessarily stand as an endorsement for axing discussions of ‘what good music is’ at large.
A Matter of Taste
At the heart of poptimism is ambivalence about taste and aesthetic judgement.
“Humorless Standard Bearer.” “Rockism actually does a disservice to rock as well as pop,” Sanneh explained in a 2015 interview, “by turning rock into this humorless standard bearer for all other genres.”
“Against Interpretation.” Susan Sontag’s famous 1964 essay presages the poptimist turn. Sontag argues that too much high-minded “interpretation” gets in the way of enjoyment: “By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.”
Phony Distinctions. Sanneh echoes Sontag’s attack on aesthetic hierarchies: “Are you really pondering the phony distinction between ‘great art’ and a ‘guilty pleasure’ when you’re humming along to the radio?”
Phony Position. DeBoer, in another anti-poptimism essay: “The biggest lie poptimists have told has always been that they’re not dictating taste. But there is no difference between making the kind of value distinctions Sanneh makes and dictating taste. They are one and the same.”
Cultural Decadence. In his book about decadence,
should have considered the possibility that “poptimism has had a corrupting influence on all those who acquiesce to it,” suggested in his 2020 review.
Our Sloptimistic Future
Sanneh’s original essay is relatively … optimistic about the corporate interests driving the music industry: “… most memorable music is created despite multimillion-dollar deals and spur-of-the-moment collaborations and murky commercial forces. In fact, a lot of great music is created because of those things.”
But today’s corporations — Meta and OpenAI — produce slop. “Sloptimism” is a new term for a sensibility that few people seem to have.
Skeptical of Sloptimism. To defend slop, writes
, is a fool’s errand: “Just as American capital works tirelessly to find the cheapest dopamine hit that produces the most monetary value, there will always be another large contingent of people who care about what they consume.” Those people will need discernment and taste.“But Did I Have to Choose?” Looking back at “Against Interpretation” thirty years later, Sontag wrote: “I was — I am — for a pluralistic, polymorphous culture. No hierarchy, then? Certainly there’s a hierarchy. If I’d had to choose between the Doors and Dostoyevsky, then — of course — I’d have chosen Dostoyevsky. But did I have to choose?”
From the Crowd
responds to ’ article, “The Shallow Future is Already Here”:All praise the hockey stick chart!
Reading
’s article, when he dismissed Romanticists who “knock over the edifice of industrial society intentionally, in order to kick against the seeming shallowness of modern life — to return humanity to a world of toil and struggle, in order to ennoble us” as VILLAINS ... I almost laughed out loud. It’s EVERY sci-fi novel’s trope that the uneducated pagan is set against “progress” and it’s up to the protagonist to overcome ignorance. The only problem is usually the protagonist is ignorant of any value deeper than “freedom” or “science” or “progress” and, apart from a good story, these principles hold little value at all. His only footnote is a video game so that just proves my point.Noah’s argument also leaves room for little of value in our lived experience. Apparently pro-creation is the point of our ascent? For why? So our genetic heirs can live more peaceful lives? If there’s one thing easily observed today, it’s that spoiled children handed everything on silver platters are not ennobled, their lives are wasted.
Anyone thoughtfully raising children or versed in the basics of human development knows: the point of child-rearing is to instill resilience. Noah seems to imagine a world where resilience isn’t necessary, I could humor him on his take of humanity. But in basic biology, he is absolutely wrong.
See you next week!
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But Paglia likes pop culture. One of pre-conditions of poptimism is popular culture becoming the object of academic interest which allows college educated people to treat it half seriously, half ironically. And "Against Interpretation" can hardly presage poptimism. Poptimism is supported by an incessant interpretation of popular culture (in the case of music, the lyrics) that leads Swift eventually to start turning her music into a commentary on her self and career
I think Sanneh's essay persuaded me to look into plaid-wearing indie rockers whose shows' tickets ran to ten or twelve dollars -- or maybe it just made me doubly glad that I did.