"Let people enjoy things!!"
I feel like every decade there's some unofficial meeting where everyone comes to the table and asks: "So, poptimism. How is this still a thing?" I've stumbled across a lot of great essays about it recently that all echo the same thoughts I've had about it for years.
If you don't know, poptimism is the argument that pop music deserves to be taken seriously, that it's just as important as other forms of music, and should be appreciated for what it is, not what it isn't. Fifteen years ago, you wouldn't have found in-depth essays seriously analyzing the ethos of Taylor Swift or the lyricism of Cardi B. But around the 2010s, something changed. People were frustrated with elitist music critics, who were mostly white men, exalting indie rock above everything else. And, thus, "poptisism" was born.
But lately there's been a growing backlash.
Although poptimism had the right idea of making criticism more open-minded and less discriminatory against women musicians or black musicians, some say its original intentions got misinterpreted. At some point "open-mindedness" transformed into "must be shielded from criticism." Now everything's good. Nothing is bad. Everything is worthy of analysis, and if you are one of those people who bring up words like "taste," then you're just a big ol' meany. "Why can't you let people enjoy things?!" people love to scream now.
But over the past decade, many people have begun to notice the impact of poptimism on popular culture. As Eris from Discordia Review wrote in this excellent essay about it, they explain how the movement has infantilized consumers and granted immunity to rich, mainstream musicians who don't even need it:
Slowly, inevitablyâlike evolution turning everything into crabsâeverything is becoming pop. Whether intentionally or not, the effect of this kind of culture is bad for us, it is cultural cocaine and it is continuously piping itself into us at all hours, shortening our attention spans and making us tired and making us weak. This constant stimulation cannot be good for us. [...] Iâm not saying you shouldnât listen to or enjoy pop music at allâI do, and, as I said, I like McDonaldâs tooâbut letâs stop pretending it is in any way as rewarding or as fulfilling or as engaging with something heartier.
It shouldnât be controversial to say that the music of Rihanna is not all that deep. Yet we somehow have to put up with Pitchforkâthe usual delinquent yet againâsaying shit like ââDiamondsâ added a notch of versatility to Rihâs belt for its subtlety and sentimental lyrics.â WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT???
A writer in The Guardian expressed a similar frustration. Now that everything is "good," TV is mid, and AI slop is everywhere, we're now drowning in content, most of which isn't good. We're depressed, we're tired, criticism is dead, taste is dead. The writer, out of desperation, asks, Should we just bring cultural snobbery back?
This may all sound very nice, but a new age is upon us. Accounts pumping out AI-generated music are reaching massive audiences; in June, a fake rock band called the Velvet Sundown amassed more than 1m Spotify plays in weeks. In light of advances in AI video technology, YouTube recently issued a warning about content that is âinauthenticâ, âmass-producedâ and ârepetitiousâ (which does admittedly sound like a 1990s dad describing happy hardcore). There is now an established term for this sort of thing: slop â a word that reflects its junky, empty, imitative nature. Should we just let people enjoy that, too?
I've expressed in the past my frustration with technology and how it's completely gotten rid of critics and curation and replaced everything with algorithms. But algorithms currently can't tell the difference between music made with AI and music made by humans. It looks like this hand-wringing argument of, "Stop policing what people like!" sort of needs...policing. How else are you supposed to make sense of the mess of it all?
And I'm not anti-pop, by the way. I listen to pop sometimes, but I also listen to experimental stuff or electronic stuff or folksy stuff. They all meet completely different needs, and I can't imagine only choosing one. In fact, some of my favorite albums were ones recommended by critics in genres I didn't think I would ever like. There was no way something like Joanna Newsom's Ys was ever gonna magically appear in my algorithm one day.
And isn't that the point of critics? I don't need music critics to analyze Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift is everywhere. She doesn't even need the press. If critics are just going to regurgitate the opinions of the masses, it makes them useless. We don't need critics to tell us to go listen to Taylor Swift or BeyoncĂŠ. I can hear their music anywhere, usually against my will.
I don't know, but this backlash to poptimism has been really interesting to watch unfold. I remember reading a few essays a few years ago opining to "the death of poptimism," but hopefully it'll stick this time.