Carl Wilson Should Give Himself More Credit

Let me embrace the oldest cliche in essay writing: I actually agree with more of this Carl Wilson Slate essay on poptimism than you might think! To profoundly different effect, of course. But the points of agreement are there. Let me in particular endorse this paragraph and the subsequent one:

Like pretty much everyone else’s hopes about the internet, ours have come back to bite us in the ass. What we’ve gotten instead is indeed a click-based media economy, in which publications do try to produce as many headlines about a handful of big names as they can and are more hesitant to pay critics to write about new discoveries or obscure favorites, because they won’t get any views. There are still many specialty music sites where that work does happen, thankfully, but more and more of it is unpaid labor.

Matt Yglesias made this point ably, recently, that the poptimism debate makes ideas seem like currency when in fact only currency is currency. Base determines superstructure; music coverage chased the shrinking pool of money in cultural commentary, and that meant covering Post Malone instead of Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs. As Wilson says, “that’s because of eyeballs. It’s because of money.” So it is! And so it goes.

I do have my objections to Wilson’s essay, obviously, in which I am specifically named as a particularly deluded charlatan. What I object to most strenuously is the essay’s branding: it’s illustrated by an image of a literal strawman, which is meant to suggest that the poptimist figure I and others have written about many times is one that does not exist. In fact I think that figure is very real, and Slate is guilty of doing what so many do when it comes to the term “strawman”: suggesting that an argument does not exist when in fact it just isn’t a given writer’s preferred version of an argument that very much does. Wilson has his defense of pop music, other people have theirs, critics of poptimism have mostly responded to the latter, and this annoys him. I know how he feels.

I’ll start by copping to something that I have long struggled with in the discursive reality of the 21st century: argument is ambient now. I write plenty of pieces that respond to individual essays - that’s what I’m doing here - but to a remarkable degree,