Rockism and poptimism
[5] Detractors of poptimism describe it as a counterpart of rockism that unfairly privileges the most famous or best-selling pop, hip hop and R&B acts.
[5] While poptimism was envisioned and encouraged[9] as a corrective to rockist attitudes,[6] opponents of its discourse argue that it has resulted in certain pop stars being shielded from negative reviews as part of an effort to maintain a consensus of uncritical excitement.
As examples of this "continuous canonization, Regev cites Robert Christgau's decade-end "Consumer Guide" collections (for the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s) and Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums book.
[21] Around this time, the term "rockist" gained popularity to disparagingly describe music that privileged traditionalist rock styles.
[22] The term was immediately repurposed as a polemical label to identify and critique a cluster of beliefs and assumptions in music criticism.
If the idea of rockism confused you, and you lazily thought Pink Floyd were automatically better than Gang of Four, and that good music had stopped with punk, you were a rockist and you were wrong.
... Anti-rockism was always violently pro-pop, largely because we original campaigning anti-rockists had been given such a tough time at school for liking [David] Bowie and [Marc] Bolan and not ELP and Led Zep.
"[13] PopMatters' Robert Loss wrote that "traditionalism" describes the policing of the present with the past, making it a better word for "rockism".
The rockist makes Art out of popular music, insists on serious meaning, and demands artists who sing their own songs and play instruments, preferably guitars; the poptimist lets pop be fun and, if not meaningless, slight.
[2] In 2006, music journalist Jody Rosen noted the growing backlash against rock's traditional critical acclaim and the new poptimism ideology.
[4] By 2015, Washington Post writer Chris Richards wrote that, after a decade of "righteously vanquishing [rockism's] nagging falsehood", poptimism had become "the prevailing ideology for today's most influential music critics.
"[5] In 2006, Morley derided the seriousness of contemporary music writers: "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.
"[6] After the 2000s, the effects of poptimism attracted a belief that once a pop star reaches a certain level of stardom, many critics will safeguard them from negative reviews.
[5] New York Times Magazine's Saul Austerlitz called poptimism a product of click-driven internet journalism that aspired to the lowest common denominator while being hostile to fans of genres and bands associated with rockism.
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!'
"[6] He also noted a minuscule number of low-rated albums in publications such as Rolling Stone, Pitchfork and PopMatters, and that "telling consumers what to purchase is still the point of a lot of music 'criticism'".
[6] Hann says that 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.
