thread to track Poptimism 2.0

Yeah, it seems like it's been that way for at least a few years. A disjunction exists between the coverage and good press given the Miranda Lambert gang, Brandi Carlile, etc and the so-called himbos who dominate first-week sales and country airplay.

I've not read it - I'm not mad - but this Dominic Sandbrook book on British popular culture seems to come at the "choices of the market are necessarily aesthetically interesting" angle from a right of centre, trust-in-the-market angle - perhaps some Poptimists here or elsewhere have engaged with it more diligently:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/14/the-great-british-dream-factory-by-dominic-sandbrook-review

Most of those don't really exist in the current pop market, with the exception of some watered down Timba/Pharrell stuff, and dancehall which has only really crept back into the mainstream over the past couple of years.

um, what? leaving aside dancehall, which is obviously everywhere:

- Timba/Neptunes shiny futurism (and also futuristic-classicism, all those recycled and reskinned Jacko and Prince and Marvin moves)

...the... weeknd? and all of the post-"Get Lucky" shiny nu-'80s-cocaine-funk tracks from the past couple years, many produced by Max Martin; every time I think it's dying out it goes fuckin' one winged bateman

- Retro-80s synths, recycled glam riffs, kitchen sink maximalism (that whole Xenomania/Richard X/Girls Aloud/Sugababes/Rachel Stevens Popjustice Brit axis)

maybe not the Xenomania variety, but "retro-80s synths" describes huge swaths of the pop charts at any given point and has so for about a decade.

- Punk pop (Avril, Kelly Clarkson, Ashlee Simpson etc)

this is the one entry on the list that isn't on the charts per se. but it's not that it's gone -- a lot of these people have just become songwriters. Sarah Hudson is a good example here. (given the market economics, a lot of what might otherwise have been a pop-punk or pop-rock song in another era turns into an EDM topline.)

literally all my exposure to adorno is through ben watson's zappa book. he seems ok from what i can tell, but why have a critical philosophy at all? i think the true poptimist critical stance is syncretism. do anything you want as long as it holds together for three minutes.

I mean Altamont happened because the Stones a) were shamed into doing a free concert to prove they weren't capitalist pigs and b) hired Hell's Angels instead of real security because the Dead told them to

― bhad and bhabie (upper mississippi sh@kedown)

do we still believe this? do we still believe moonlighting cops would have been less likely to kill a black guy for no reason than hell's angels were?

I think the big shift for me wrt politics/social awareness in pop has been moving from necessary discussions about the problematic aspects of popular art (i.e. "Under My Thumb," Graceland, The Marshall Mathers LP) to treating the problematic aspects as something that determines the actual worth of art (i.e. Justin/Taylor/Katy being not woke enough)

I know this is getting close to /mu/ "protect men from cuckfork" stuff, but defining art by its political awareness seems really *disconnected* from an wider audience that is still putting toxic males like XXX and 6ix9ine and Chris Brown and Chainsmokers in the Hot 100. Society is *still* reflecting those values, sadly, and Taylor/Justin/Katy/Bruno are reflections too, navigating this sea as best they can. They can't be expected to be up on the latest Twitter opinion on whether Three Billboards is necessary art or garbage.

It reminds me of the media that spent the 2016 election reposting John Oliver EVISCERATES videos to a tiny audience of self-satisfied, comfy libs while America voted for Trump anyway. As I type this, the radio in the diner is playing MJ and R Kelly's "You Are Not Alone." This stuff is not going away.

It's obviously INCREDIBLY important that we discuss, analyze, dissect, confront, attack and tear down the weird, retrograde masculinity in the Timberlake album (and I did in my review) but it's def a priveliged position to be a scold about it and treat it like the reason his music is bad

I tend to be a little more agnostic/reletivist because I have the opposite approach as lex: I think art is driven by society and not the other way around

for the most part

how do you define "driven'?

Replace driven with reflects

art <---> society, i.e. a reinforcement loop, but the collegiate Wildean I was would have ground his boot in my face

I mean one of the differences between rock and pop is that rock looks backwards to retain relevancy whereas pop has to innovate - compare the overuse of "futuristic production" as a positive signifier for pop music vs "classic rock and roll" and the pride of influence in indie/rock narratives when those styles are undergoing a popularity boom. (Eg "Toxic" vs The Strokes fifteen years ago).

Its not that innovation or retroism are inherently positive/negative attributes. But i think as a listener i would find it limiting if pop was to live in thrall to a golden era of nostalgia.

― boxedjoy, Tuesday, February 6, 2018 12:40 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'm not really up with JT or what happened at the Superbowl or anything like that, but I find this perspective interesting.

Rock hasn't always been about looking backwards and in its heyday you had styles like 'progressive rock' which by definition were looking to move things forward. Punk music was also seen as radical (despite some of the sound being modelled on 50s rock'n'roll). Like all genres, the radical, forward thinking music of its day ossifies and becomes the stuffy traditionalist benchmark by which olds measure contemporary music. It's hard to mark exactly when and how jazz went from being perceived as a culturally lowbrow movement that was potentially damaging to the fabric of society, to something that is studied in conservatoires and scrutinised by academics. But it happened. And in the last ten or more years, rock has started going a similar way - classicist, stuffy, stuck in the past. This is not 'rock' by definition, rather the natural bellcurve of any cultural movement.

So there's nothing to say that pop - having gone from being seen as a disposable movement in the 80s/90s, to critical re-evaluation by the poptimist movement in the 2000s (which let's not forget was bolstered largely by critics), and finally accepted as a truth by all but the most entrenched rockists - hasn't got much else to push against. If it's been accepted by everyone, it's become the status quo and the purveyance of not just 'the kids' but parents and professors and journalists etc.

It's not that pop itself has become stale as a sound (there are still people pushing rock and jazz into new territory), but as things go on we might see an end to the traditional Madonna/Beyonce/Dua Lipa model of popstar. The kneejerk tearing-down of former idols like Taylor and Justin seem to be the first signs of that.

...the... weeknd? and all of the post-"Get Lucky" shiny nu-'80s-cocaine-funk tracks from the past couple years, many produced by Max Martin; every time I think it's dying out it goes fuckin' one winged bateman

These are fundamentally different I think, there's a big festival-friendly sheen to the records you're talking about, big build-ups and 4/4 kicks and rising Eurohouse chords amid all the Jacko-lite moves, all of which is absent from peak-era Timbaland and Neptunes productions. They're all slinkier, with much more space in the sound and syncopation in the beat. Also the *texture* of current pop is completely different to the era we're talking about.

maybe not the Xenomania variety, but "retro-80s synths" describes huge swaths of the pop charts at any given point and has so for about a decade

Really? Obviously most current chart point is heavily synthy but it's a thoroughly modern sound these days, all those punchy EDM bass sounds or plinky Clean Bandit synths or once again that hypercompressed maximalist house sheen. A lot of the 00s Brit stuff I'm talking about was as much built around chugging 70s glam riffs as it was about 80s synthpop and that's vanished as well. It's the songwriting that's changed as well, big Coldplayish stadium choruses, Guetta bangers, the millennial whoop. I don't think it's controversial to say that pop music sounds entirely different now.

to the traditional Madonna/Beyonce/Dua Lipa model of popstar

one of these is not like the other

xp -- every time the phrase "millennial whoop" is used strauss and howe rip the wings off a baby boomer

I haven't checked the figures but like people are saying upthread, the wide church of 'pop' if you simply define it as 'music that is popular' is peaking at acts like Chainsmokers, Migos, Ed Sheeran, none of whom really fit the traditional model of the teen-pop act as we once knew it. The Spice Girls are reuniting as a legacy act this year and there are loads of 40 year olds at my work going beserk about it

TS: millennial whoop vs barbaric yawp

hmmm. whiney, your take on things is so far away from both my take and what i take to be the collective critical ethos of board posters that i can't even meaningfully engage with it. like, i know you started this thread, but it seems like an argument for another thread at this point.

yeah, for sure, I mean, I shouldn't imply that my way is the CORRECT way, I'm just saying it's a trend I'm seeing. Correct me if I'm wrong!

Also, I think a lot of words usually reserved for academic contexts – like "misogynoir" – coming into wider use if helping this push too, idk

To put it more clearer, in the 90s it felt like we used to weigh the problematic elements of art against its merit, and now art's merit seems increasingly dictated by its relationship to problematic elements

If that's improvement or not is in the eye of the reader/critic/ILXor. But the JT album DOES feel like a weird moment for this. Like Uproxx ran TWO pieces that are like "idk maybe we're doing this wrong"

http://uproxx.com/music/justin-timberlake-man-of-the-woods-takedown-culture/
http://uproxx.com/music/justin-timberlake-super-bowl-halftime-show-man-of-the-woods-album-cycle/

I know both katherine and I are fucking terrified that "music g@merg@te" is always around the corner

vs balearic yawn

Pop, like beer, used to be proudly proletarian, unpretentious, and tasteless.

#Pabst

lmao @ that sentence

from this day forth I'm always going to assume Whitman's "barbaric yawp" sounds like the "aaAAY!" from "Macarena"

I'm more acquainted with the discussion in film criticism, but back then the discussion seemed always to be about separating artist and art, and to some extent that has become increasingly impossible to do. The recent thing that has stuck with me was a film magazine making a list of the best sex scenes in film, and put the butter scene from Last Tango in Paris as number one, the same scene that had been at the center of a storm after Bertolucci admitted to withholding information from the Maria Schneider before the shoot, making her feel violated. But he did that to get an effect out of her, the exact effect that the magazine thought was so good. So that scene was hailed not in spite of, but because of the despicable way it was made. And the feeling that a lot of especially 70's cinema was hailed not in spite of it's problematic content, but to a large extent because of it, is sticking with me (hi, Woody Allen...)

I'd wager something similar is going on with music, especially with appropriation. Justin Timberlake has always been a watered down version of the Timbaland sound of the late nineties, but critics still liked it despite of it. And now there's more focus on him never getting good press despite of being the conservative and safe version of Aaliyah/Missy Elliott, but because of it.

conservative and safe version of Missy Elliott

are you talking about the Missy Elliott from the Mountain Dew commercial?

but back then the discussion seemed always to be about separating artist and art,

and, whoever said it upthread, it is, in fact harder to do this in the age of social media

It's hard to mark exactly when and how jazz went from being perceived as a culturally lowbrow movement that was potentially damaging to the fabric of society, to something that is studied in conservatoires and scrutinised by academics. But it happened.

It's not that hard - it started in the early 1950s, when jazz's commercial prospects were eclipsed by rock 'n' roll; all the same people who'd been calling jazz vulgar and lowbrow heard Elvis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry et al. and thought/said/wrote, "OMG, we thought jazz was bad? These new barbarians will be the death of us all!" And as far as jazz entering the academy, that was a years-long struggle, instigated by jazz musicians themselves who were a) in search of critical respect and b) seeking the relative job security of professorships. And in the late 60s, they were able to break in in large part because of broader social upheaval - free/avant-garde jazz was, rightly or (mostly) wrongly, portrayed as a voice of Black Rage and Social Justice, and institutions decided they needed to get in on that action, so Anthony Braxton and Cecil Taylor and Roscoe Mitchell and Bill Dixon and a few others became college professors.

specialist publications existed that didn't see jazz as culturally lowbrow well before the 50s (uk's melody maker started in 1926, down beat in 1934, jazz hot in 1935): the start of the move from that perspective is in the 30s, tho it didn't bed in in academic terms, as grawlix says, until the 50s (john lewis and gunther schuller founded the modern jazz society in 1955; nat hentoff and martin williams found the jazz review inc 1958)

the poets, novelists and critics of the harlem renaissance were taking jazz seriously even earlier

(and gilbert seldes wrote "the seven lively arts" in 1923) (obviously in one sense these were all outliers, but they indicated when/where a particular trajectory began

I think the big shift for me wrt politics/social awareness in pop has been moving from necessary discussions about the problematic aspects of popular art (i.e. "Under My Thumb," Graceland, The Marshall Mathers LP) to treating the problematic aspects as something that determines the actual worth of art (i.e. Justin/Taylor/Katy being not woke enough)

To me it seems like the opposite. I think critics are still starting with the same central notion of “Do I like this music?” they always have, but then they’re working backward from that conclusion to find moral justifications for their preferences. And that’s the easiest thing in the world to do when they already don’t like the music, since all art is problematic in one way or another. So now it’s not enough to just rip on Miley, JT, Taylor and Katy for putting out mediocre-to-crappy albums—they’re also an affront to your values. (And yeah as David argued, there’s some clear hypocrisy here; critics are all too happy to give Migos or Cardi B a pass b/c they like their music).

But I think it leads to some sloppy criticism in the reverse, too, with critics holding up a lot of great albums as social statements they may not have been intended to be (SZA, Rihanna, Frank Ocean—acts that put out great albums that work best on the personal/emotional level). We see this a lot with Lorde, who put out an immensely lovable album that critics sometimes strained to imbue with an importance it didn’t need in order to enjoy it. Critics have started retrofitting any album they love as a political statement, b/c "great pop album" alone isn't reason enough to celebrate a record now.

cynical question: do they do that for clicks?

what in 2018 isn't?

whoever said upthread that we're back to revering the album is OTM, only now revering the album also includes admiring the way in which the album's politics and mine mesh.

part of this is just what critics do -- imbue albums with importance -- but the rest, at least of what I've read, comes from a place of "the personal is political." (and not always explicitly, but also from a place of "it is valid and often enlightening to talk about music as it is received by listeners and by the world" -- I'm pretty sure this showed up in one or more of Tom Ewing's taxonomy-of-pop-writing articles, none that I'm able to find now though)

xxp I think it's deeper seeded (and genuinely less cynical) than that. Writers have so deeply internalized what gets clicks that it's rewired their critical minds in some ways. Like, a whole generation of writers has been trained to think of music criticism primarily on these terms, and that's become how they construct arguments about an artist's worth

what

care to back up that statement with some... anything

so you're implying subconscious "performative wokeness" or something? isn't that more cynical?

this is genuinely the first time I've heard the old false consciousness saw applied to pageviews and I'm just kind of stunned right now still

From the POV of my students, the majority of whom belong to an ethnic/racial/sexual minority, it's refreshing that they get to pick the pop stars who most correspond with their politics. That's not cynicism.

so you're implying subconscious "performative wokeness" or something? isn't that more cynical?

― Evan, Tuesday, February 6, 2018 9:15 AM (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's way more cynical imo

and as with most critiques of How We Write Now Lol it ignores the relationship between writer and editorial to make a point about young writers having been brainwashed over time into being click-hungry paragraph generators. even if you feel you're noticing this as a trend it's, like, impossible to measure and there are roughly 1000000 counterexamples

I always assumed younger writers quietly resented having to churn out 15 pieces about Taylor Swift a month but maybe it's not that quiet.

We see this a lot with Lorde, who put out an immensely lovable album that critics sometimes strained to imbue with an importance it didn’t need in order to enjoy it

idk man. i don't really *agree* with this per se as much as i read... at least one piece trying to twist itself into knots about how important that record is, but otherwise deep reading ... is... part of criticism? like things become important as you excavate meaning from them and apply meaning to them. i mayyyy be bristling at this bc i was recently accused of reading a fall out boy song too deeply (sorry it is very in character that i keep bringing them up in this discussion). none of the other examples you mentioned really register with me: as much i think blonde is less a record than an empty space to project yourself onto (not that that doesn't describe a lot of useful and good art, things that are less substantive than evocatively minimal so that the viewer/listener feels as much a part of the piece as the artist? idk i'm actually rambling now) the writing about it has, ime, always been really sharp and really connected to the personal dimensions of ocean's music. (in fact the other two examples you mentioned, sza and rihanna, are *also* personality showcases with a little to a lot of empty space left for the listener, which the writing responded to i think)

idk. i think something is going on with How We Write Music Crit Now Lol and it's not great—not necessarily a new depth of bad so much as maybe a familiar badness in a different package bc of how social media has reshaped our relationships to songs/albums/artists as well as our relationship to personal expression? but i'm also speaking from a position where i've basically already decided forever that pans are a very narrow and dull form of criticism for the most part, and extramusical elements getting drawn into pans is potentially a long established tradition, it's just easier to observe the pattern now bc literally everyone is writing the same two paragraphs (encouraged by editorial!) about jt and janet and the superb owl

i never participate in these discussions bc my thoughts never feel complete about them lol

i also feel like five different discussions are happening in this thread and i'm responding to like... a third of one conversation

w/o rereading the entire thread to check if anyone's already mentioned this, but a thing that social media has greatly amplified is the real-time 24/7 performance of persona as a key element IN the project, alongside shows and videos and singles and LPs and acting roles and slim volumes of poetry and etc

obviously this dimension has been part of pop since day once (=jenny lind) and was part the ideology of romanticism even before that, but (equally obviously) not 24-7 until quite recently and therefore far less of a faff to work at unravelling and examining and checking the various moving parts against one another

(i am basically only responding to earlier posts i have made, that is how i roll)

agree w/ brad on importance of deep reading whenever applicable; it's an undeniably essential element of finding emotional common ground and through-lines in music or any other art. forcing deep reads on anything, pop or otherwise, is probably silly, but i think it naturally occurs often as not

Has pop music content always had such a strong focus on the artists' personality?

Like, yeah I know that everyone from Bowie to Madonna to Prince were able to reinvent themselves every few years and allow themselves to inhabit these different personas, keeping it fresh etc.

But increasingly it feels like, let's take Taylor for example, pop music requires the listener to invest in TAYLOR as a personality cult.
The music assumes you have some kind of interested in her and her life and career (the whole 'The real Taylor can't come to the phone right now' thing).
This is something that's been around in hip hop since forever, from mentioning the artist by name to whole albums based on real life events. Certain strains of confessional rock music do this too, but usually it's shrouded by metaphorical devices, unless we're talking about Sun Kil Moon or the last Mount Eerie album.
Prince sang 'my name is Prince and I am funky, but you knew that already. Ziggy Stardust died and was reincarnated as Aladdin Sane, but this was more of a panto act. Madonna likely drew inspiration from events in her life, but I don't really remember her singing about HERSELF as Madonna.
Often with an artist like Taylor Swift you're acutely aware that you're listening to Taylor Swift, not just a pop song. It's an illusion-busting and myth-creating effect, a bit like the cultivation of a Twitter feed. It's the creation of a personality rather than a persona. There's little artistic license or theatricality to hide behind. Conceptual flourishes, if they appear problematic, can't be put down to theatrics - they are an transparent extension of the artists' public image. You can't separate the public profile from the music

hah, wrote that before Mark S's post

Prince sang 'my name is Prince and I am funky, but you knew that already.

LMAO Should read: Prince sang 'my name is Prince and I am funky', but you knew that already.

It's difficult to tell whether social media has eroded the importance of MYSTIQUE as a commodity in pop, or whether fans just demand that level of engagement and relateability now (I mean the current biggest pop star is Ed Sheeran so chicken/egg really). I like how tightly limited and controlled Beyonce's public pronouncements are and I wonder how long it'll be before some svengali turns up with an act who are pretty much banned from using social media, and whether you could ever get away with that now.