Have We Reached the End of Poptimism?

A new Taylor Swift album is upon us, which means it’s time to talk about death. Certainly the death of the Old Taylor, who, on account of being dead, can’t come to the phone right now. But Swift’s lengthy run of getting more charitable treatment from music critics than from gossip columnists might soon come to an end, too. Reputation, her sixth album, is easily her most divisive, a chaotic and uncomfortably rap-adjacent sex-jam safari that for perhaps the first time finds Swift chasing pop’s zeitgeist rather than boldly reinventing it. It is not quite the self-absorbed and disastrous heel-turn beef-a-thon suggested by the lousy first single, “Look What You Made Me Do,” or the goofy, fake-news-evoking cover image. This record could’ve been much worse. But it’s still her worst, and the potential ripple effect is still awfully worrisome.

For if Taylor Swift’s quality control is finally slipping, then pure boldface-name pop music as a whole might be in trouble. The genre has had a poor showing in 2017, from the outright bombs (Katy Perry) to the undeservedly modest commercial receptions (from Lorde to Harry Styles) to the underwhelming farm team (from the Chainsmokers and Halsey to Niall Horan). And if boldface-name pop music’s grip is weakening, then the notion of poptimism — which encourages music critics to take glamorous pop stars as seriously as scruffy indie-rockers or pious singer-songwriters or the other historical objects of critical fascination — might be imperiled, too.

“There is a sense that totally mainstream, middle-of-the-bull’s-eye pop records haven’t been the records that have been making the most impact,” says Kelefa Sanneh, a staff writer for The New Yorker and a former pop-music critic for The New York Times. “There’s always something interestingly counterintuitive about an era when mainstream pop isn’t quite so mainstream.”

In 2004, Sanneh wrote a massively influential Times article called “The Rap Against Rockism,” which best articulated and publicized one of rock criticism’s deepest and gnarliest biases: the fact that it was called rock criticism in the first place. As he wrote, “Rockism means idolizing the authentic old legend (or underground hero) while mocking the latest pop star; lionizing punk while barely tolerating disco; loving the live show and hating the music video; extolling the growling performer while hating the lip-syncher.”

The solution, by then already heralded by a small band of influential critics on pre-social-media message boards, came to be called poptimism, which gives hip-hop, and R&B, and chart-topping pop, and maybe even country music the same critical respect and attention accorded to the notably white-male-oriented rock that had dominated critical discourse since the ’60s. “The challenge,” Sanneh wrote, “is to acknowledge that music videos and reality shows and glamorous layouts can be as interesting — and as influential — as an old-fashioned album.”

This is one of those big-picture ideas so jarring and incendiary to many at the time that 13 years later it scans as obvious to the point of mundane. (For critics who felt they’d started out more broad-minded, that epiphany itself might breed suspicion: As current Times pop critic Jon Caramanica puts it, “It’s hard for me to take seriously a movement mostly agonized over by people with closed ears who chose to open them.”) But the pop landscape was shifting whether critics took it seriously or not. Two years after the Times piece, Taylor Swift launched her career and quickly ascended from wide-eyed pop-country trifle to crossover-minded critical cause célèbre to planet-smashing monolith. Meanwhile, from Kanye West to Rihanna to Drake, the leading lights of rap and R&B came to burn so brightly that they long ago proved themselves much bigger rock stars than any actual current rock stars.

This in turn eventually triggered a poptimism backlash, a fear that while the impulse to confront critical biases (and the racial and sexual biases underpinning them) was noble and fruitful, the pendulum had swung too far toward lockstep cheerleading for pop music’s 1 percent. “Deployed reflexively, [poptimism] becomes worshipful of fame,” The Washington Post’s Chris Richards wrote in 2015. “It treats megastars, despite their untold corporate resources, like underdogs. It grants immunity to a lot of dim music. Worst of all, it asks everyone to agree on the winners and then cheer louder.”

Taylor Swift, of course, is pop music’s ultimate Overlord Posing as an Underdog, and knee-jerk cheerleading will forever be a critic’s occupational hazard. Richards is right that a different sort of critical consensus has set in, with a broader, more thoughtful approach to genre that nonetheless leads many writers to fixate on a dozen or so widely agreed-upon albums every year. In 2016, those albums were particularly great, but also particularly agreed-upon, including Frank Ocean’s Blonde, Chance the Rapper’s Coloring Book, Solange’s A Seat at the Table, and especially Beyoncé’s Lemonade. But all of those were ambitious and compelling enough to justify some measure of overexposure. Collectively they asserted that some of pop culture’s boldest-face names had legitimately made much of the year’s best music, while expanding the notion of what a “pop star” looked, and sounded, and acted like.

That sort of reinvention can still happen now: The single most delightful pop event of 2017 is the vertiginous rise of Cardi B, whose brusque rap hit “Bodak Yellow” knocked Swift’s “Look What You Made Me Do” from atop the Hot 100, and who has now beamed from the covers of both New York magazine and Rolling Stone. But Cardi presents herself so effectively as a gleeful outlier that it threatens the vitality of pop’s once-mighty insiders. Part of ascending to the mainstream throne now involves building your own custom throne.

Swift’s Reputation easily had the best first-week sales of any 2017 album, selling more than a million copies in four days, but its first four singles show nowhere near the staying power of the bulletproof hits off her last record, 2014’s 1989; overall, this new foray feels like a triumph more of marketing ubiquity than thrilling artistic evolution. Swift is coasting at best, and given her momentum she can afford to coast for years and years. But not many pop stars can say the same. Meanwhile, the increasingly dominant role of streaming services has only further underscored the fact that at least in that universe, hip-hop is still dominant to an absurd degree, from the rise of scabrous SoundCloud rap to Spotify’s ungodly massive “RapCaviar” playlist, both full of by-teenagers-for-teenagers experimentation expressly designed to confound and terrorize anyone old enough to rent a car.

What happens to pop music when its biggest stars aren’t even the biggest pop stars? Does “pop” as a stand-alone category even mean anything anymore? Is pop music as we’ve always understood it becoming as wayward and vapid and inconsequential as detractors have always insisted it was? And what happens to poptimism if an unbroken string of disappointing albums proves those detractors right?

Taylor Swift was divisive from the beginning, even among those relatively few critics taking the Nashville machine seriously in the second half of the 2000s. The likes of Kanye West, M.I.A., and Lil Wayne joined the larger pop-star canon in that era, but a country-pop starlet was still a tough sell for even the broader-minded. Even experts in that realm took a little convincing.

“People forget now how controversial she was in the country world,” Sanneh says. “There’s a sense in the country world that she was kind of a lightweight — there were maybe a couple of wobbly award-show performances, if I recall correctly. On the other hand, she had some killer songs, and she was galvanizing this young audience and getting people excited and creating this huge spectacle. I seem to remember a show where she was in the middle of a big flower and the petals unfolded one by one, early in her career. That’s the kind of thing I always enjoy. I was definitely rooting for her.”

From the beginning, Swift’s core audience has been Actual Teenagers, who tend to shed their genre biases far more quickly and with far less consternation than adult critics. Rolling Stone’s Brittany Spanos, who wrote the magazine’s Cardi B cover story, was in high school when Swift’s career began. “I did not like country music then,” she says. “I really was very anti-pop — you go through the phases of hating really popular music over the course of your adolescence. And so she came out at a time when I really was against it.” A major turning point for Spanos was the Jonas Brothers — “I just thought my growing out of hating pop music was just me growing up,” she says. “It was part of my natural evolution of, like, ‘I’m not going to hate this thing that is popular just because it’s popular.’”

Most critics at most prominent publications have experienced some version of this pop-friendly awakening in the past 15 years, if they were not previously awoken. That’s partly due to poptimism gaining the upper hand in the critical debate; that’s partly due to institutional changes for both critics and listeners. “What’s happened since ’04?” Caramanica asks. “iTunes. Streaming. YouTube. SoundCloud. I think the tools helped to dismantle rockism maybe faster than the critics helped to dismantle it. I also think — and this is about magazine and website hiring practices — I think at a certain point it becomes impractical to hire a person whose only interest set is indie rock.”

It certainly helped that the late 2000s and early 2010s produced some world-conquering pop albums that attracted a great deal of critical support. Justin Timberlake’s FutureSex/LoveSounds (2006) led to Lady Gaga’s The Fame (2008), which led to Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream and Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (both 2010), which led to Drake’s Take Care (2011), which led to Taylor Swift’s Red (2012), still the best Taylor album for the way it mixes the genius singer-songwriter stuff with the pop-crossover stuff. Part of Sanneh’s anti-rockist argument involved nixing the idea of “guilty pleasures,” of condemning even the greatest pop songs as unserious, embarrassing goofs you can truly love only in spite of yourself, with huge emotional appeal but no intellectual weight. But denying the wit and the vibrance and the craftsmanship of “My Love” or “Bad Romance” or “Teenage Dream” was nearly impossible, and the same even went for a song called “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.”

From 2003’s “Crazy in Love” forward, Beyoncé’s catalog perhaps best triangulates mass appeal and critical esteem — the esteem, at least, has gone into overdrive with her past two records, 2013’s self-titled “surprise release” pioneer and 2016’s Lemonade. Part of the knock against pop in 2017 is that no one record can match either of Beyoncé’s past few in terms of either flaunting artistic ambition or dominating the cultural conversation. As for pure chart success, a new album debuting at no. 1 on the Billboard charts is usually more a function of name recognition and marketing savvy than a reflection of quality. This year has produced plenty of hit records but, with some exceptions (including Kendrick Lamar and the Weeknd), few with enough power to stay at no. 1 for even a second week, and certainly none able to dominate the way Drake’s Views dominated summer 2016.

Instead, this year, Perry’s new Witness collapsed beneath the weight of its own wokeness, while other poptimism-borne stars set out in valiant (and faintly more traditional) new directions with less dazzling commercial results. “Looking at the idea of rockism, and the backlash against poptimism, what’s funny is Kesha and Miley Cyrus did rockesque albums this year and really didn’t do well,” says Pitchfork senior editor Ryan Dombal. “So to me, that’s not a knock against pop. They didn’t do pop. I think that’s kind of interesting, the idea that these people who were talked about a couple years ago as being part of poptimism’s wave were literally doing rock albums.”

MTV’s Video Music Awards remain a reliable bellwether for The Year in Pop, and here, too, the mood was grim in 2017: This year’s show was hosted by a flop-sweating Katy Perry, barely kept afloat by a few bigger names (including Pink, whose briskly selling October release Beautiful Trauma was a rare bright spot this year), and mostly turned over to much younger and, for the moment at least, dimmer-wattage stars, from Alessia Cara to Logic to Shawn Mendes. The result suggested some promise for pop’s future, but not much excitement for pop’s present.

“I don’t see it as a bubble bursting, I see it as a stratification,” Caramanica says. “I think what you’re seeing are superstars retreating into their particular corners, whatever those corners are. They have support from their dedicated fan bases; obviously they prize ubiquity, but they don’t always need it. Beyoncé doesn’t need radio ubiquity to be Beyoncé. Rihanna is either at that point or is almost at that point. I think it holds slightly less for Katy, maybe, because there is not as much ideology at work in Katy — Katy’s ideology is ubiquity. But I think for the other stars at that level, it still holds.”

For younger, rising stars, it could simply be that there’s less impetus to attempt the sort of universe-throttling marketing campaign that made Reputation a thoroughly exhausting proposition. “That other generation — the Halseys, the Selena Gomezes — their version of ubiquity is very different,” Caramanica says. “This is like a post-Spotify kind of ubiquity. And it doesn’t have to resonate in the same world-killing way as superstardom of even five years ago did, and certainly 10 or 15 years ago. I don’t think it’s so much the younger generation not quite replacing the older generation so much as the younger generation playing by a different set of rules.” Under the new rules, it’s easier than ever to call yourself a pop star, and harder than ever to stand out.

As always, it’s hard to determine how much critical attention pop deserves when the very notion of “pop” itself is a moving target. “If I or anyone else described ‘pop’ as a genre, we were wrong,” says NPR’s Ann Powers, who did pioneering, genre-omnivorous work for the likes of The New York Times, the Village Voice, and the Los Angeles Times for decades. “Pop is not a genre. It is a format. I’m quoting from my husband, Eric Weisbard — his book talks about that. But if we think of pop as a format, Top 40 as a format, then anything can be contained in it. ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ could be contained in it, if the right person recorded it.”

But for most casual listeners, Taylor Swift is still synonymous with “pop star” in 2017, and Reputation, given the brazenness of its rollout and the enormity of its sales, will serve as a referendum on pop music in 2017. More critics than ever are weighing in: Notably, this is the first album of Swift’s to be reviewed on Pitchfork (it got a fair and thoughtful 6.5), capping the initially indie-rock leaning site’s slow and steady creep toward rap, R&B, and pop. “I don’t think it was a hard decision,“ Dombal says. “Obviously Pitchfork has gone through an evolution even through the years that Taylor’s been active, in covering more pop stuff. For this one it seemed that it was overdue to say our piece on her; it was interesting to have it come on her least acclaimed album.”

The actual sonic construction of Reputation is extremely 2017, in that it’s split almost evenly between Max Martin’s long-reigning maximalist pop machine and the thornier, more intimate work of Jack Antonoff, who this year alone produced everyone from Lorde to Pink to the increasingly mainstream-aspirant St. Vincent. The vibe on this record is clamorous, and vaguely goth-y, and synthetic in a way that allows for some startling intimacy, but not the same precise directness that animates Swift’s best work on mid-period hits like “Dear John” and “Mean.” It matches the current zeitgeist so exactly that it threatens to calcify it.

“When I first heard Fearless, I thought, ‘Wow, this is a very young person that really understands the human experience — like, already, at this incredibly young age,’” says The Washington Post’s Richards, whose review of Reputation is less positive than either Powers’s or Caramanica’s. “When I listened to Reputation, I thought to myself, ‘Wow, this is a woman who really understands the marketplace.’”

Part of this has to do with the obvious ways that Swift has evolved, coupled with the ways that the pop-music machine has more subtly prevented her from evolving. “I thought it was interesting, on Saturday Night Live, she does this one song where she’s performing it like it sounds on the record, and she’s dancing and she’s doing what the record suggests she should be doing,” Powers says. “And then she does another song where she’s sitting down and playing it on guitar. And I thought, in a way it’s too bad she feels like she has to do that, to pull off some kind of idea about authenticity.”

Overall, Reputation is far from a bomb, whether your metric is a review aggregator like Metacritic or something more Twitter-driven and anecdotal. But there’s still enough divisiveness to change the way critics talk about both Swift and the pop-music universe she’s still presiding over, a possible discord that could be just what poptimism needs for those who feel most reviews are still uniformly glowing and uncritical.

“To some extent, there has been a bit of a crisis of confidence I think, among critics,” Sanneh says. “Which is to say, you read less and less pieces that take the form of, ‘Everyone’s wrong about saying this thing is good, because it’s really bad.’ Which is sort of the thing that you think of — when I was a kid, the first critics I encountered were Statler and Waldorf from the Muppets. That was their role: ‘You guys are having fun, but this is actually terrible.’ For a variety of reasons, both good and bad, I think critics are more hesitant about doing that now.”

By that standard, Reputation might be just wayward enough to start more fights that might make both pop and pop criticism healthier in the long run. And if critics are still hesitant to sharply call out Swift, other worthy targets remain. “I don’t know: Everybody still hates Ed Sheeran,” Powers says with a laugh. “I mean, all critics still hate Ed Sheeran. How far have we gone if we all still hate Ed Sheeran? We’ll always have Ed.”