Rockism and poptimism

Rockism is a perceived bias in rock music communities that discriminates against other forms of popular music, especially producer-driven genres like disco, R&B and hip-hop. Coined in 1981 by English rock musician Pete Wylie with his Race Against Rockism campaign, the term was used humorously by self-described "anti-rockist" critics in the British press. A "rockist" may also be someone who regards rock music as the normative state of popular music. The term was not generally used outside the confines of small music magazines until the mid 2000s, partly due to the increasing number of bloggers who used it more seriously in analytical debate.

In the 2000s, poptimism (or popism) represented a critical reassessment of pop music, and in the 2010s, it supplanted rockism as the prevailing ideology in popular musical criticism. Opponents of poptimist discourse have criticized the movement, believing that it has resulted in certain pop stars being prevented from negative reviews as part of an effort to maintain a consensus of uncritical excitement.

During the 1960s and 1970s, magazines like Rolling Stone and Creem laid the foundation for popular music criticism in an attempt to make popular music worthy of study. Some of these formative critics suggested that enduring pop music art was made by singer-songwriters using traditional rock instruments on long-playing albums, and that pop hits reside on a lower aesthetic plane, a source of "guilty pleasure". In 1976, Robert Christgau wrote an article titled "Yes, There Is a Rock-Critic Establishment (But Is That Bad for Rock?)". Noting that there is a difference between "rock critics" and the "rock press", he lists the "establishment" members as himself, Jon Landau, Dave Marsh, Paul Nelson, and John Rockwell. Christgau also concedes that "Because we are all self-taught (of necessity, since our academy is as yet informal), even the best of our work has the faults of autodidacticism: eccentricity, incompleteness, self-indulgence. The worst of our work, meanwhile, has the faults of drivel. ... Yet I read on, as much from inclination as from duty, and find that a fair portion of what is bad, like some strains of 'bad' rock and roll, has the sloppy appeal of all open, democratic phenomena." Christgau later accused Rolling Stone of promoting a "boring rock-as-idealism myth" and "claiming suzerainty over the music ever since" the magazine was founded in 1967.

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