#rockism

Not that I really want to give Ryan Adams any more attention than he’s already getting, but something I failed to mention that really bugged me was all that press he got a couple of years ago when he covered Taylor Swift’s 1989 in its entirety: looking at it with the knowledge that’s recently come to light it seems like apart from the commercial coattail-riding, there could pretty easily have been much more sinister ulterior motives behind the decision to cover the record.

But Adams is not really the specific issue here: it’s that whole rockist idea that pop music--and specifically pop music made by women--is just vapid trash, but if a man takes that vapid trash and refashions it in the vernacular of sad white guy music he can legitimize it. 

Hopefully the debate about ‘nu-metal’ and the hidden racism behind it is finally over.

It's not a secret that since Rock & Roll became a white-skin-only genre rockstars have seen non-traditional instruments-music like Hip-Hop, Pop music or EDM like a piece of shit, something to look down to. Rockism, 'Disco Sucks' and 'selling out' have been part of that strategy.

Just turning to Twitter and seeing a couple posts in response to a recent article in The Quietus condemning poptimism’s possible hegemony. The people I follow were quick to point out that while in general the article lacked solid examples, and anyway the claims of poptimism’s possible negative qualities are generally missing the point. It seems like a far better thing to be open to consider the critical merit and value in some sense of a wider variety of music, a plurality of voices (as advocated by poptimism) rather that adhere doggedly to rockism’s central tenets of veneration of rock’s central figures and claims to copyright on artistic integrity and authenticity, and as rock as popular music’s natural state.

My first formal encounter with poptimism’s basic ideas in writing came from the book Let’s Talk About Love by Carl Wilson a couple of years ago. I was very interested to start to think about the ways in which the value we place on music and our listening habits depends on class, as well as gender, regionality, language, and a whole host of intersectional attributes. In discussing his initial aversion to Celine Dion, Wilson made me question my own preconceived notions about what musical styles I might exclude from my listening habits, and that I would downplay in my own taste profile.

As I realised from listening to musicians like Sarah Geronimo, Nat King Cole and Edith Piaf is that there's a difference between not writing your own songs (or playing one's instrument) and being made to fit an image of somebody that you're not, which gives me the impression that the Backstreet Boys and the like are manufactured in a way The Platters, Four Tops and The Temptations aren't, well to the same extent in terms of fitting a prefabricated persona around the person. In this sense that it could be argued that Mina Mazzini and Pilita Corrales are authentic, but in the sense of being merely themselves.

They may not necessarily write their own songs and play instruments, but authentic in the sense of presenting themselves as they are. Well as far as I know about it, that kind of turns notions of authenticity on its head. Especially now that K-Pop boy bands have members who do contribute to music in other, more recognisably rockist ways like doing songwriting and producing themselves, but living out personae that don't necessarily or entirely reflect who they actually are in person. Somebody like Wonho might not necessarily like you if you met him in person, if you ever had the misfortune of encountering his bad side.