Rockism and poptimism

Based on Wikipedia: Rockism and poptimism

In 1981, a Liverpool musician named Pete Wylie announced something called the "Race Against Rockism"—a cheeky inversion of the era's Rock Against Racism campaign. Within moments, music journalists seized the term "rockist" as an insult. If you lazily assumed Pink Floyd was automatically superior to Gang of Four, or believed good music had died with punk, you were a rockist. And you were wrong.

What followed over the next four decades was a slow-motion culture war over the soul of music criticism itself.

The Great Divide: When Pop and Rock Stopped Being Synonyms

This might surprise you: until the late 1960s, "pop" and "rock" meant essentially the same thing. Both were shorthand for the exciting new sound that had electrified teenagers since the 1950s. The words were interchangeable, like "film" and "movie."

Then the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967, and everything changed.

Magazines like Rolling Stone and Creem had been working to establish popular music as worthy of serious critical attention—the same way film critics had fought to have cinema recognized as an art form, not just carnival entertainment. After Sgt. Pepper, these writers needed a vocabulary to distinguish between different ambitions within popular music. They split the atom.

"Rock" became the serious stuff: heavier, guitar-driven, rebellious, innovative, politically engaged. Rock artists wrote their own songs, played their own instruments, and released ambitious long-playing albums meant to be absorbed as complete artistic statements.

"Pop" became everything else: lighter, more commercial, more disposable. A guilty pleasure at best.

This distinction wasn't just about sound—it was about values. Rock embodied authenticity. Pop represented artifice. Rock was art. Pop was product. Rock would endure. Pop was ephemeral.

Or so the thinking went.

The Authenticity Trap

The rockist worldview rested on a seductive premise: that some music is more "real" than other music. The singer-songwriter pouring their heart out with an acoustic guitar was authentic. The manufactured pop group assembled by record executives was fake. The growling performer lost in the moment was genuine. The lip-syncher hitting their marks was a fraud.

But here's the uncomfortable truth that rockism never quite resolved: all recorded music is artificial. Every album involves producers, engineers, editors, and marketers making countless decisions about how to present the artist. Bob Dylan's raw folk persona was as carefully constructed as any boy band's image. The Rolling Stones' bad-boy rebellion was managed by savvy handlers who understood exactly how to package danger for suburban consumption.

The sociologist Motti Regev observed that professional critics had created an orthodoxy—a canonical hierarchy where certain artists and albums became unquestionable monuments. He pointed to Robert Christgau's decade-end "Consumer Guide" collections and Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums as examples of this "continuous canonization," where the critical establishment kept reinforcing the same value system year after year.

Not everyone bought it. Some critics argued that imposing high-culture values onto rock music was itself a kind of pretension—the cultural establishment colonizing youth culture and declaring its own favorites the winners.

The Anti-Rockist Insurgency

The first serious challenge to rockism came from an unexpected direction: the wreckage of punk.

By the late 1970s, punk had burned itself out in Britain, but it left behind musicians and critics hungry for something new. The post-punk movement that emerged was obsessed with experimentation, creativity, and forward motion. When that energy began to dissipate, writers like Paul Morley at the New Musical Express (commonly known as NME) started championing what they called "new pop"—a deliberate embrace of mainstream accessibility and what Morley termed "overground brightness."

If punk had been about tearing down, new pop was about building something genuinely pleasurable. And crucially, it rejected the rockist assumption that underground credibility was inherently superior to commercial success.

The original anti-rockists had personal grievances driving their crusade. As Morley later recalled, they'd been given a hard time in school for loving David Bowie and Marc Bolan instead of Emerson, Lake and Palmer and Led Zeppelin. This wasn't abstract aesthetic theory—it was revenge.

What Exactly Is Rockism?

Defining rockism precisely has always been tricky. The term functions more as a cluster of attitudes than a coherent philosophy.

In 2004, the critic Kelefa Sanneh offered perhaps the most influential definition in an essay for The New York Times. A rockist, he wrote, "reduces rock 'n' roll to a caricature, then uses that caricature as a weapon." Rockism meant idolizing authentic old legends while mocking current pop stars. It meant lionizing punk while barely tolerating disco. It meant loving live shows and hating music videos. It meant extolling growling performers while dismissing lip-synchers.

Sanneh went further, accusing rockism of carrying undercurrents of sexism, racism, and homophobia. After all, the genres most dismissed by rockist critics—disco, dance music, teen pop—were often those with the largest audiences of women, Black listeners, and gay fans.

The Seattle Weekly's Douglas Wolk proposed a simpler formulation: rockism is treating rock as the default state of popular music, the standard against which everything else is measured. When critics describe a hip-hop album as having "rock sensibilities" as a compliment, or praise an electronic artist for sounding "organic," they're revealing their rockist assumptions.

The design critic Nick Currie compared rockism to Stuckism, an international art movement that holds painters and sculptors are the only real artists. Both ideologies police boundaries, insisting that certain forms of creative expression are legitimate while others are mere entertainment or commerce.

Enter the Poptimists

Poptimism—sometimes called popism—emerged as the explicit antidote to rockism. The term itself is a portmanteau of "pop" and "optimism," and it carries a simple core argument: pop music deserves the same respect, the same serious critical attention, as rock.

Two texts crystallized this movement. First was Carl Wilson's book about Céline Dion's album Let's Talk About Love, a deep dive into why critics dismiss certain artists as uncool and what that dismissal reveals about critical biases. Second was Sanneh's 2004 New York Times article, which asked readers to reconsider their assumptions about musical permanence.

"Stop pretending that serious rock songs will last forever, as if anything could," Sanneh wrote, "and that shiny pop songs are inherently disposable, as if that were necessarily a bad thing." He offered a pointed example: Van Morrison's Into the Music was released the same year as the Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight." Which one do you hear more often?

The argument resonated. As the critic Robert Loss summarized the emerging poptimist position: the rockist represents traditional values of authenticity while the poptimist is progressive and inclusive. The rockist is nostalgic, forever complaining that they don't make good music anymore. The poptimist looks forward and values the new. The rockist demands artists who sing their own songs and play instruments, preferably guitars. The poptimist lets pop be fun.

The Poptimist Conquest

What happened next was remarkable. Poptimism didn't just win the argument—it conquered the entire landscape of music criticism.

Pitchfork, the online publication that had built its reputation covering indie and alternative music, began reviewing mainstream pop acts like Taylor Swift. More tellingly, those reviews grew less critical over time. The publication simply stopped publishing takedowns of major artists.

By 2015, the Washington Post's Chris Richards could declare that after a decade of "righteously vanquishing rockism's nagging falsehoods," poptimism had become "the prevailing ideology for today's most influential music critics." The word itself might not come up at parties, but in music journalism circles, poptimism was holy writ.

The music journalist Jody Rosen had seen this coming. Writing in 2006, he noted the growing backlash against rock's traditional acclaim and the rise of a new critical consensus. He spoke positively of the shift but warned against excess: a hierarchy biased toward pop was no better than one biased toward rock. Both genres had qualities worth respecting.

The Poptimism Backlash

Almost immediately, critics began noticing something uncomfortable about poptimism in practice.

Paul Morley, the former NME writer who'd been on the anti-rockist frontlines since the beginning, complained in 2006 that "many of the self-proclaimed American anti-rockists—or popists, or poptimists, or pop pricks—actually write with a kind of fussy, self-important rockist sheen." Despite all their studious over-analysis, he argued, they'd simply replaced one orthodoxy with another.

Rob Horning at PopMatters was harsher: "It's sad to think the sharpest critics drowning in self-importance while believing they are shedding themselves of it. Basically by rejecting all that was once deemed important by a previous generation and embracing the opposite, you can make the case for your own importance. This is not optimism, it's reaction."

By 2017, Michael Hann, music editor at The Guardian, was ready to declare that "the poptimists are just as proscriptive as the rockists." He identified a new set of sacred cows that critics were forbidden to challenge:

• When a member of a manufactured pop group releases solo material, it must be treated as a profound statement of artistic integrity—never as a sad footnote to the imperial years.
• When a major artist drops a "surprise" album, the release strategy itself is revolutionary, regardless of the music.
• To express indifference toward Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, or similar artists reveals not your musical taste but your prejudices. You might be exposing unconscious racism and sexism. At best, you're trolling.
• Commercial success should be taken as evidence of quality. Fifty million Elvis fans can't be wrong.
• If authenticity is worthless as a marker of musical value, then contrivance and cynicism should be celebrated as evidence that the artist understands the game they're playing.

That last point captures something essential about poptimism's evolution. What began as a call for critics to take pop music seriously had transformed into something stranger: a demand that critics not take pop music seriously at all. Meaning was out. Fun was in. And if you insisted on analyzing pop with the same rigor you'd apply to any other art form, you were probably just a disguised rockist.

The Cheerleading Problem

The most damaging critique of poptimism focused on what happened when critics actually sat down to write.

Chris Richards argued that poptimism had become a form of cheerleading for the already successful. Once an artist reached a certain level of stardom, negative reviews essentially became forbidden. Consensus was privileged. Dissent was smothered.

The New York Times Magazine's Saul Austerlitz called poptimism a product of click-driven internet journalism. Publications discovered that positive reviews of popular artists generated more traffic than critical assessments. The incentives aligned perfectly: readers wanted validation of their existing tastes, advertisers wanted eyeballs, and critics wanted to keep their jobs. Everyone benefited except anyone hoping for honest evaluation.

Austerlitz posed an uncomfortable question: "Should gainfully employed adults whose job is to listen to music thoughtfully really agree so regularly with the taste of 13-year-olds?" He noted that book critics and film critics still felt free to champion difficult, challenging work over popular entertainment. Why had music critics surrendered that responsibility?

Robert Loss endorsed this diagnosis: "When Austerlitz wrote that 'music criticism's former priority—telling consumers what to purchase—has been rendered null and void for most fans. In its stead, I believe, many critics have become cheerleaders for pop stars,' I imagined an editor and a record label exec swooping down on him saying, 'Don't tell them that!'"

The numbers supported the skeptics. Look at any major music publication—Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, PopMatters—and count the low-rated albums. You'll barely find any. "Telling consumers what to purchase is still the point of a lot of music 'criticism,'" Loss concluded.

The Arms Race of Hyperbole

Michael Hann offered a revealing confession about how poptimist pressures shaped coverage at The Guardian:

When writers deal with "upmarket" readership, they need to be able to justify your coverage, and that means thinkpieces hailing the cultural significance of the new pop stars. And once you've decided these subjects matter, it's hard to turn round and say: "Actually, you know what? This isn't much cop."

He described commissioning articles about Taylor Swift not because they were editorially necessary but because they generated traffic. If no one wanted to read about Swift, the thinkpieces would disappear. Instead, publications entered "an arms race of hyperbole," crediting her with forcing Apple to change its streaming terms, dismantling the musical patriarchy, and creating new paradigms in music and society.

This dynamic creates a self-reinforcing cycle. Coverage generates attention, which justifies more coverage, which demands ever-grander claims to distinguish this month's thinkpiece from last month's. The result is criticism that functions as marketing—not for the publication, but for the artist.

The Same Coin, Different Sides

Perhaps the most devastating critique came from Robert Loss, who argued that rockism and poptimism are ultimately the same thing.

Both ideologies treat music as a social commodity. Both mystify the conditions in which music is actually made. Both create hierarchies and police boundaries, just with different artists on top. The rockist demands authenticity; the poptimist dismisses authenticity as a myth. But neither engages seriously with the economics, labor conditions, and power structures that shape what music gets made and who profits from it.

Loss also noted that poptimism, like many movements in "a culture wherein history isn't valued much," neglects its own precedents. It presents itself as a radical break with the past, depicting older rock critics as nothing more than "a bunch of bricklayers for the foundations of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame."

But this caricature ignores what those critics were actually doing. "Like film studies, rock criticism of the late '60s and the '70s was an attempt to make popular music worthy of study," Loss wrote. "It was poptimism before its day." The original rock critics weren't defending a canon—they were building the case that popular music deserved serious attention at all. That's precisely what poptimists claim to want.

Where Does This Leave Us?

In 2025, Kelefa Sanneh—the critic whose 2004 article helped launch poptimism as a movement—reflected on what had happened to his ideas. Poptimism, he wrote, had "bled into a broader belief that it was bad manners to criticize any cultural product that people liked, whether it be a pop song or a superhero movie or a romance novel."

This wasn't what he'd intended. The argument against rockism was supposed to expand the range of music that critics took seriously, not eliminate critical judgment altogether. Instead, the movement had produced a criticism culture where the only acceptable response to popular art was celebration.

The irony is painful. Rockism failed because it couldn't recognize artistry in music that didn't conform to its narrow templates. Poptimism promised to fix this by embracing a wider range of music. But in practice, it created its own blind spots—an inability to distinguish between good pop and bad pop, between genuine innovation and cynical calculation, between art that challenges its audience and product designed to confirm existing tastes.

Neither ideology, it turns out, has solved the fundamental problem of music criticism: how do you evaluate art honestly while respecting the diverse ways people find meaning in music? How do you maintain critical standards without becoming a snob? How do you celebrate pleasure without abandoning judgment?

These questions remain unanswered. The war between rockism and poptimism generated enormous amounts of heat, reshaped the landscape of music journalism, and launched countless thinkpieces. What it didn't produce was a sustainable model for criticism that serves listeners rather than artists, labels, or publications.

Maybe that's because the battle was always about the wrong things. Both sides were fighting over which music deserved respect, when the more interesting question was always how to think clearly about any music at all.