File: 150 KB, 650x430, katy-perry-cover-02-billboard-650.jpg [
Show reposts] Image reverse search: [
iqdb] [
google]
No.54055175 [
Reply] [
Original]
Can someone explain what this is? I've been hearing it thrown around a lot lately.
| >> | No.54055444
>>54055423
A Grantland article published a few months ago was illustrative of this new mode of critical thought. The author described being disappointed with the new Beyoncé album after having listened to it some 20 times, before eventually changing his mind and pleading guilty to deviations from orthodoxy. “I was wrong to say that I didn’t like the Beyoncé album after two days,” he wrote, eventually concluding by admonishing any others who had not yet seen the light: “If you don’t like the new Beyoncé album, re-evaluate what you want out of music.”
The reigning style of music criticism today is called “poptimism,” or “popism,” and it comes complete with a series of trap doors through which the unsuspecting skeptic may tumble. Prefer Queens of the Stone Age to Rihanna? Perhaps you are a “rockist,” still salivating over your old Led Zeppelin records and insisting that no musical performer not equipped with a serious case of self-seriousness and, probably, a guitar, bass and drums is worthy of consideration. Find Lady Gaga’s bargain basement David Bowie routine a snooze? You, my friend, are fatally out of touch with the mainstream, with the pop idols of the present. You are, in short, an old person. Contemporary music criticism is a minefield rife with nasty, ad hominem attacks, and the most popular target, in recent years, has been those professing inadequate fealty to pop.
|
| >> | No.54055474
>>54055444
Poptimism is a studied reaction to the musical past. It is, to paraphrase a summary offered by Kelefa Sanneh some years ago in The New York Times in an article on the perils of “rockism”: disco, not punk; pop, not rock; synthesizers, not guitars; the music video, not the live show. It is to privilege the deliriously artificial over the artificially genuine. It developed as an ideology to counteract rockism, the stance held by the sort of critic who, in Sanneh’s words, whines “about a pop landscape dominated by big-budget spectacles and high-concept photo shoots” and reminisces “about a time when the charts were packed with people who had something to say, and meant it, even if that time never actually existed.”
Poptimism wants to be in touch with the taste of average music fans, to speak to the rush that comes from hearing a great single on the radio, or YouTube, and to value it no differently from a song with more “serious” artistic intent. It’s a laudable goal, emerging in part from the identity politics of the 1990s and in part from a desire to undo the original sin of rock ’n’ roll: white male performers’ co-opting of established styles and undeservedly receiving credit as musical innovators. Jody Rosen, a music critic I admire greatly, admitted as much in Slate in 2006, writing that “many of my colleagues, like me, have embraced the anti-rockist critique with particular fervor as a kind of penance, atoning for past rockist misdeeds — for the party line we’d swallowed whole in our formative years and maybe even parroted under our bylines.”
|
| >> | No.54055548
>>54055520
The music historian Ted Gioia recently argued in a pointed Daily Beast article that “music criticism has turned into lifestyle reporting,” more interested in breakups and arrests than in-depth musical analysis. He has a point, although the culprit is not rampant musical illiteracy on the part of critics or the factthat not everyone is Lester Bangs reincarnate, as he suggests. The problem may very well be that music criticism has become so staunchly descriptivist.
I spend most of my time, professionally speaking, writing about movies and books, and during quiet moments, I like to entertain myself by imagining what might happen if the equivalent of poptimism were to transform those other disciplines. A significant subset of book reviewers would turn up their noses at every mention of Jhumpa Lahiri and James Salter as representatives of snobbish, boring novels for the elite and argue that to be a worthy critic, engaged with mass culture, you would have to direct the bulk of your critical attention to the likes of Dan Brown and Stephenie Meyer. Movie critics would be enjoined from devoting too much of their time to “12 Years a Slave” (box-office take: $56 million) or “The Great Beauty” ($2.7 million), lest they fail to adequately analyze the majesty that is “Thor: The Dark World” ($206.2 million). What if New York food critics insisted on banging on about the virtues of Wendy’s Spicy Chipotle Jr. Cheeseburger? No matter the field, a critic’s job is to argue and plead for the underappreciated, not just to cheer on the winners.
|
| >> | No.54055706
>>54055653
In the guise of open-mindedness and inclusivity, poptimism gives critics — and by extension, fans — carte blanche to be less adventurous. If we are all talking about Miley Cyrus, then we do not need to wrestle with knottier music that might require some effort to appreciate. And so jazz and world music and regional American genres are shunted off to specialized reviewers, or entirely ignored. If this sounds like a fundamental challengeof the contemporary world — preserving complexity and nuance in a world devoted to bite-size nuggets of easy-to-swallow, predigested information — it should.
Poptimism diminishes the glory of music by declaring, repeatedly and insistently, that this is all it can do. But there is always more to the story. Critics of all stripes have the privilege of devoting their professional lives to hacking a path through the thicket of cultural abundance. There is, now more than ever, too much to listen to, too much to watch, too much to read. All we can do is point out some highlights of our journey. Criticism matters because its virtues are profoundly human ones: honesty, curiosity, diligence, pluralism. We should never sacrifice any of those in the name of an artificial consensus.
And get that Speedy Ortiz album. It’s killer.
|