"Professing Inadequate Fealty to Pop"

"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.'"


Saul Austerlitz in The New York Times Magazine decries "The Pernicious Rise of Poptimism."