A Few Indisputable Points About Poptimism and Then I Give Up | Hacker News Reader

A Few Indisputable Points About Poptimism and Then I Give Up

freddiedeboer.substack.com

21 pointspaulpauper21 comments

I kind of dropped out of The Discourse a few years back, mainly by quitting Twitter, and articles like this have really stopped making sense to me. I'm sure that there is Somebody doing all these things he's talking about, but I kind of have to wonder if it drives him that crazy why is he still listening? Just go to underground shows in your city, indie music is more active than ever before (or at least it is where I live). What do I care what some NPR host thinks about Taylor Swift vs., idk, Priori or Kush Jones or any of the artists that I like. So long as I can still see them perform or listen to their music then I'm ship-shape! The Culture Industry has been shitty since the 60s, is this really news?

> I'm sure that there is Somebody doing all these things he's talking about, but I kind of have to wonder if it drives him that crazy why is he still listening?

It is pretty annoying when sources of music news and reviews you used to rely on to find new music are poptimized.

Okay that makes sense to me; I've historically avoided music reviews bc I personally hate people giving me their opinions about stuff I like/dislike, but I can see how it would be frustrating if like the Jop and Pazz section just suddenly started only recommending Sabrina Carpenter or similar.

aka what happened to Pitchfork in the early 2000s.

Nothing lasts forever....even cold November rain. We'll always have the monkey piss review though

Summed up in a tweet: https://x.com/JucheMane/status/852949235981012994

This is just one a long long number of Deboer articles all cut from the same cloth.

There's a whole (low) culture of reactionaryism & contrarianism whose existence is to rile people up & make "yet you participate in society, curious" sound like a smart edgy take that makes them better than everyone else.

There are some sources of submissions that are almost always like this. And we keep wandering in without context, taking the article at face value & trying to engage honestly, without seeing the underlying bias & context. The presence of discussions around Deboer submissions, to me, is a canary in the coal mine example of one of the primary weaknesses of social networks, which is that we come in context-free to every reshare rebroadcast out. Unless it's Barack Obama or DJT most people won't generally have a model of the implicit biases & slant of what they're reading, & wont have the time energy interest or access to go hunt down what these biases are. We are forever at risk of Freddie Deboer's (and unherd/quilette/reason) naively & slyly (that is, without having ascertained the greater context, upon which it becomes an honest acceptance) tainting us with their elaborately/conversionarily argued reactionaryism or whatever other ism.

> So, so many Millennials are confronting the end of their youth by performatively embracing youth culture, loudly declaring that the only music that matters is that which you discover on TikTok. They need everyone to know that they’ve spent the cost of a new Toyota on tickets to the Eras Tour.

Wasn't the Eras Tour designed to appeal to millennials, since they essentially grew up at the same time as Taylor Swift? This is such a bad example.

And the whole design of the concert itself is to step through different albums a few years at a time up to the present day. It's basically a concentrated nostalgia ray.

poptimism was a movement to end the critical dismissal of "pop" music in and of itself. that is, music CRITICS and writers not fans. its goal wasn't to kill or devalue rock, it was to recognize and appreciate so-called "low art" of pop music. it won and that's a good thing.

what we have now is not poptimism, because that already won and pop music has been re-evaluated critically. with the internet having more or less killed real music criticism, all that's left is clickbait reviews/articles that attract the most eyeballs. unsurprisingly, the stuff that attracts the most eyeballs is the most popular music and the stuff with the most money behind it.

i don't have a problem with pop music, i quite like pop music. i have a problem with the uncritical acceptance of all pop music being necessarily "good". i like to say i'm not a rockist, i'm a popessimist

I can appreciate and I listen to a good amount of pop music, but I never kind of see it as real music. And I have the same attitude towards EDM. It is not music to me, it is entertainment, but I simply can't see it as art, even enjoying it as entertainment. And there are things like Taylor Swift that I can't even enjoy as entertainment.

Never thought I'd be going to bat for pop music, but I'll bet you that sentiment has been said about different genres as long as there has been music.

That sentiment has been said about a lot of different things as long as there has been things to have sentiments about. What's your point?

That it's usually an effect of not understanding or an attempt at gate-keeping and acceptance is usually just a matter of time rather than some objective value.

What's your definition of music?

This is personal, and I am not trying to convince anyone, but I don't think that I can consciously put John Coltrane on the same bin as Beyonce or Eminem.

And it is definitelly not a generational issue, as Mr Coltrane has passed away decades before I was born.

Rick Beato's take: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxrwjJHXPlQ

His writing reminds me of Ben "Yatzhee" Croshaw's video game reviews. Any connection between the two? Ben, at least, was funny.

This is very much The Rebel Sell[0]:

"we - never actually had aesthetic tastes at all and have instead lived like little reeds in the wind, terrified of ever appearing to not be The Right Kind of Person, which can only ever be defined through our capitalist consumption, since we think that all we are is our capitalist consumption."

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rebel_Sell

I guess the next question is: Was Girl Talk the Bob Dylan of poptimism?

If you need another 4000 words of Freddie whining about the world today & telling you how shitty - terrible the youth are & what awful snowflakes everyone is, them here you go!

> If you tell an Olivia Rodrigo fan that you think her music is bad, they’ll have you arrested on hate crime charges. These kids can’t fucking handle it; they can’t live in a world where someone thinks the music they like sucks

This man manages to constantly see only the worst in everything & to make the most extreme cases possible. He is smart & he sees correctly and wants you all to know you're dumb and part of a dumb stupid world. Thanks Freddie, thanks a lot.

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