Gwilym here: this week’s Guide is a guest post from one of our favourite writers, Rachel Aroesti, on why she’s hoping for a quick end to our long Brat summer, and the poptimism era in general. I’ll be back next week.
Have you had a nice Brat summer? Or was it more of a Cruel one? Maybe it was simply femininomenal. Or perhaps it was a bit more caffeinated than that.
From the memetic marketing genius of Charli xcx’s sixth album and the record-obliterating, economy-propelling force of Taylor Swift’s Eras tour to Chappell Roan’s chart domination (at the time of writing she has seven songs on the Billboard Hot 100) and Sabrina Carpenter’s song of the summer title-holder Espresso, the past few months have been soused in the output and influence of female pop stars.
Such is the cultural import of these women that it hasn’t seemed completely absurd to wonder whether they could decide the upcoming US election: Kamala Harris’s campaign cannily appropriated both Charli and Chappell’s pop momentum to lend cool and relevance, while a hoped-for endorsement from Swift is genuinely likely to push many young people to vote. Obviously, the latter’s mind-boggling domination of the zeitgeist needs no explanation: the Eras tour is the pop cultural moment of the century so far.
Which is all … great. Of course it’s great! What kind of sour-faced misogynist would rail against the celebration of the creative power and commercial clout of these clever, talented young women? But as summer draws to a close, I must admit that I’m looking forward to a Swiftless September (the Eras tour will take a break before a final US and Canada leg in the autumn). The prospect of Carpenter’s Italian holiday of a single being stowed away with the suitcases makes my heart sing. Refasten your bras and vacuum pack your white tank tops in flagrant disregard for the Brat uniform – I, for one, cannot wait for the vibe shift.
For me, the souring of this fizzy pop summer isn’t so much a reflection of the music itself. I love Brat the album – in fact, I’ve spent years desperately longing for Charli and her frequent collaborator AG Cook to have a mainstream moment with their postmodern pop. I honestly haven’t minded having a semi-permanent Espresso earworm. I consider the spiky chamber-pop of Chappell Roan (pictured below) to be fun and fresh. I’m not a Swiftie myself, but I still think the 34-year-old is a technically brilliant songwriter.
The issue is the hysteria and the hegemony. The seemingly mandatory adoration of these artists is something I’ve encountered not only via the media but in real life too. It feels frustratingly infantile, especially when combined with the music itself. Good pop is simple and easily digestible – that’s how it ensures mass acceptance – and is generally designed to appeal to the very young. The Swiftie friendship bracelet trend is pre-pubescent and this chimes with the back catalogue: it’s cleverly rendered, but there is nothing challenging about Swift’s output.
Carpenter’s Espresso, meanwhile, is a proud exercise in inanity, while Kelefa Sanneh, in a particularly edifying New Yorker review of Brat (an album which is called Brat), highlighted Charli’s tendency to “exaggerate the seeming mindlessness” of pop. He also traced a link between the album’s scrappy, archly offhand nature and the 13-year-old Rebecca Black’s 2011 car-crash single Friday, since ironically embraced by hyperpop fans, underlining how Charli knowingly tapped into pop’s juvenile, junky side.
The new status quo – in which relatively childish music is treated with childishly uncompromising enthusiasm by adults – is poptimism at its peak. It’s been 20 years since Sanneh’s seminal New York Times piece neatly outlined the backlash to “rockism” – shorthand for the idea, widely held by 90s and 00s critics and self-styled musos, that authentic, guitar-based, generally masculine music was more important than synthetic, manufactured, generally feminine pop.
In the intervening decades, the poptimist movement – which demanded equal respect for pop – has been gathering steam. In 2004, Sanneh complained that “rockism just won’t go away”. It has now. After this summer’s wall-to-wall coverage and blanket reverence of Swift et al, the insistence that pop music get its dues has reached a strange apogee.
The panic that poptimism has gone too far has been circulating for years. In 2014, a New York Times article by Saul Austerlitz headlined The Pernicious Rise of Poptimism argued that “professing inadequate fealty to pop” had become a sin. By 2017, former Guardian music editor Michael Hann was asking: “Is poptimism now as blinkered as the rockism it replaced?” in The Quietus.
One concern was that poptimism encouraged a lack of discernment, but there has been no embrace of pop for pop’s sake – if there had been, Katy Perry might have had a less disastrous summer. Another worry was that criticising pop artists (who tend to be young, female and more diverse than rock acts) was now taboo owing to its potential for racism and sexism. Certainly, the demise of the catty irreverence that once shadowed pop is partly down to the mainstreaming of identity politics, but the idea that you could be cancelled for not liking Beyoncé seems a little far-fetched. More pertinent is the power of rabid fanbases who threaten critics and detractors, sometimes with violence – yet another example of the childishness that is fully entwined with this pop moment.
Criticising poptimism often comes across as curmudgeonly, yet the arguments made in the 2010s still strike a chord – particularly Michael Hann’s observation that commercial success was becoming synonymous with quality – even if I can find ripostes to most of them (on music critics, Saul Austerlitz asked “should gainfully employed adults whose job is to listen to music thoughtfully really agree so regularly with the taste of 13-year-olds?” What about the 13-year-old metalheads and indie fanatics?).
Clearly, though, I am craving some maturity. Artfully done basicness is all well and good – see also: last summer’s Barbiemania – however it would be nice to keep it seasonal. I’m not advocating a return-to-rockism autumn (although the new Fontaines DC album makes a good argument for the greatness of old-fashioned deep and meaningful guitar music). But when it comes to the kind of music that dominates the cultural conversation, wouldn’t it be gratifying to find a middle – if not quite middle-aged – ground?
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