thread to track Poptimism 2.0

Yeah, that's fair re: Katy P

I feel like Ariana Grande is a decent counterpoint to this though - her singles and her last album have been generally well liked by critics and she isn't any sort of underdog nor is she making big album statements

We are in an an era of unprecedented chartpop conservatism imo. The algorithms have churned out Imagine Dragons and they'll keep churning out similar

this thought experiment brings up a question i've had for a long time: does poptimism imply a kind of classically liberal stance, in which the choices of the market are necessarily aesthetically valuable, or is it a populism that doesn't necessarily match up with chart trends? the former seems like it's got support in various industry trendpieces like Carl Wilson or Chris Molanphy's stuff, whereas the latter feels like it's the driving force behind the rise of semi-pop artists like CRJ and Charli XCX, not to mention Allie X or MUNA.

the former also feels like it's less music qua music criticism and more cultural criticism, while the latter is a developed aesthetic stance that i think Tom Ewing summed up well in this piece, regardless of what you think of its surrounding argument https://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/jun/16/can-pop-music-survive

this thought experiment brings up a question i've had for a long time: does poptimism imply a kind of classically liberal stance, in which the choices of the market are necessarily aesthetically valuable, or is it a populism that doesn't necessarily match up with chart trends? the former seems like it's got support in various industry trendpieces like Carl Wilson or Chris Molanphy's stuff, whereas the latter feels like it's the driving force behind the rise of semi-pop artists like CRJ and Charli XCX, not to mention Allie X or MUNA.

"the choices of the market are necessarily aesthetically valuable" seems like a slightly loaded statement to me, but I guess it depends on what sits behind it. 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. Both Chris's 'Why is X Number 1' column and Tom's 'Popular' series assume that songs that get to number 1 get there for a reason (or reasons), but don't assume as a starting premise that those reasons have to do with aspects of the song the writer privately considers valuable, attractive, "worthy" etc. (though they might!).

yeah, "interesting" definitely is a better word than "valuable"—although i think the slipperiness between the two is the foundation of the confusion around what poptimism is that seems to have pervaded.

re: the quoted text in the first post, my understanding of the nebulous term 'poptimism' was simply that it asks critics to put forth the slightest modicum of effort required to avoid having a kneejerk reaction against music just because it was successful or marketed to people that typical (white male) rockcrits don't see as credible, i.e. women, poc and young'ns... not that a 'poptimist' must have the exact set of tastes equal to the mythical median "target audience" consumer, who therefore enthusiastically and earnestly recommends virtually everything that is successful.

so not quite sure what is different about poptimism 2.0!! not that i had a particularly strong grasp of what 1.0 was

anti-rockism was always a more useful notion to me than poptimism tbh, i saw it as pretty much a shortcut to catch untrained undereducated music critics up w/ arts/literary criticism broadly

"it" = poptimism or anti-rickism?

er rockism

anti-rockism

Lorde definitely fits into Whiney's category C; she's a one-hit wonder whose latest album is almost entirely propped up by critical goodwill.

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.

im trying to imagine if any of the rappers i'd written about had a career trajectory like hers, how quickly they'd be tossed out by the critical apparatus ... waiting x years to drop a follow up album

anti-rockism was always a more useful notion to me than poptimism

― Listen to my homeboy Fantano (D-40), Monday, February 5

otm

i mean, ppl who took a 'poptimist' approach to the genres i liked def helped me look at them in a new way but a lot of times they were just as much invested in "scenius" & the relationship between the local and underground + national and commercial just in other genres

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. Both Chris's 'Why is X Number 1' column and Tom's 'Popular' series assume that songs that get to number 1 get there for a reason (or reasons), but don't assume as a starting premise that those reasons have to do with aspects of the song the writer privately considers valuable, attractive, "worthy" etc. (though they might!).

But, in practice, an e.g. post-Adorno writer who enjoys avant-garde art music and thinks that the most popular music is interesting and worth studying because it is so culturally damaging wouldn't be called "poptimist", right? Or even someone who thinks it is worth studying from a technical standpoint in order to cynically craft commercially successful music? Iirc, Tom (and a lot of early-00s ilxors) loved "Baby One More Time" and thought we were living in a Golden Era of Pop Music, not just that the music was interesting in an abstract sense. What is the "optimism" in the term about?

But, in practice, an e.g. post-Adorno writer who enjoys avant-garde art music and thinks that the most popular music is interesting and worth studying because it is so culturally damaging wouldn't be called "poptimist", right?

This person would be called "a fiction."

the early 00s seem like a golden era of pop music in comparison to the 2017 charts

But, in practice, an e.g. post-Adorno writer who enjoys avant-garde art music and thinks that the most popular music is interesting and worth studying because it is so culturally damaging wouldn't be called "poptimist", right? Or even someone who thinks it is worth studying from a technical standpoint in order to cynically craft commercially successful music? Iirc, Tom (and a lot of early-00s ilxors) loved "Baby One More Time" and thought we were living in a Golden Era of Pop Music, not just that the music was interesting in an abstract sense. What is the "optimism" in the term about?

― No purposes. Sounds. (Sund4r), Monday, 5 February 2018 11:33 PM (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think this goes back to what austinb refers to above as the "slipperiness" between the propositions that popularity is interesting and that what is popular is good.

This is a slipperiness that need not exist - it emerges from sloppy thinking as follows:

1. Hypothetical pop music critic says (or implies) that "popularity is interesting in itself."

2. That same hypothetical pop music critic says "this particular pop song (currently at number one on the charts) is great!" <-- Although pointedly does not claim that all commercially successful pop songs are great, or that her enjoyment of that particular pop song emerges from its commercial dominance.

3. Observer of hypothetical pop music critic complains: "Your approach to music criticism assumes that pop songs are great because they are popular."

4. Hypothetical pop music critic seeks to clarify: "No, that's not what I'm saying. You're conflating two separate propositions. Allow me to expl-"

5. Observer cuts in: "Sorry, I've stopped listening, a magazine has accepted my pitch for a hot-take on how the orthodoxy of populism has come at the expense of critical appreciation of less popular artists, and I've got a deadline to meet."

^^ they should teach this post in schools

i think you could argue that some poptimist proponents also bought into this faulty logic

like, what poptimist thinkers thought became what was cool think, and if this small group of influential people gravitated towards a particular school of Pop music, ppl would gravitate towards particular styles of pop as being representative of this theoretical argument, and now x years later we have carly rae jepson

those two posts are making slightly different points i realize

But, in practice, an e.g. post-Adorno writer who enjoys avant-garde art music and thinks that the most popular music is interesting and worth studying because it is so culturally damaging wouldn't be called "poptimist", right?

This person would be called "a fiction."

― morning wood truancy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 5 February 2018 11:34 PM (nineteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Alfred is correct here, I think. People tend to conflate any handwringing about the state of popular culture with Dialectic of Enlightenment, but (at least in part because it would be so exhausting "in practice" for anyone not so profoundly invested in negativity as Adorno was) there's no such thing as a music critic who both considers that popular music en masse should be viewed first and foremost through the frame of how it is culturally/socially damaging and is actually interested in writing about it in any detail.

If I had to name the critic that springs to mind in response to the question "who do you think has written the most and most thoughtfully about the problems with the current composition of commercially successful pop music" my answer would be Maura, and that is no surprise: it is precisely because Maura is open to the prospect of commercially successful pop music being good that she has both the interest and the capacity to write thoughtfully about how and why it might not be.

i think you could argue that some poptimist proponents also bought into this faulty logic

― Listen to my homeboy Fantano (D-40), Monday, 5 February 2018 11:54 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Any professional music critics, though?

there was a period where i found myself really put off (pre-streaming service era) by the coverage of "popular music" that seemed like it was undercounting hip-hop, or not recognizing its cultural breadth bc it was invested in this sorta discourse of the pop as populist marketplace & center of the teen zeitgeist ... some of the stuff ann powers (a critic i do respect on a number of levels) was writing around this time for example, the hollowed-out sounds of like 00s/early 10s "pop music" have aged awfully in many cases imo (not talking about taylor)

*late 00s/early 10s

i think whiney's characterization of poptimism in the op is subtly at odds with my own, but also recognize what he identifies as poptimism 2.0 as a thing

There was a conversation in early 2012 i'm thinking of (w/r/t Ann)

Year-End Critics' Polls 2011

i'm not sure i was right back then, but i think i was getting at something that felt kind of 'off' about a perceived poptimist status quo

like it felt like the way we wrestled w/ "pop" was very detached from earnest enthusiasm & was almost anthropological and dispassionate cataloguing of what teens listen to

i am possibly being hugely unfair to ann but i think there was something there that has been validated by the way the streaming economy completely shifted the sound of the 'pop charts' in something akin to the 80s/90s soundscan moment

I think that for most (especially young) people who would self-diagnose as "liking pop music" in some concrete, active sense, the actual commercial performance of any given piece of pop music is of decreasing importance - i.e. Carly Rae Jepsen and Rihanna and Lady Gaga and Charli XCX and Ariana Grande and Katy Perry and Meghan Trainor are all competing on broadly the same terrain for stans, which competition could broadly be boiled down to two zones of possible success (you need to succeed on one, but ideally both):

(a) quality x quantity of bops

(b) fierceness of instagram/twitter feed

In this sense "pop music" in the sense of genre has become detached from the charts and even commercial success to a much greater degree than whiney's opening post suggests - carly and the chainsmokers are much more aligned than they are opposed.

On basically every single possible level of this debate, the transformative impact of social media (which has become the space in which the enjoyment of popular music is performed) simply cannot be overstated.

t swift notably unfierce, which might explain the sudden critical volte-face at the first sign of weak bops

Looking back on that thread i think both you (deej) and lex were right, or perhaps rather the truth was the combination of your respective positions: "pop" moved from being what "just folks" listen to becoming a smaller, activated niche with a much more concrete sense of genre identity.

However, this is not a problem with criticism, IMO, but rather a real reaction to the fact that the patterns of music engagement are so much more decentralized than they used to be such that talking about what "just folks" listen to now is just not as relevant or meaningful: it's very difficult to point to a community of people who are primarily invested in "chart music".

i think ive veered slightly from the original convo but this was the post i was thinking about when you asked the question, tim, if there were actual professional critics who'd allowed the distorted version of poptimism to shape their work:

yeah i mean i don't mind the shopping at whole foods thing, or that she's writing to a generalist audience, i guess it's more that I don't get a sense of what she likes as much as a sense of what she thinks she needs to cover, all of which she's vaguely enthusiastic about, and as a result the coverage is of a fairly rote series of artists I guess? idk I guess I'd just like to see some more personality in it or something

idk I'm probably being unfair. at a certain pt. the job is covering what people are likely to care about. although i'm not sure that explains the tuneyards thing which is p niche right?

― Regional Thug (D-40), Wednesday, January 4, 2012 8:31 PM (six years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haha, that was until last week the last time tune-yards was something i might talk about in an ilx post

i suppose there is nothing intrinsically conservative about chartpop now, as it's never really existed along a conservative/progressive scale - it's simply always been about consumer choice

i don't quite know how to express my disgust at music like the chainsmokers without finding recourse in phrases like 'conservative' or blaming algorithms. it's hard to express the firm opinion that chartpop is worse now than it was ten years ago because i'm forgetting that good stuff still sometimes does well and bad stuff still sometimes did well then. and that some of the good stuff is familiar, and some of the bad stuff is novel

perhaps one can say that nowadays it is simply easier to produce music that you know for sure will go viral, regardless of its worth as music. something like lukas graham feels like some sort of elaborate prank on humanity - 'here is something terrible and you're all gonna LOVE it. xoxo denmark'

that's what they said about Disco Duck though

perhaps one can say that nowadays it is simply easier to produce music that you know for sure will go viral

there are ppl throwing bullshit at the wall 24/7 trying to make it go viral. it is not 'easy'

if anything it's the work i see going into projects like Roy Purdy that makes them seem so swaggerless

what happened to rtc? i miss him during these debates

agreed

it would be interesting to track similarities between the more successful artists achieving widespread exposure through youtube etc

the chainsmokers literally built themselves up by looking at popular songs on hype machine and remixing them, piggybacking off the fame of already-known songs. many youtube sensations (including bieber here! but also pomplamoose) built up their follower counts by covering already popular songs. there is definitely a self-reinforcing aspect to pop music in this decade that's been accelerated by "most popular" lists being the most common means of discovery for new users, and it's hammered in further by search engines being both too literal and utterly fungible.

something that isn't talked about enough: the way streaming/track purchasing consumption is measured compared to album sales factors into the confusion about what, exactly, is "popular," or "pop." if you were one of the 162,000 people who bought WITNESS in its first week, even if you listened to it nonstop for a month, your consumption would count less than 200 people buying "chained to the rhythm" (which would count for 20 album-equivalent units) or 6000 people streaming its first 30 seconds then peacing out because there was a new song by someone else (which would count for four album-equivalent units). the math is really screwy (and, as post malone and his label proved last year, extremely susceptible to shenanigans). WITNESS was a crappy record that reflected the conservatism plaguing pop in the late 2010s, but i do have a sense that its actual popularity was measured a bit short.

probably related to the previous point: lorde (82,000 first-week album sales) sells out arenas so i'm not sure if "one-hit wonder" is a precise enough term for her brand of popularity.

also i think there's a big difference between the sort of writing that pops on social media – the posts with bumper-sticker headlines that focus on the Big Name of That Week and shoehorn their records into whatever sort of shareable opinion will pop at that time – and the original popist idea. maybe that's why "anti-rockism" is a better way to go, although given the way "pro-life" works better than "anti-abortion" in rhetorical discourse even though the latter description is, you know, more accurate, it seems like saying you're an anti-anything cedes too much ground to your antagonists.

(and yeah, narrative plays into this a lot. the "squeak of the resistance" discourse around cardi b probably helped her transphobic comments be not much of A Thing...)

the chainsmokers talk about their strategy in this billboard interview

The group’s strategy came to them after remixing a favorite song by Sigur Ros singer Jonsi: They would make dance versions of the indie tracks charting on music blog aggregator Hype Machine, catapult themselves to the top of the same charts and, as Pall puts it, “peel off a couple of Phoenix fans, peel off a couple Two Door Cinema Club fans and, in the process, garner some attention from the label and agency side of things.”

"agency side of things" my god

great post ty

4/ worth nothing that most of Mexico is listening to a song by NJ-based Nicky Jam and Colombian J. Balvin.

it sure is

worth noting even more is that said track was produced by two Dutch guys

i am not convinced by this analysis that music today is more homogeneous than it was in the 1980s (!)

may i ask why the article was shared in this thread? like, "here's evidence of why we need to be taking this evil new strain of poptimism seriously!" or something? personally i was considering reviving this thread with a link to the thread where some of ilm's influential early adopters are heaping praise onto the new charlie puth record, thus setting us up to thoughtfully enjoy whatever ed sheeran, maroon 5, meghan trainor and james arthur put out next. phew, the poptimist threat has been vanquished and all is well again!

No particular reason

Feel free to post whatever u like man

I am still so annoyed by that "timeless" article. Early takedowns, including me going on about their amateur-level misreading of Pearl Jam data, can be found here: songs that weren't a bands biggest hit, but have gone on to be their legacy song and biggest iTunes seller

For example, in 1961, Bobby Lewis’s Tossin’ and Turnin’ spent 7 weeks at #1. For all intents and purposes, Bobby Lewis was the Beyonce of 1961. Yet, have you heard of it? Do you know who Bobby Lewis is? Meanwhile, Etta James’ debut album dropped the same year, with At Last peaking on Billboard at #68. Music historians will regard Bobby Lewis as a pioneer in rock and roll and R&B, yet whatever led to Tossin’ and Turnin’s popularity in 1961 has faded over time. His music, for countless reasons, didn’t persevere in the same way as Etta James’.

One hypothesis: Tossin’ and Turnin’s success had more to do than just the song...perhaps Bobby Lewis was a huge personality. Great looks. Amazing dancer. When we examine pop hits, popularity is so much more than song quality.

It's baffling to me that someone who writes about music would have to turn to extra-musical factors in trying to understand why "Tossin' and Turnin'" was a bigger hit than "At Last"!

Yet, have you heard of it?

haha - lemme rack my brain

if this is one of pudding's better music-related analyses I'd hate to read the worse ones

― aloha darkness my old friend (katherine)

Things That Can Happen in European Politics is one of the all-time great historical analyses, up there with Albert Thayer Mahan

lmao

the pudding people don't appear to have any experience writing about music outside those pieces hence their extremely bad engagement with their data

pudding in, pudding out

Pudding poptimism

Pudtimism

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVME_l4IwII&t=21s

i don't even know if we've already done this but lol peak fucknut

sick of these yet? https://www8.gsb.columbia.edu/articles/projects/what-makes-a-hit/

(i haven't read the paper the visualization is based on)

Oh god

It is funny to me that an article might begin with a caveat along the lines of "pop music is often derided as manufactured...", and then follow that up with the most manufactured and useless I-Made-Some-Arbitrary-Metrics-To-Try-And-Correllate-Characteristics-Of-Pop-Singles-With-Chart-Performance pie-charting

There are so many things I want to learn about with regards to pop music, and statistical charting of tempos and "acousticness" aren't it; if anything, articles like these make me feel as if people are missing the point, making pop music all about "numbers" instead of "feelings"

i wanna see an analysis of those EQ tweaks they do to rev into the chorus of every song now

yeah i get the sense that these features don't adequately describe the audio analysis tools they are leaning so heavily on as the basis of their work. like the most this one says is 'sometimes the tool gets the tempo wrong by a factor of 2' but none i have seen so far has critically examined whether the select metrics these tools zero-in on are actually that salient as far as whether people respond positively or negatively to music. of course by these methods lyrical content is considered nearly irrelevant beyond its mere presence and how 'speechy' it is, lol. ridiculous.

of course by these methods lyrical content is considered nearly irrelevant beyond its mere presence and how 'speechy' it is

― dyl, Monday, July 23, 2018 12:59 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

to be fair this is also the music-critic party line

"sometimes the tool gets the tempo wrong by a factor of 2" is insanely obvious to anyone who's ever used serato

another thing i sometimes wonder about these pieces that do audio analyses of hits is how often the tracks they feed into their analytical tools aren't even the correct ones. like the one i linked above says it sourced audio from spotify (if i'm understanding correctly), but, like, you don't even have to go that far back in the history of the charts before you start turning up hits that aren't on any of the streaming services or digital download stores. not to mention the many that aren't available on digital platforms as their original versions, but ARE available as bad, cheap-sounding re-recordings from 15 years later. personally when i am searching for old + relatively forgotten chart music i often have to turn to youtube when the streameries don't have the proper versions!

If I had a way to automatically deactivate the Spotify audio-attribute API whenever anybody tries to use it to explain or predict hits, I would totally do that...

ha. yeah, and dyl otm - - - i'm waiting for something like "we analyzed fifty bubblegum hits from the early 70s, and surprisingly, the feature most predictive of a hit in this period was tinny late 80s digital production"

"the late 2010s were characterized by an uptick in songs that sound as if they have been shifted up a half-step in key"

Lol that's a joke, but that's actually a good trick. When you tune the track a little sharp it pops on radio

the streameries

nice

oh I meant people pitch-shifting videos for YouTube to get around copyright detection but that works too

this is killing me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Q34lJ5gEJs

lmao that's deserves to take the 77 this year

lol excellent work.

loving this new mountain goats

UMS, how did you encounter this 4-year old youtube with 38 views?

Didn’t we talk about his guy recently in some thread?

I saw it on Facebook via a former ilxor

btw this guy's body of work in insane

so this is what kozelek is up to these days

Listen to @alyandaj's cover of @TheNational's "I Need My Girl" https://t.co/hfv5RvyYNQ pic.twitter.com/kCm6qp8e1C

— Stereogum (@stereogum) July 31, 2021

I was really hoping this would be the Pitchfork Peppa Pig review