thread to track Poptimism 2.0

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.

I mean, there was that whole boomlet of acts kept deliberately anonymous -- the Weeknd before he became a huge pop star, stuff like Who Is Fancy, etc.

Somewhat related is the thing where acts, once they become big, will scrub any prior history of past music deals, demos, names, etc. from the Internet, as not to appear to have failures on one's resume. (or I guess to avoid any problematic old tweets from showing up). Lana Del Rey-gate was the biggest example I can think of where someone actually got called out on it

"Madonna likely drew inspiration from events in her life, but I don't really remember her singing about HERSELF as Madonna. "

A *lot* of the press around LIKE A PRAYER specifically was about her being "honest" (first album after Sean Penn divorce, etc) although she pushed back at that assumption and played with it. In a VOGUE interview (May '89) that was subheded as exploring "the private woman behind the public merchandise," she said “People don’t see that you can take some of your experiences from real life and use part of them in your art... They try to make everything an absolute truth.” And in INTERVIEW (also May '89) she said “My first couple of albums I would say came from the little girl in me, who is interested only in having people like me, in being entertaining and charming and frivolous and sweet,” Madonna told Interview in May 1989. “And this new one is the adult side of me, which is concerned with being brutally honest.”

(sorry about the wonky pasting, i cut and pasted it from my review)

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

Not really. You can choose not to. The act of singing in from of a mike or an audience means creating a character.

a brand

OH there is blessing in this gentle breeze,
A visitant that while it fans my cheek
Doth seem half-conscious of the joy it brings
From the green fields, and from yon azure sky.
Whate'er its mission, the soft breeze can come
To none more grateful than to me; escaped
From the vast city, where I long had pined
A discontented sojourner: now free,
Free as a brand to settle where I will.

I do not relate to mattdc’s breakdown of millennial pop at all, and I also think 180 degrees differently than him about the effect of streaming: its been a long needed corrective to an industry that had become detached from culture

Also I know it’s a cynical marketing move for many of them but OBVIOUSLY SoundCloud rap is the new decade pop punk

Over here that's the stuff that critics gravitated towards. Obviously that leaves out a lot but if you pick any chart from, say 2003 there's a hell of a lot of music that even the most pro-pop critic couldn't be arsed to mount a defence of, any more than they could The Script or whoever.

I also feel that streaming has enabled new sounds (eg UK afro) to break into the pop mainstream more quickly whole also making the charts more homogeneous - there's a definite sound that I think of as Spotify pop at this stage and daytime Radio 1 was full of it last year.

(Also the US and UK feel further apart and more divergent than they've been for a while which is going to lead to a fair amount of talking at cross purposes)

(Also the US and UK feel further apart and more divergent than they've been for a while which is going to lead to a fair amount of talking at cross purposes)

otm, has been for a while; the only people who care about Xenomania in the US are people who read about pop music online

No one cares about Xenomania here either nowadays and the very name would probably elicit blank glances from people even thought they were given the keys to Britain's biggest manufactured pop group and reality TV/tabloid sensation for pretty much their entire career. That era - 2004/05 in particular - was the last time the two countries felt this far apart, particularly because our charts were full of Britrock at the time. They've moved closer together and further apart at least once since then.

i've been reading this all with a lot of fascination, and i just want to throw in some of my 2 cents as someone on the cusp of "millennial"/"gen z".

i notice that, at least amongst my peers, there's a general disconnect between their ACTUAL listening habits and personal tastes and their tendencies for what they post on social media. the latter is often determined by what's discussed here—political leanings, calling out artists, dissecting their political alignments, dunking on and stanning them to varying degrees (this extends down to indie too! a FB group im in recently renamed itself to Porchrician Thunderdome for a time because everyone had been mocking porches for so long). however, there's a general self-awareness that that behavior doesn't necessarily represent actual listening habits—a favored phrase is "all ur favs are problematic". in reality, a lot of listening seems determined by intimacy, personal alignment, and a sense of relatability on a smaller scale, rather than on a political one—in tandem with a shrugging "they're bops tho," which defines a lot of engagement with chart pop. the intersection of the two is where you get an artist like Carly Rae Jepsen.

what does seem to get elided for me via these forums is an engagement with the outside world that's based on observation rather than participation—possibly as a result of the globalized listening ecosystem, lived experience and authenticity performance is valued far above deconstruction or the inhabiting of characters not identifiably proximal to the artist. if you look back, the big albums of the 2010s are defined by a continued move away from storytelling and towards theatrical performance of the self, which your mileage may vary on the value of.

these are two sides of the same coin, and it's one that poses a weird question for pop music (and society!) that feels like it's coming to a head right now. what does broad populism look like when the determining factor in securing fans is the unpacking of one's specific position, sociopolitically or emotionally or both, in society? i can't imagine a madonna, or even a michael jackson, coming about in the current pop ecosystem.

the counterpoint i guess is people like bruno mars, an exception to a lot of these ideas. but he comes to his popularity through a different kind of *historical* specificity not unlike what the weeknd did with his own pop turn—nostalgia for that assumed universalism which in itself represents a sort of specificity.

this is a rambling post and kind of disorganized, but i think y'all get my drift

there's definitely a disconnect between my actual listening habits and what I post on social media, but generally that's more because people don't give a shit about what I listen to / don't want to hear about me go on about the same 10 albums 100 times each

(the "I" to be clear is referring to me and only me, this isn't directed at anyone else)

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

― flamenco drop (BradNelson), Tuesday, 6 February 2018 16:42 (five hours ago) Permalink

this feels right to me.

In some ways my frustrations now are about seeing critical approaches that I "fought for" (to use that term very loosely) being used in ways I find uninspiring and lazy. This is not to say that I fought for the wrong things but rather that no approach to thinking about music comes pre-guaranteed with significance, meaning, nuance, insight etc.

In fact maybe what frustrates me is our apparent failure to remember that fact.

Perhaps the biggest way in which callout-culture writing has morphed into a kind of nu-rockism is not necessarily any of the specific stances taken but rather the way in which particular frames are simply assumed to lend an air of depth and authority to what is not necessarily anything more than a superficial hot-take, thereby discouraging differentiation in thinking/writing outside of relatively shallow political binaries. "Justin Timberlake sucks because he is the embodiment of white male privilege" may well be correct (or more precisely: there are interesting and potentially persuasive ways to make this argument) but as an argument it shouldn't be assumed to have any special significance or power simply because it gestures towards a political frame.

For me the point of calling out rockism was less about demanding a rejection of any notion of authenticity than it was asking that we think harder about it, that we unpack what we mean when we try to articulate why a given artist or piece of music feels more real or more important or more auratic to us than something else does - and come up with something better than just a circular hierarchy without foundation (this is authentic because it is not that, and vice versa).

On balance I think that the current popularity of politicized hot-takes still tends to produce more thoughtful writing than the worst artifacts of old-rockism, but I see similar risks in its codification and formularization - in particular, the risk that the apparent self-evidence of our dichotomies provides us a free pass to think less carefully, both about music and about politics.

Probably the other issue which feeds into the changes to music crit is the influence of twitter, and the way in which it elevates the bald assertion to a higher level of social and critical significance in terms of instigating "important conversations" about current issues/people/events.

A lot of music writing which I consider to fall within the rubric of "callout culture" feels like an assertion that started as a tweet and then was padded out to 400 words. And typically the assertion (at least if you haven't seen it in like twenty-five versions already) seems useful as a prompt for thinking, whereas the padding is just padding (i.e. the prompt evidently failed for the writer at least).

A related but separate influence is the way we now expect articles to lead with their most strident proposition.

Agreed, Tim. I get the feeling that it's common for people to start formulating their savage hot takes ready before they even hear/watch something to maximise the amount of likes or retweets they'll get. There's a competition to become the first to have the most biting take on something, with "I'M SCREAMING!" being the sought out reply from the Twittersphere. And then that hot take become consensus about art - JT is a textbook example of this.

The opposite is true for artists who align closest with the, I guess, millennial political ideal. Like, I can already tell you exactly what the Twitter consensus to whatever Beyonce does next will be. No matter what it is. A lot of knee-jerk "SLAY QUEEN" kinda stuff with little reflection.

are we still pretending to be talking about legacy media critics

if you seriously think the reason Beyonce gets better reviews than Justin Timberlake, is because of those damn millennials and their social justice, and not because Beyonce is making excellent, innovative music and Justin Timberlake is making terrible, dated music, then you should probably stop hate-reading Twitter, or at least redirect your complaints to the comments section of Salon

Some of us most certainly are, others should probably think more deeply about why they associate appropriated slang w their ideological opponents

I wish Katherine could see my twitter timeline right now bc this conversation is really not just happening among Whiney style chapo/cum town podcast listeners. This convo is happening in lots of different spaces ...

I just don’t trust any consensus but that doesn’t mean I’m eager to watch the music press from caring too much about Beyoncé to caring too much about Wilco