Deep Magic From Before The Dawn Of Poptimism

A thing I have sometimes threatened to do is write about poptimism. This is not exactly that - at least not yet - but it comes out of a conversation I had about the word on Bluesky.

The great Ann Powers was saying that a persistent issue is that “poptimism has never been properly theorised” - she meant at the time, the time being ‘the early 00s’; it’s surely been theorised a lot ever since (here's a good piece). A lot of contemporary thinkers on Substack seem to imagine the poptimism conversation really began with Kelefa Sanneh’s “The Rap Against Rockism” in October 2004 - this is the line taken by a fairly inadequate Wikipedia page - but Sanneh was writing, a few years late, about a wider discussion that sprawled across message boards and blogs with roots that went back decades.

Certainly nobody identified as a poptimist sat down and tried to define it. My impulse has usually been to say that not theorising ‘poptimism’ - the lack of a manifesto, for instance - was a feature not a bug. The best definition I could give to Frank Kogan when he asked once is that poptimism was not an idea so much as a set of tactics for enjoying (and sometimes winning) message board arguments. From which an idea or theory might grow, of course. 

As Ann Powers pointed out in her Bluesky thread, the lack of theorisation has meant the word is up for grabs, used by people as a “whipping boy/girl/non-binary person” standing in for whatever they dislike about modern culture. This is definitely the case now, where poptimism is taken - by people who don’t like whatever it is - to be a hegemonic ideology of modern culture, far beyond its roots as an intervention in arguments about music at a particular place and time. To the extent that poptimism was even slightly coherent, it wasn’t really meant to describe other parts of popular culture. Music has its own technologies, distribution systems, fandoms and critical histories: in fact I'm going to argue that shifts in those technologies are crucial for understanding what it might have been.

A good tell here is if someone starts talking about the MCU. Cinema isn’t music, and there’s no causal link between the success of, say, Taylor Swift and the success of Marvel movies around the same time. Meanwhile film criticism and fandom have had their own decades-long debates about the relationship between popularity, creativity, and art. Film critics are old hands at this stuff! By all means describe Avengers fans getting mad at Martin Scorsese as “poptimism” if you like, but it’s not really anything to do with the ideas swirling around early-00s music writing.

Now, if there is a hegemonic ideology of modern culture, lord knows I don’t want to defend it, whatever you want to call it. Ways of thinking about culture need to be regularly revised, moaned about, torn down, revived! One reason I’ve not written about poptimism is that the little part of me that feels quite possessive of it - even in whatever silly mutant forms people dream up - is not necessarily a good part. It was, literally, half my lifetime ago. I don’t really want to turn over the old stone and see the pale, blind idea forms wriggling underneath.

And yet! Let’s find out where the word came from.

Simon Reynolds says he was the first person he can find using it, in 1987, and a couple of times again in the next couple of years in Melody Maker. I can absolutely believe this, though as he says it’s possible he picked it up somewhere else. But “poptimism” in this usage seems more a musical quality, a kind of vacuous upbeat positivity of a sort he was generally opposed to - see also his stuff on “soulcialism” from around the same time. When it resurfaces in the 00s it’s describing a critical stance - not unrelated, as it’s still a pejorative, but the meaning’s shifted.

The writer who picked up the word, in January 2004, was the late Mark Fisher, then generally known on the ‘blogosphere’ as K-Punk, which is how I always think of him. Of the various people writing music and culture blogs at that point, Fisher became the breakout intellectual star, a tremendous writer about the things he loved and at least provocative about what he didn’t.

K-Punk’s use of “poptimists” was to do with quite a specific argument - was 2003 a good year for pop (and music in general) or a “dry spell” after 2002, which almost everyone involved had agreed was a banger of a year? The springboard for this was an epic and highly entertaining screed by blogging veteran Marcello Carlin against 1985, a year he marked as pop's nadir. K-Punk’s point was that pop-lovers at the time would not have been able to perceive this, because their rose tinted (poptimistic!) outlook would simply prevent them noticing the obvious decline. The question wasn’t so much the specific qualities of 2003 or 1985 as the wider question of whether a ‘poptimist’ critic could accept that any year in pop was a bad one.

I took the bait on this and said, no, I didn’t think there was such a thing as a bad year: there’s always something exciting happening somewhere. If you don’t believe there is, widen your field of vision.

There were a couple more posts and the argument fizzled - most likely I found K-Punk too intimidating to want to tangle with much (it was a strange, edgy time on the blogs as everyone was rattled and angry about the Iraq War; I’d also recently got married, which made caring about blog beef less appealing). I also think we were stating truisms more than any very interesting ideas. My “there’s always something happening somewhere” feels like a very wishy-washy if also undeniable statement, so does his idea that in any given somewhere there will be ups and downs, that some years just are more exciting than others, and you won’t really feel the ups unless you go through the downs.

The word “poptimist” stuck though as a kind of label, and got taken up, semi-ironically, on the ILX message boards. By the time Kelefa Sanneh got hold of it for the New York Times it had replaced a previous coinage, “pop-ist” as meaning the opposite of “rockist” (whatever that was).

None of which has anything much to do with modern complaints about “poptimism”. But the K-Punk post which rediscovered the word was only part of a much longer discussion. This had flared up with a piece I wrote at the end of 2002 called “2002 - Best Year Ever!” as an introduction to a Top 100 tracks I compiled, and it was where I riffed on the ideas that ended up with the ‘can a year be bad?’ argument.

The key line was “We are all dilettantes now”. My idea was that “there’s always something happening somewhere” had strictly speaking always been true but also pointless. Unless you made record-collecting your life, and had the money to do so, it was almost impossible to have the kind of broad knowledge that allowed you to hop from genre to genre when one got stale. I have known a few people since who managed that - it was probably not quite as hard as I imagined when I was in my 20s - but the point was that MP3 culture and file-sharing (and later streaming) made it trivial. You could literally type “[genre] 2002” into soulseek and find dozens of gems. We’d flipped, very suddenly, from a context of scarcity and specialist knowledge to a context of abundance and immediate access, and this was going to change how people thought and wrote about music.

Simon Reynolds picked up on that piece a few months later and it sparked an entertaining back and forth - and long ILM thread - about “dilettantes vs fanatics” (the relevant bits are the March 6 and March 10 entries), with Reynolds instinctively on the fanatics side. He ran through a series of metaphors for each and made the point that while for a listener dilettantism was all very well, for great music making you needed a solid core of fanatics. This dilettante v fanatic idea was the seed of the division that led Mark Fisher to resurrect the word “poptimism” a year or so later: of course you can be optimistic about pop if you’ve always got some other bit of pop to run to, but what might that cost you?

All this was related, but orthogonal, to longer-running ILM conversations about “rockism” vs “pop-ism”, which I can’t bear (yet) to dig into again. They drew on years, decades of previous critical conversation about high and low art, the underground and the mainstream, commerce and creativity, and they were also a conversation about what music chat on the internet was like. (By the time “The Rap Against Rockism” was published, everyone involved was thoroughly sick of rockism and its counterpoints)

Later for that maybe. The point is that the original conversation about “poptimism” as a critical stance wasn’t about any straw man notions of compulsory love of Taylor Swift. But it was about the same thing we talk about intensely now - the impact of massive, cheap or free access to music on taste and listening habits. In 2002 I was poptimistic, but also too techno-optimistic to imagine how rapacious the streamers would be. But I was right that access would completely change the context of listening, and you can hear the echoes of those early arguments in debates about playlists and algorithms now.

When critics talk about “poptimism” there’s a tendency to want to situate it in a long tradition and conversation - Nik Cohn, Ellen Willis, Simon Frith, Chuck Eddy - and it fits there. But there are also lots of reasons it could only have become such a talking point when and where it did, and most of them are to do with the internet and the collapse of barriers to access it drove through. Poptimism in its 00s form only makes full sense in that context. True poptimism, I thought, could actually be tried.