Poptimism puts stars on a pedestal
If you’re truly listening, you already know that today’s music is every bit as magnificent and horrible as it ever was. But read enough contemporary music criticism and you might buy in to a more flattering hallucination.
Now, when a pop star reaches a certain strata of fame — and we’re talking Beyoncé, Drake, Taylor Swift, Arcade Fire levels here — something magical happens. They no longer seem to get bad reviews. Stars become superstars, critics become cheerleaders and the discussion froths into a consensus of uncritical excitement.
This is the collateral damage of “poptimism,” the prevailing ideology for today’s most influential music critics. Few would drop this word in conversation at a house party or a nightclub, but in music-journo circles, the idea of poptimism itself is holy writ.
That’s because poptimists have spent the past decade righteously vanquishing a nagging falsehood: the idea that rock-centric songwriters with rough voices and “real” instruments are inherently more legitimate than pop stars with Auto-Tuned voices and choreographed music videos.
By and large, they succeeded. “Poptimism came of age in 2014 led by the unlikely figure of Taylor Swift,” the Guardian wrote in December, explaining how a blossoming industry juggernaut came to be regarded as a cool, authentic, unassailable, planet-devouring supergenius.
Poptimism’s intentions are true blue. It contends that all pop music deserves a thoughtful listen and a fair shake, that the music of an Ariana Grande can and should be taken as seriously as that of a U2.
But in practice, the poptimist dogma has been misread and misused. Deployed reflexively, it becomes worshipful of fame. It treats megastars, despite their untold corporate resources, like underdogs. It grants immunity to a lot of dim music. Worst of all, it asks everyone to agree on the winners and then cheer louder.
We should all be choosing our own winners by now. The dawn of the Internet promised listeners a sandbox with no horizons, a borderless playground where niche tastes would be cultivated by robust debate. Instead, today’s pop conversation seems driven by the latent desire for a cosy poptimistic consensus — an obsequious hive-mind tediously churning toward oblivion.
And while poptimism feels so ripe for toppling, it triumphs in a cultural space that continues to feel vast, crowded and exhausting. We need things to hold on to. We’d like to believe that Justin Bieber’s fame isn’t just a cosmic prank. We’d like to tell ourselves that Katy Perry’s infantilizing Super Bowl splurge was somehow heroic. We want to feel as though our irrational universe obeys a hidden logic and that we each belong to something greater.
This is where poptimism does us dirty. It rightfully recognizes the complexity of pop music, but it too often fails to generate a justly complex conversation.
It has been a year since Saul Austerlitz took to the pages of the New York Times Magazine to slay poptimism once and for all.
Like me, Austerlitz was suffering from consensus fatigue. He also wondered whether the hype machine had finally cracked the formula for perpetual motion: Fame begets fawning praise; fawning praise generates big Web traffic; big Web traffic perpetuates fame; rinse and repeat forever and ever.
But the essay whiffed. Austerlitz simply wanted that old thing back — those halcyon days when someone could love the Strokes and resent Miley Cyrus, no questions asked. He argued that the open-heartedness of poptimism was actually a guise that gave listeners “carte blanche to be less adventurous.”
If there’s a poptimist Magna Carta, it’s Kelefa Sanneh’s influential 2004 essay The Rap Against Rockism, also published in the Times. In it, the critic blasted “rockism” — a lingering favouritism for rock ‘n’ roll that deems other forms of pop as inauthentic — as an imperialistic, misogynistic way of thinking about music that overlooked the heft and nuance of disco, R&B and vast swaths of radio pop.
More than a decade later, that’s become a problem with poptimism, too. Just as rockism asserts that “today’s music isn’t as good as it used to be,” poptimism overcorrects by saying, “Today’s music is better than ever!” And this can feel so reductive, so constrictive, so patently untrue. Especially during the hangover of a surprise album release.
This year, numerous Alisters will release their albums online with little or no warning. It’s a nifty trick that Beyoncé, Radiohead and Kanye West have used with great success. If-slash-when Rihanna, Drake and others drop surprise albums in coming months, music critics — who were once granted a head start on their opinions through advance listens — will be hearing the music for the first time, right along with the rest of the world.
There’s something refreshingly democratic about this new ritual, but its indifference to our critical metabolism only reinforces the poptimistic consensus.
For a good critic, listening to a recording should be like a skeptical stroll around a new-car lot, not an unwrapping frenzy on Christmas morning.
Listening alongside fans on social media, racing toward a verdict, too many writers seem to get swept away in the love-fest.
This establishes a hasty and formidable wave of acclaim, and to speak out against it at a later date is to out yourself as a hater, a contrarian, a click-baiter or a troll.
Somehow, we seem to be growing more comfortable with this grody polarization of taste. Disagreement is now perceived as a demonstrative act instead of a necessary position.
Music will always be pushing through the public airspace. Let’s at least agree to be honest when we disagree about how it feels.