Elitism in Pop Music

This is pretty much to a large extent about context, isn't it? Pop-music got very political for a few years, and under Obama it could really seem as if things were getting better. So Taylor Swifts 'squad' was not perfect, but a step in the right direction? But now small steps aren't enough, and people are turning on those who they deem to not measure up,

idk where he gets it from specifically, but hes not getting this randomly hes just reflecting the generic received wisdom

i just dont think we're in some new woke utopia just bc mainstream pundit class is scared to be on the wrong side of twitter, and saying so isn't the same as being a reactionary

I think it was Vince Staples who said if Eminem was black he’d be redman. The wild vascillations are like 🙄

― Listen to my homeboy Fantano (D-40), Monday, February 5, 2018 2:20 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Did he mean that as a diss because Redman is classic as hell

no i think he just was talking about the way white rappers get blown out of proportion but that eminem was still a dope rapper (i agree w vince i'm saying hes a voice of reason, the vascillations are more pundit class ish ...)

Lmao Lefsetz being republished in DJ booth is *chef kissing fingers motion*

brothers and sisters...i don't know what this world is coming to

no i think he just was talking about the way white rappers get blown out of proportion but that eminem was still a dope rapper (i agree w vince i'm saying hes a voice of reason, the vascillations are more pundit class ish ...)

― Listen to my homeboy Fantano (D-40), Monday, February 5, 2018 3:31 PM (seventeen seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh i get it basically like they were both dope but red doesn't get mentioned on all time top 10 lists like em and obv doesn't have near the sales/$$$$, i agree w/that

and fwiw im also not saying any individual pundit is *per se* just following consensus ... i know caramanica's been panning JT since at least 20/20. (that said the idea that he wasn't an essential pop star seems counter to my experience of his nsync through FS/LS peak)

"he's been around for a while so he's worth listening to" is some real rank shit

I’ve been worrying at this general issue a lot. Like how to square the following propositions all of which I agree with:

1. Taylor Swift’s handling of issues of race / gender / politics has been tonedeaf.

2. At least some of the prior broad support for Taylor probably has been due to her perceived status as a white “all American girl”, which probably has benefited her critically and commercially (at least in some ways or in some contexts) at the expense of other artists.

3. The music she made up until 2014 was (with some variation) largely excellent.

4. Her most recent album is her worst by some distance.

5. The critical pile-on against her in response has frequently irritated me for its lack of nuance, and in particular the way that propositions 1, 2 and 4 above are collapsed into each other.

This is not even an erroneous cause and effect issue for me, or not specifically (“Taylor’s new album is awful because she is the face of white feminism” is a proposition that one sees often enough, of course, but in truth these arguments rarely bother to actually spell out that presumed causal relationship - it’s more often presented as a kind of cluster of badness), and it’s certainly not about the invasion of social justice considerations onto the field of pop music criticism.

I think really the broader issue I have is the collapse of all critique of pop music into polarised debates over the status and intentions of the creator (typically considered first and foremost by reference to their social media presence), and a marginalisation of any other prism through which a given piece of pop music may be considered. The social justice gloss is at least in part something that we as critics use to make ourselves feel better about our interest in policing celebrities - is Taylor woke (2017) seeming like a rather more worthy topic than is Britney a talent-devoid sexbot (1999). But the structure of these arguments haven’t really changed from 1999 to 2017, which is maybe why a lot of white male critics are happy enough to adopt these new arguments - it allows the continued conflation of popular music criticism with prurient celebrity gossip culture.

I think really the broader issue I have is the collapse of all critique of pop music into polarised debates over the status and intentions of the creator (typically considered first and foremost by reference to their social media presence), and a marginalisation of any other prism through which a given piece of pop music may be considered.

Or: confusing a Facebook acquaintance's disgust with Swift or Timberlake with a useful prism through which to look at their work.

I don't see how it's surprising for the consensus to "change" on Timberlake from wherever it was five years ago around the time the last albums were released, when his most recent moment of pop culture ubiquity was actually not The 20/20 Experience but that horribly peppy song he provided to the Trolls film, which even now still continues to haunt pop radio, and he's then presented us with the cognitive dissonance of appearing on a red carpet wearing a "#TimesUp" pin while appearing in a forthcoming Woody Allen film (and then, in the pièce de résistance, asking Twitter for clarification as to the meaning of the phrase "have one's cake and eat it too" (

The saying means, for example, you can’t support #TIMESUP and praise sexual predators at the same time. You can’t retain your credibility as an activist (i.e. - retain the cake) and, at the same time, praise a sexual predator (i.e. - eating the cake).

— Dylan Farrow (@RealDylanFarrow) January 23, 2018

Add to that the context of being invited back to the Superbowl stage after what happened the last time he was there, the Grammy awards ceremony last week where barely any non-male pop artists were given any notable recognition, and the ugly nature of the music he's just released, and you have everything required to provoke a lot of people into getting mad online and letting themselves quickly forget about "My Love" or whatever.

"Can't Stop the Feeling!" is one of the decade's biggest recurrent hits. I hear it on the radio at least three or four times a week.

(and then, in the pièce de résistance, asking Twitter for clarification as to the meaning of the phrase "have one's cake and eat it too" (

this was a powerful scene in Good Time

Add to that the context of being invited back to the Superbowl stage after what happened the last time he was there, the Grammy awards ceremony last week where barely any non-male pop artists were given any notable recognition, and the ugly nature of the music he's just released, and you have everything required to provoke a lot of people into getting mad online and letting themselves quickly forget about "My Love" or whatever.

― monotony, Monday, February 5, 2018 5:06 PM (eleven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i dont think anyone is saying its happening for no reason but its not like hes more of an idiot now than he was when he was younger, people just care more. like half the shit you're complaining about is super "who gives a fuck" when people like the music, or if he was on the upswing ... cardi b said transphobic shit but its not slowing her roll

are these sorts of critical pile-ons knocking previously respected artists down a peg even that unprecedented, or is the unusual thing here that we've had ~two in a fairly short period? (the 'pile-on' for taylor was also not nearly as uniformly negative as this conversation would suggest.)

has the nature of #content changed so fundamentally that this is something to remain worried about for the foreseeable future? like yes, i would say there are certainly worrisome recent developments in how information in general, including criticism, reaches its audience and is expected to resonate in a manner that induces shares/virality/etc., so while i do get the sense that things are not quite right i am also failing to understand what is specifically objectionable about the situation discussed here. i would not guess it's especially related to 'elitism'.

given the context of reactionary backlash that katherine has patiently* delineated i am not eager to add to the chorus of " ______ otm"s, as lovely as it feels to do that here on the ilx.

* and gently too btw, despite the 'omg you're calling me a fascist/4chan' pushback

oh and also were the 'poptimists' of the stylus mag era even that uniformly supportive of jt's work at the time? i seem to recall some scathing reaction to "sexyback"

xps: the tolerance for Timberlake's brand from pop culture critics was always going to turn south when the songs became as unpalatable as they now have - without any distraction all the corniness is much harder to ignore. His conventional presentation of manhood is also all so dull and wearying, at least to me personally. This is something I felt lex explained well in his review of the album:

In some ways, Timberlake is a victim of the rapidly changing zeitgeist – though surely it is a pop star’s job to have their finger on its pulse, if not actually create it. His aspirational masculinity is the same story he has been peddling for his whole career – and when he and his collaborators were young and fresh, it resulted in genius. It is also the narrative that pop culture as a whole has sold us for a good half-century – which is why it is increasingly feeling so familiar and so tiresome.

Cardi B's circumstances are not really analogous here so I don't know that she provides a helpful comparison, though I certainly wouldn't say that her comments have passed unnoticed by the same people who have recently piled on Timberlake.

are we man of the woods yet are we man of the woods yet are we man of the woods

what is the 'aspirational masculinity' he is describing there? does he go into more depth than those two words?

though I certainly wouldn't say that her comments have passed unnoticed by the same people who have recently piled on Timberlake.

― monotony, Monday, February 5, 2018 6:11 PM (eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

hmmmmmm isn't the difference between those who *did* notice them and those who (appeared to) not notice them exactly where the me vs. katherine argument is breaking down here

I missed the Super Bowl and halftime show and showed up at my friend's party late. My friend showed me the clip of the half-time show, and we both responded similarly ("that was bad!") and then he made a show of playing "Cry Me A River" one last night before deleting it from his iTunes.

I remarked that I had a soft spot for that song and the 'dialogue' it held with "Everytime" by Britney, and he said "oh no, I don't fuck with Britney. Let me show you how much I don't fuck with Britney," and began playing "Toxic". It was the instrumental version. He had four Britney songs and they were all instrumental. "I don't need Britney when I got this," he said.

Anyway I disagree with most of the sentiments of this thread's revival

Timberlake had mega-bangers

That half-time performance felt like literal erasure of Prince and Prince's own legendary halftime show

I googled "Prince halftime show" after it was over to cleanse my brain from Justin's bullshit and all that came up was "Justin performs with Prince at the halftime show"-- it was literal, functional erasure

Here's lex's full review for context. At least for me, the aspirational masculinity Timberlake presents on this new album is one which conflates manliness with working on the land, having your woman wear your shirt so she feels like she's yours, serving as protector to wife and child, etc etc. Whether it's an overly dramatic shift from his previous work is up for debate I guess. IMO he's probably just been looking at some different Pinterest boards for inspiration as to aesthetic.

I'm not too sure what the argument is anymore and haven't been keeping a list of who has and has not called out Cardi B, but I can understand why people are less willing to disparage her personally when there are other factors like race, gender and class to consider that aren't relevant to Timberlake or, say, Ed Sheeran when he writes songs like "New Man", or Charlie Puth when he favourites Mark Dice tweets.

And a big congratulations to Britney on one year with her hunky instathot boyfriend. https://www.instagram.com/p/Be1Ht6wF4Lj/?taken-by=britneyspears

Ugh, instahot?

uh insta-not

the way ~algorithms~ engage in the erasure of the past fgti outlined is very upsetting

* and gently too btw, despite the 'omg you're calling me a fascist/4chan' pushback

― dyl, Monday, February 5, 2018 7:03 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah it was shitty of me to react the way i did to that b/c i revived this thread with inflammatory and flippant commentary and katherine was only responding in kind. i'm glad the popism 2.0 thread got started because, even though i harbor so much irrational bitterness towards the post-max martin/lou pearlman/iheart/livenation pop landscape, i was basically raised by ILM so seeing people talk out why this evolution in thinking happened is genuinely interesting and insightful to me. it was stupid for me to broach the subject in such a hostile way.

i got pretty shook by the 4chan reference because i think i do have that bitter-white-guy-who-got-bullied-in-middle-school thing going on. in my case the bullying was soundtracked by *NSYNC and Britney, so there u have it, katherine otm

i'm sorry i got all "fuck you!!!" about it

Ugh, instahot?

― Video reach stereo bog (Tom D.), Tuesday, February 6, 2018 11:44 AM (five hours ago)

no, instathot

Well, I never!

I remarked that I had a soft spot for that song and the 'dialogue' it held with "Everytime" by Britney, and he said "oh no, I don't fuck with Britney. Let me show you how much I don't fuck with Britney," and began playing "Toxic". It was the instrumental version. He had four Britney songs and they were all instrumental. "I don't need Britney when I got this," he said.

― flamboyant goon tie included, Monday, February 5, 2018 7:25 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

with friends like this etc

xp: apology accepted.

I think what bothers me the most about this discussion, every time it comes up, is the constant sense of talking about one group of people while meaning another. When I think of legacy media critics -- the few remaining who haven't gotten laid off -- I don't think of people writing hot takes for Twitter likes. I don't generally think of politics being mentioned at all unless they're absolutely unavoidable. These are all things I associate with writers in their 20s, who given the shifting demographics of media* are more likely to be women and more likely to be people of color. The most derided piece of the Justin Timberlake album cycle thus far ("Justin Timberlake is Rebranding as a White Man") was not written by a white male critic for legacy media, but written by a woman of color for a startup (The Outline). The pieces I've seen most praised, among my followers at least (a non-representative sample, but fairly representative of ILX probably) are by legacy media critics: the WaPo review, Lex's piece, etc.

I'm not saying the former pieces are beyond critique (although I do think the former piece is not as bad as many people thought, and that if you're commissioned to write a piece on the trailer for an album that, AFAIK, isn't getting promo copies widely distributed, you are inherently gambling on its sound). But it often feels like what is being criticized is not the substance of the piece but its existence, the very temerity that someone we haven't vetted** is allowed to write! and write about racism! And now they're hiring people from Twitter instead of people we vetted! Whatever will become of real music journalism? And then those exact criticisms get transplanted onto legacy media writers, and the arguments no longer make sense, because that's not who they were originally about.

* there's definitely a glass-cliff component to this, but that's for another thread. what's the analogous term to "glass cliff" for non-executive roles? glass floor?

** I haven't seen it here, but I have seen elsewhere an underlying bitterness: why are *those* people getting hired, and not me? Which, of course, also mirrors reactionary "they're taking our jobs" sentiment exactly.

The Outline piece was (rightly) criticized for being a piece of fan fiction. Or anti-fan fiction, so it assumed the worst motivations on behalf of the artist. That type of criticism – what I refer to as stone soup – is endemic to the internet because of the ever-growing need for "content," endemic to younger writers because they are in less of a position to push back at editors with bad ideas, and endemic to this age because things like promo trailers for albums that didn't even have a single attached barely existed in the old days. (Not to mention that The Outline's self-branding as "So smart, we've made ourselves downright impossible to navigate" should have killed that piece before it ever got drafted, and the editor who looked it over should have probably looked past their own biases during the process of reworking it.) Obviously the lockdown of promos, particularly for writers at non-name outlets, hasn't helped much on that front, either.

The same critiques would be, and have been, made to pieces that posit how awesome something is going to be based on bread crumbs as well.

legacy media critics: the WaPo review, Lex's piece, etc.

damn lex is a legacy music critic now
*dies of old age*

the thing about the piece is absolutely none of this is incorrect, or "fanfiction"; the closest is "heavy country influences," but the album does in fact have that; the latest single (and, it looks like, its highest-charting song) has Chris Stapleton on it! the marketing of the album also absolutely plays into the whole "Younger Now"/"Joanne"/"Rainbow" narrative, by design.

White colonialist fantasies aside, there’s something very familiar about this pivot in Timberlake’s style. We saw it from Miley Cyrus in her hasty rebranding around her 2017 pop country album Younger Now, as well as from Lady Gaga who took to wearing cowboy hats with the release of her 2016 album Joanne. Authenticity is quite marketable now, and for white pop stars that means shifting away from the hip-hop and R&B-influenced sounds that made them famous, and toward the sounds of Southern and country rock. For Timberlake, the pivot should be sonically natural: Originally hailing from Tennessee, Timberlake has never been shy about celebrating his Southern origins. And considering Pharrell and Timbaland are both producers on the album, Man of the Woods is likely to retain some familiar influences. But with his insistence in the video that this album will be his most personal yet, Timberlake is indulging in the inexplicably popular fallacy that music with heavy country influences is somehow more profound or emotionally acute than music that is electronic, lyrics that are rapped, or songs that inspire listeners to shake their asses. Most recently, hip-hop artist Post Malone pushed this narrative in an interview where he said, “If you’re looking for lyrics, if you’re looking to cry, if you’re looking to think about life, don’t listen to Hip Hop.”

Timberlake has a long history with hip-hop and R&B, genres invented and dominated by black people. (And to be clear, without African-Americans, there would be no rock or country music as we know it either — but I digress.) His first single as a solo artist featured legendary hip-hop duo Clipse and was co-written by The Neptunes. The success of his second studio album FutureSex/LoveSounds was in no small part due to hip-hop producers like Timbaland and Rick Rubin. There’s nothing wrong with a white artist expressing black influences in his music; still, the ease with which Timberlake can pivot to and away from blackness certainly raises some questions. Pop music is about reinvention, but only white artists are allowed the freedom to leap between racialized identities, depending on the whims of the market. Timberlake can escape his past much more easily than Janet Jackson, whose nude breast at the 2004 Super Bowl — which popped out thanks to Timberlake’s planned pull — directly kicked off the decline of her career, which has yet to recover. (Timberlake, for his part, has never fully atoned in public, though his upcoming performance would be a good place to start.)

xp -- by "legacy music critic" I'm using it a bit broadly here, as is everybody else, to refer to "people who started writing before 2010 or so"

no i figured, and it's true! just crazy to me to think of lex like that but time moves on

it's still fanfiction because it was not based on a listen. that it was correct is a (happy?) accident.

I mean, if you're going to complain about writers "who started writing before 2010 or so" being held up as more important than others, you have to talk about how most of them have have held onto their staff positions at big-name outlets, while other similarly big-name outlets that would also be taken seriously because of their URLs being reflective of some sort of legacy* have ditched full-time music critics because of budget cuts and attrition and layoffs. (the new york daily news, the boston globe, etc.) christgau is an exception to the "people take outlets more seriously than writers" argument but probably the only one.

*i am convinced this is why examiner.com was taken seriously at all; its name had the air of a place where copyeditors and fact-checkers were at least thought about, if not employed.

I'm not complaining about their being held up as more important (although virtually every big-name music outlet has seen a lot of turnover at basically every level of the editorial ladder, voluntary or otherwise). What I'm pointing out is this thing, which happens like clockwork, of displacing one's complaints about one class of writers by attributing them to a different class, about whom those complaints don't make sense. And the more of the following exist, the more likely this is to happen: women writers, writers of color, writers taking progressive stances.

also, "you're right, but you still shouldn't have written anything" is a stance I'm never going to be on board with, sorry. The piece isn't pretending to be an album review.

sorry accepted, and sorry back, but i'm not going to be on board with pieces that are making a lot of assumptions about art based on a too-small-to-even-be-thought-of-as-cursory sample. wait it out or look for cheap bumper-sticker traffic elsewhere.

Authenticity is quite marketable now, and for white pop stars that means shifting away from the hip-hop and R&B-influenced sounds that made them famous, and toward the sounds of Southern and country rock

Katherine... this is NOT accurate. He didn’t shift away from hip hop and r&b sounds. And he worked with the same black songwriters and producers he has for ages.

my sense lately is that whole of popular cultural criticism, which includes pop music criticism, has changed in the past several years (imo paralleling the rise of twitter, but this is conjecture) to more clearly foreground issues of social justice, anti-racism, intersectionality, etc... for people who look like me (white guys, which includes many of the initial posters in this revive), we're probably a little more likely to see the gears moving, so to speak, in some of the lazier essays (that much-discussed outline article on JT being an obvious example) the new movement produces, because unlike the women and POC who are doing more and more of the writing (a good thing), these ways of thinking do not come as naturally to us. but I think it's important for me, and other white guys, to consider that this is probably how music criticism read to non-white guys for basically the entire history of the craft, and, you know, open our minds to new ways of looking at the world

so I'm not really mad at that outline essay because while it's bad, a certain percentage of essays are always going to be bad, and this is just what bad essays are going to look like increasingly now I guess.

part of me is also just glad that I am at the point in my life when I have the least use for pop music criticism, so I feel very uninvested in any of this

I mean, it isn't a sneak preview of one track off a tracklist, it's an album trailer, conceived and released as a deliberate piece of marketing meant to convey a particular message, and conveying it with the subtlety of a lumberjack's axe. (I can't find anything about who directed it, what agency, etc., but given the caliber of personnel Justin Timberlake got for every other video this cycle, I doubt it was done on the cheap.) It's valid to write criticism about what that message might be, the same way it's valid to write criticism about any other type of advertisement.

(Trailers are also increasingly large parts of album roll-outs in general, with as much if not more deliberate label and creative attention paid to them as the album itself. Where is the line beyond which something becomes superficial and not worth commenting upon? Would it be inappropriate to write about Kanye West's 20-odd minute "Runaway" film, for instance?)

It is valid is an argument / backpedal I can agree with, I suppose

I can’t help but feel like part of what people are reacting to is a white tendency to treat certain ideological positions as inherently fixed, as authentically representative of say young black women without acknowledging the multiplicity and contradictory perspectives generated by a group that is *not monolithic*. And what ends up happening is white people and sometimes nonblack POC jump on board to one POV without realizing how by parroting the arguments of say a black woman there’s a big context shift, and that it does not mean the same thing coming from them that it did for the people who first drew attention to it. And also do not realize that one person’s perspective is not a stand in for all the perspectives of the wider group. That amplification effect is unavoidable of course, but it still has a distortive effect on conversations around lots of subjects.

Katherine... this is NOT accurate. He didn’t shift away from hip hop and r&b sounds. And he worked with the same black songwriters and producers he has for ages.

It'd be inaccurate if it said he completely abandoned it. He did not completely abandon it. He shifted toward it. Even if you discount the general Americana influence as present in Timberlake's music all along -- I don't particularly agree with that, but just discounting it for argument's sake -- putting the most critically acclaimed person in country music, Chris Stapleton, on an album where, previously, your albums did not have Chris Stapleton (emphasis on "albums," I know he cut tracks/live performances) constitutes a shift to country. The fact that "Say Something" is likely the next "official" single (AFAIK it hasn't been officially sent to radio yet, or at least doesn't show up on the list of upcoming pop radio songs, but given that it's charting so well, the one he's performing on TV, etc., I would be surprised if it weren't) corroborates that shift. (Stapleton also co-wrote more than one track on the album, so it's not some isolated gimmick.)