Pop über alles

Homogeneity, hustle culture, & the collapse of the middle

Freddie deBoer’s January 22 piece “What We’ve Lost in Music Criticism” wasn’t the first time I’d seen him grinding his axe against the poptimism phenomenon, but it became the only article of his on the topic which I read in full. It caught my attention because I’m still kind of gobsmacked by the demise of Pitchfork, even though I never cared for it.¹ What I appreciate about deBoer’s effort here is his articulation of a stage in Pitchfork’s evolution that was for several years inexplicable to me:

The gambit worked: Your aunt who only listens to Whitney Houston probably bought 1989; the guy who thinks his indie records are much cooler than yours definitely told you it contained “some really well-crafted pop songs” on a Tinder date once. The album yielded five Hot 100 top 10s,

In October, these words appeared in Pitchfork. My opinions on these matters are well-known, at this point, and they are of course contestable. It’s also the case that this kind of framing has become so ubiquitous that it barely seems to reference the real world at all. And yet I would hope that anyone would be able to understand the confusion I felt when I read this. By which I mean, what are indie records? What is “indie”? Which acts are indie acts? What is being referred to, here? Indie rock no longer exists, in 2024. There is no scene. Williamsburg at this point is like a neighborhood-sized artisan coffee shop where the napkins are ethically sourced and the labor non-union. There are no cool clubs anywhere keeping the flame burning, not sufficiently to produce albums that people actually listen to, anyway. No remotely plugged-in person under the age of 50 who’d like to be perceived as fuckable would openly claim to like “indie records”…

…With Pitchfork, you have the site’s strange, bifurcated history, split between its period of good-natured snobbery and interest in the then-salient concept of indie music and its sudden, totalizing embrace of poptimism, the school of music criticism that effortlessly colonized the entirety of the music journalism industry starting sometime in the mid-aughts. What’s interesting about a lot of the coverage is that these reminiscences can’t help but reveal that strange and sudden evolution, but most of the people writing them seem uncomfortable with actually describing it. This discomfort, I think, is telling.

Even though I rarely wandered onto the site, Pitchfork wielded so much clout and was so often mentioned that I couldn’t but be aware that something had changed. Somewhere along the line, Pitchfork stopped being the composite avatar of that guy who thought his indie records were much cooler than yours, would have never again taken you seriously if you admitted you weren’t really that into Kid A, and pronounced “the industry” as though it were a bone in his throat. Instead it started to remind me of Will Farrell’s caricature of James Lipton—straining towards the ultraviolet band in search of prose purple enough to articulate the frisson and the ecstasy and the superlunary magnificence of scientifically determined and optimized pop acts whose output truly never needed critical elucidation or generous signal boosting because it was both transparent and omnipresent from the moment of its release.

Pop music’s revenge has been a strange thing to witness. I suspect that for most people (over a certain age) who weren’t making a living in the trenches of the culture industry, it was a development they noticed only from the corner of their eye, and by the time they did it was already a fait accompli. But perhaps I’m generalizing my own experience.

I used to be a goth kid, so I had to raise an eyebrow last summer when I saw a pair of teenaged girls dressed totally in black, with dyed black hair, black lipstick, black fishnet stockings—I mean like decked out goth girls—walking down the sidewalk with a Kpop track blaring from a portable speaker in one of their (black) bookbags. Not Skinny Puppy, not Covenant, not Funker Vogt, not the Sisters of Mercy, not any of the more modern derivative acts I hear when I go out for goth night once or twice a year. Kpop. They practiced dance moves in the crosswalk.

For that matter, my seminal experiences prepared me to expect that the genderqueer twentysomethings I met at various service jobs over the last ten years would have musical tastes that at least somewhat resembled those of the gender-nonconforming gay riot grrl types I knew back in the day, who knew the words to every Sleater Kinney song by heart and wrote about Dresden Dolls in their zines. Nope—when they got to pick the music, they put on Rhianna, Arianna Grande, and Demi Lovato.

The idea that “alternative” kinds of people needn’t necessarily be devoted to “alternative” kinds of music took some time for my elderly brain to absorb.

Clearly there’d been a vibe shift I hadn’t been aware of—though I must have had an inkling of it on any number of occasions in the last fifteen years where I found myself at the mall and poked my head into Hot Topic for nostalgia’s sake. When I frequented the store and then worked there in the very late nineties and very early aughts, the expansive display of T-shirts under plexiglass squares was referred to as the “rock wall.” It’s grown incrementally smaller, and there isn’t a lot of rock on it lately. At some point I stopped being surprised to find the likes of Oliva Rodrigo and BLACKPINK represented. But it was surprising at first because in my day, the staff would have been absolutely aghast to receive a shipment of Christina Aguilera and NSYNC T-shirts and be asked to sell them to people.

Today it’s pop über alles.

To be perfectly honest, I’m not particularly bothered by any of this. I’m too old to be truly concerned about what anyone else is listening to, wearing, or championing in terms of music; let me have WFMU, ragas, and sundry electronic mixes on YouTube and leave me alone. I’m just fascinated by the reinvigorated hegemony of commercial pop, since the whole paradigm is so incongruous with what I couldn’t but understand as the “natural” order of things when I was growing up.

Over the last few days I’ve had some conversations with friends about these matters, and I’d like to share some reflections:

I.

When I worked at Hot Topic (and yes I know how unsexy it is to keep bringing it up), the company motto was “Everything about the music.” The store’s raison d’etre was to bring the kinds of subcultural paraphernalia available in big-city boutiques into the suburbs, and it was taken as an unexamined given that the clothing, accessories, and various other trappings signifying the wearer’s alternative sensibilities must ultimately refer back to the music they listened to.

A blast from the past via Your Scene Sucks

It wasn’t examined because it appeared self-evident for such a long time. Let’s go back to the early 1980s. You’re traipsing around Manhattan and you see a guy with a bright red mohawk, a leather jacket covered with pyramid studs, ripped black jeans, and a nose ring. What can we assume about him? Is he spending more time at the public library, the basketball court, or the record store? Are he and his friends more apt to congregate at the bowling alley, the discotheque, or at dingy, smoky clubs with live acts? Is he more likely to spend his constructive leisure time reading the Paris Review or playing the guitar? What should we guess about his musical tastes—Madonna and the Flashdance soundtrack, or UK Subs and Minor Threat?

I suppose there’s a faint chance that some willful moron might be looking at this and shaking his head, saying something about jumping to conclusions or judging a book by it cover. But that’s not at all what we’re doing: we’re reading the guy, because his sartorial choices are meant to tell us what he’s about and what circles he moves in. He’s involved in the punk scene, you twit. Obviously.²

And this held true through the nineties and into the aughts—though the mere fact that wearable signifiers of subcultural affinity became available to suburban youth did have a diluting effect on the schema, since a growing proportion of “scenesters” were removed from the urban nodes in which participation was at its most intense, and where the uniform signified more active forms of involvement than simply buying and listening to the records. . . . . .³

But I digress.

The upshot of these voluntary sumptuary codes is that you could arrive at a new high school and enter the cafeteria, or show up to your freshman orientation at college, survey the crowd, and make an educated guess about the people with whom you’d get along. It also meant that when I clocked in at Hot Topic, I could size up a group of kids coming into the store and make an accurate guess as to which new CDs I should pimp to them.

I’ve a pet theory about the fundamental reason why we suburban adolescents flagged and sorted ourselves in terms of our musical preferences: because music used to be expensive. Being a fan of a given artist or genre meant something completely different than it does now in the age of Spotify, because you had to open your wallet and fork over about fifteen bucks (roughly $27 in today’s dollars) to get about that many songs you could take home with you and listen to at your pleasure.⁴

If you were into punk, you’d made an actual financial investment in a franchise. You were a shareholder. You’d staked a claim, made a pecuniary statement about your tastes and allegiances; you’d bought in. Not only had you voted for a particular strain of culture with your dollars, you’d also tacitly rejected the artists and genres to whom you hadn’t given your money.

A veritably partisan form a brand loyalty is apt to manifest when you’ve spent hundreds of dollars developing your personal collection of metal or industrial albums, not the least because the stack of records you’ve acquired is the quantitative limit of your personal playlist. You’ve made clear to yourself what you’re into (and what you reject). Insofar as the explicit statements or suggestive aesthetics of your chosen genre (punk’s antiauthoritarian streak, the stormy and abrasive self-assertiveness of nu-metal, the peace & love & dance of happy hardcore, etc.) have been hammered into you by your listening (and purchasing) habits, you’ve probably come to subscribe to or sympathize with those values yourself—and clothing has ever been a means of advertising what one is about. So your clique becomes a local branch of a national association that recognizes its members by the shibboleths they literally wear on their sleeves.

Or that’s how it used to be. I knew I was getting old when, during my sporadic visits to the mall in my hometown, I realized that all the teenage cliques in the food court looked exactly the same to me. If they’re wearing their affiliations like they used to (very possible), I can no longer see it. To my eyes, it looks like there’s just the plainclothes normies and a colorfully nebulous hive of “alternative” kids.

If that’s the case (and I must emphasize if), then it makes sense: given that the financial restrictions on access to music were the indirect grounds for adolescent self-identification and sorting, then there’s no reason anymore for the narrow categories the old uniforms expressed.⁵ Free music makes eclectics of us all. We’re no longer saddled with our economic investments in a particular artist, label, or genre, and don’t need to pay tolls to explore new territory. On a given day, at our whim, we can be junglists in the morning, Beatlemaniacs at lunch, shoegazing post-punkers in the afternoon, and Swifties in the evening—all with the click of a mouse button or tap of a touchscreen, instantaneously, anywhere, free of charge. The chauvinism of genre affiliation was outmoded when scarcity altogether ceased to be a factor in the consumption of recorded music.

…Or it should have been. As deBoer says, going on TikTok or Twitter and talking shit about Kpop or Taylor Swift is risky business. Something a little different is happening there. There’s been an inversion.

But on that topic: the economy of music on the eve of its liberation from pay-to-own physical media also makes explicable the de riguer disdain for pop music among my cohort’s alternative kids. Genre fans had to put in work to cultivate their collections: not only did they have to buy the albums, they had to search for them—which meant purchasing (relatively inexpensive) samplers issued by labels, talking to people at record stores, leafing through special-interest magazines, taking note of the names on T-shirts seen at concerts, asking savvy friends for mix tapes, and so on. By contrast, pop fans basically had only to turn on the radio. The Spice Girls? Great, wonderful, I’ll take it. Ricky Martin? Love him, bought the CD, only listened to the single, but he’s still my fave. Britney Spears? GIVE IT HERES! To the sensibilities of someone who felt they had to exert themselves somewhat to become a bona fide shareholder in an “alternative” scene, your being into pop music indicated a lack of discernment or even of autonomy: you were just blithely rolling along with whatever The Industry was having slotted into heavy rotation on Top 40 radio and MTV.

At least some of this was performative. People I knew who’d grit their teeth and groan at the Backstreet Boys twenty-five years ago no longer see anything wrong with bobbing their heads to “Everybody” when it plays on the TouchTunes box. And honestly, it makes me happy that the freeing up of music has allowed us all to unclench a bit.

…Except where pop is concerned.

II.

The music ecosystem has changed in such a way that curiously & probably coincidentally mirrors developments in the wider economy. A younger friend (in the second half of his twenties) tells me he’s seeing nostalgia for the indie wave of the aughts, and speculates that one of the reasons is because it was the last time in recent memory that there existed a broad and durable transition zone between the obscurity of the underground and the revolving pantheon of household-name pop stars. The middle has disintegrated.

These are conjectures about which both my friend and I are uncertain, and I’d happily invite input from readers.

The artists and genres constituting the musical transition zone formed the basis of the tribal sorting phenomenon, of punker kids, metal kids, hippie kids, and so on, all recognizing each other by their uniforms and clustering together. A cartel of record labels, promoters, retailers, publications, etc. ensured that every shopping mall, high school cafeteria, and college campus would have adolescents sitting at tables or standing in circles wearing the T-shirts and/or accessories of some dozen or so related musical acts, in spite of the fact that their music rarely if ever got Top 40 radio play and maybe sometimes got airtime on M2.⁶

Hot Topic’s “rock wall,” circa 1995 (found on the VintageTees subreddit)

My friend’s remark about nostalgia for the indie wave called to mind—yet again—the Hot Topic rock wall. If I strolled into a time warp in 1996 and came out again in 2002, the grid of plexiglass T-shirts would have looked like so many hieroglyphics. When I last wandered into the store, I recognized pretty much all the artists whose apparel was on display, and it’s not because I’ve made a point of keeping up with the trends. With the exceptions of the more recent pop stars whom it’s impossible not to have at least heard of, most of the names represented were of bands that made their bones in the 2010s—or much earlier.

The determination of the transition zone used to be left to an association of industry gatekeepers and middlemen. Filesharing, iTunes, Pandora, Spotify, etc. disrupted and eventually collapsed that part of the ecosystem, sidelining the parties that curated and promoted the layer of genre musicians standing between the stuff of college radio stations and Top 40 FM. What I’m interested to know is whether this was an effect or cause of popular music’s denuded efficacy as a shaper of distinct adolescent cliques.

Of course, I could be overthinking it. Maybe deBoer is right, and it just comes down to rock music being spent as a cultural force—gone the way of jazz, reduced from a general audience craze to subsisting in a market niche. But the why and how of that might be interesting to consider (some other time), and I don’t think it’s simply a matter of guitars, drum kits, and keyboards having exhausted their possibility space.

Moreover, the fact of the matter is that despite all the hullabaloo about the internet’s power to bypass the odious gatekeeper class and allow musicians to reach a mass audience without jumping the industry hoops, the main beneficiaries of the new economic schema are clearly the A-listers, who’ve seized much of the old transition zone’s market share and left its unclaimed territory to be divvied up among sundry underground artists whose only hope is to get the Spotify algorithm to notice them.⁷ In the same way that the hollowing out of the economic middle has correlated with surging growth in the fortunes of the upper percentile, the implosion of popular music’s transition zone neatly coincides with the ascendancy of stars like Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, the cultural cache of whom has mushroomed to proportions the likes of which I’ve never seen before. The only other musician who stood at a comparable stature during my lifetime was maybe Michael Jackson—but I’m pretty sure there was never a moment when an American presidential contest might theoretically hinge on his decision to endorse the incumbent.

III.

From Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s landmark essay “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception:”

The relentless unity of the culture industry bears witness to the emergent unity of politics. Sharp distinctions like those between A and B films, or between short stories published in magazines in different price segments, do not so much reflect real differences as assist in the classification, organization, and identification of consumers. Something is provided for everyone so that no one can escape; differences are hammered home and propagated. The hierarchy of serial qualities purveyed to the public serves only to quantify it more completely. Everyone is supposed to behave spontaneously according to a “level” determined by indices and to select the category of mass product manufactured for their type. On the charts of research organizations, indistinguishable from those of political propaganda, consumers are divided up as statistical material into red, green, and blue areas according to income group.

While A&H take a socioeconomic-reductionist tack to what they’re describing here—and in the 1940s it was probably more accurate—they get at something I and my young peers failed to grasp as we scurried to the mall to buy the latest releases by Yo La Tengo, VNV Nation, Converge, etc., privately congratulating ourselves for our astuteness and independence from the soulless corporate mechanism of The Mainstream. We were suckling from precisely the same udders as the people at whom we rolled our eyes for investing in Matchbox 20 and Black Eyed Peas records; we’d just been guided towards selecting different teats.⁸

Back in 2003, The Onion put out a piece titled ‘90s Punk Decries Punks of Today, riffing on the fact that most of the established alternative scenes were running on the borrowed momentum from their original iterations as truly active and vital strains of culture. Punk in the 1990s was as much a part and product of the mechanism as boy bands, but its allure was contingent on how convincingly it could behave as though this weren’t the case.

The aftereffects of first-wave punk, the engine of alternative rock, and the tidal wave called Nirvana converged to cast a long and enduring shadow over the musical landscape of the 1990s. Flamboyant arena acts were passé; there was a protracted lag between the grunge earthquake and the entrance of Britney and Justin; the image of the musician as inspired bohemian rejecting crass commercialism and materialism came into vogue.⁹

The illusion was a beguiling one, especially if you were a bit dense. Marilyn Manson moved to Hollywood Hills in 1997, just around the time I became a teenaged superfan. I was given to picturing his new Los Angeles domicile as being something like Nick Carraway’s little house in West Egg—a modest bungalow estranged from the neighborhood’s palatial estates. I mean, come on, Manson was the real deal. He was hardcore. He was a rebel, an outsider, not some petty celebrity snoot. He moved to Hollywood for inspiration, to get closer to the culture he wanted to criticize in his work—like, did you even listen to Mechanical Animals? He probably didn’t even have that much money, anyway.

He did.

When the New Radicals’ 1998 one-hit-wonder single “Get What You Give” called Manson a fake and admonished him to retreat to his mansion, the cognitive dissonance gave me a splitting headache.

The 2000s gave us indie rock—alt rock version 2.0—bubbling out from low-rent Brooklyn neighborhoods colonized by the nominally boho kids of the suburban bourgeoisie. I don’t think its pretensions were quite so durable on the second round; not with the internet throwing open the backstage. Nor do I believe they were as necessary as before. Not in the long run, anyhow.

In a recorded 1991 performance, Bill Hicks weighed in on commercial art:

Let me tell you something right now, and you can print this in stone and don’t you ever forget it: any, any performer that ever sells a product on television is for now and all eternity removed from the artistic world. I don't care if you shit Mona Lisas out of your ass on cue, you’ve made your fuckin’ choice.

My liberal-minded friends and I had been primed to give this a HELL YES when we heard it in the late 1990s and early 2000s. (We were too young for Bill Hicks before then, and we wouldn’t have even known about him if it weren’t for Tool and Preacher.) That was the spirit of the moment, those were the values emanating from alternative music, underground comics, independent film, hip countercultural publications, the nascent community of amateur creators on the internet, and so on.

Vibe shift? Vibe shift.

I see a subterranean thread connecting poptimism with hustle culture—a mindset born out of the concatenation of the trauma of the 2008 financial crisis, the ongoing collapse of the middle class, the gig economy, and the new economic logic forced upon cultural production by the internet. It’s a hard-nosed realism that recognizes that principles, independence, originality, and all that other cherubic bullshit doesn’t pay the bills if nobody’s buying it, and what ultimately matters is that the bills get paid and time isn’t wasted.

Shameless self-promotion and fulsome networking are no longer regarded as distasteful; we respect the hustle. The conscientious development of a personal brand is no longer regarded as cynical and disingenuous; we respect the hustle. Looking to trends and calibrating one’s output accordingly no longer leaves one prone to criticisms of subordinating one’s individuality and creativity to market demands; we respect the hustle. Shilling products is no longer…

Well, you get the idea.

While my cohort was enamored of gritty bohemian rectitude and artistic integrity, even before we were old enough to appreciate what it was really like out there and what was occurring behind the public performance, the younger generations have been huffing the fumes of hustle culture since the late aughts. The goal of the artist, writer, musician, or “personality” is to get famous and make a lot of money, and any braying about mendacity or opportunism or pandering is just sour grapes. Today’s youth, it seems, are possessed of fewer romantic misconceptions than we were.

I don’t recall where I saw it or who it came from, but I was struck by an observation of the difference between the words of typical praise for twentieth-century rock stars and for modern pop stars. It ran like this:

When people talked about Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Kurt Cobain, the Beach Boys, Pink Floyd, the Smashing Pumpkins, Tool, and the other luminaries of the form, they lauded them for their passion and their originality. They were composing and performing music that only they could have composed and performed; and they were to be all the more admired when they hit upon something novel and untested, and had the gumption to bring it into a world that wouldn’t necessarily know what to do with it.¹⁰

When fans discuss the virtues of their favorite pop artists, the commonest and highest point of respect is that they work very hard.

This, incidentally, is what my wife told me when I asked why the hell she’d hold someone like Kim Kardashian in the slightest esteem. She works so hard.

Hustle culture encourages us to look at the generic commercial pop star as somebody to be celebrated on the basis of their own celebrity and success. Okay, sure, Kailee Spirk’s music is unoriginal and focus-tested and bland, she’s the beneficiary of all the hype money can buy, she was guaranteed slots in Top 40 rotation and TV soundtracks before she even started recording, she doesn’t know how to play any instruments, she’s shilling fast fashion, whatever—but she made it. She had an opportunity and she seized it, and she’s out there working hard every day. She’s young and successful and rich—and you’re not, so you’re kind of not qualified to talk shit, kay?

On the other hand, poptimism undergirds hustle culture by promoting a particular variation of the meritocracy myth and implying a particular definition of merit: that which is good succeeds, and that which succeeds is good.¹¹

Poptimism and hustle culture are not separate phenomena, but a pair of capitalist realism’s myriad hydra heads. Each celebrates our resignation to a pervasively grim and ridiculous state of affairs.

IV.

One last bit from “The Culture Industry.” (Actually it directly precedes the part I block-quoted above):

The [radio] talents belong to the operation long before they are put on show; otherwise they would not conform so eagerly. The mentality of the public, which allegedly and actually favors the system of the culture industry, is a part of the system, not an excuse for it…the pretext of meeting the public's spontaneous wishes is mere hot air. An explanation in terms of the specific interests of the technical apparatus and its personnel would be closer to the truth, provided that apparatus were understood in all its details as a part of the economic mechanism of selection. Added to this is the agreement, or at least the common determination, of the executive powers to produce or let pass nothing which does not conform to their tables, to their concept of the consumer, or, above all, to themselves…

If the objective social tendency of this age is incarnated in the obscure subjective intentions of board chairmen, this is primarily the case in the most powerful sectors of industry: steel, petroleum, electricity, chemicals. Compared to them the culture monopolies are weak and dependent. They have to keep in with the true wielders of power…The dependence of the most powerful broadcasting company on the electrical industry, or of film on the banks, characterizes the whole sphere, the individual sectors of which are themselves economically intertwined. Everything is so tightly clustered that the concentration of intellect reaches a level where it overflows the demarcations between company names and technical sectors. The relentless unity of the culture industry bears witness to the emergent unity of politics.

This has already gone on longer than I intended, and the topic I intended to write next—the politics of poptimism vis-à-vis the general crisis of liberalism and of democratic capitalism—are already adumbrated in deBoer’s examination(s) of the topic, should you care to read.¹²

Instead, I’d like to offer something like an analogy by way of a fiction. It doesn’t have very much to do with music, but I’m hoping the points of contact will be evident.

Our protagonist is a female college student attending a state university with a strong humanities department or maybe a small liberal arts college. She’s twenty-two years old, white, calls herself a political progressive, and comes from a middle-class family. Let’s also pretend that somehow she’s both stuck and unstuck in time: at any given moment across the decades, our protagonist is basically the same person of the same age in the same place, susceptible to the same kinds of pressures, and sensitive to current events and trends. She also likes to hang posters of her favorite musicians on the wall.

2006: “McDonald’s is a public health crisis and an ecological disaster masquerading as a restaurant chain. I’ve read No Logo and Nickel and Dimed. I’ve seen Super Size Me. Nobody with any sense of social responsibility should give their money to McDonalds, and we must encourage others to boycott it as well.” (The poster above her desk: Modest Mouse)

2012: “It is with a heavy heart that I’m retiring the anti-McDonald’s blog that I’ve maintained since I was a high school senior. I just don’t see the point. Committed activists have compelled it to make some changes, but it’s still fundamentally the same awful company doing the same awful things. Nothing seems to be working—anywhere. We elected Obama, and nothing changed. We turned out for Occupy, and nothing changed. I’ll still avoid McDonald’s, and if anyone asks why, I’ll tell them—but otherwise I need to figure out how to more effectively invest my time and energy.” (The poster above her desk: Florence and the Machine)

2015: [Our protagonist sits up reading an essay on Tumblr or an article published by a progressive thinkpiece mill arguing that bashing McDonald’s is racist, classist, and maybe even homophobic. She’s told it’s a bad look: a privileged white girl like her railing against a longstanding cornerstone of marginalized urban communities. She looks to the foot of of her bed, where she stacked the MCDONALDS IS MURDER flyers and literature a vegan classmate passed to her that afternoon. A bead of sweat collects at her temple and rolls down her neck.] (The poster above her desk: Lana del Rey)

2023: nuggies ✨❤️ (The poster above her desk: Taylor Swift)

from stockanalysis.com

1. Here’s a fun story: in the early 2000s I was on an Electric Hellfire Club binge and fell into a routine of taking devil-themed usernames. My usual forum handle was some variation of “Pitchfork,” and when I signed up for Twitter during the platform’s innocuous early days, I went with that as my username. I was @pitchfork.

You see where this is going.

For the first year or two there were no problems. By 2013 I was finally fed up, and registered a new account under a different email address. I couldn’t take it anymore—constantly getting atted about bands I’d never heard of and albums I’d never scored. Purely out of spite, I didn’t hand the account name over to Pitchfork. (They did ask.) I thought of it like moving out and letting the house crumble, but retaining the deed to the property. As far as I was concerned, I hadn’t been thinking about any pompous music review sites when I chose that particular two-syllable common noun as a username, I clearly wasn’t tweeting as a music critic or promoter, and I got there first. Pitchfork would just have to settle for being @pitchforkmedia. Fuck ‘em, I said.

Imagine my surprise when I later discovered that Twitter gave them my old handle without ever notifying me.

2. This is why “poseur” used to be an epithet of denunciation, denoting a fraudulent mismatch between the uniform and the quality of the person wearing it.

3. What I’m saying is that a substantive difference exists between the fashions and ethic of a highly localized music scene and of its iteration as a national (or international) franchise. Punk and grunge are the exemplary cases here.

4. True, Napster launched in 1999—but less than fifty percent of American households had internet access that year, and most of the ones that did used dial-up modems. It was a few years before the effects of file-sharing apps really made themselves felt.

5. Another very likely possibility is that music scenes/genres have ceased to be one of the principal bases of youth culture in general, or have at at minimum lost a great deal of their old power in this regard.

6. Now called MTV2; for a while it was the channel to which music videos migrated after MTV (“Music Television”) doubled down on reality TV and other non-musical kinds of programming.

7. A recent piece in the Daily Princetonian about legacy indie bands’ surrender to the spirit of the age and the pressures of the market is worth our attention:

While writing this article, I am listening to Spotify’s “Alt NOW” playlist, meant to contain the most popular alt-rock songs at the moment. Number one is Portugal. The Man’s “What, Me Worry?” In this song, synth runs the show and other instruments are so produced that they sound electronic. The bass is heavy enough that the song could be played at a club and the unique vocals, though autotuned, add a flare to the basic instrumentation. The song walks a fine line between rock and electronic dance music. 

Did that description narrow it down for you? It shouldn’t have, because that exact line could describe almost every other song on the “Alt NOW” playlist, as well as most of the songs I have heard at parties or on the radio lately. I could have used that description to describe “Heat Waves,” by Glass Animals, a song that swept the alt-rock scene throughout the country in 2020, or many of the songs on Tame Impala’s 2020 album “The Slow Rush.” 

Even bands like Tame Impala, Twenty One Pilots, and the Gorillaz, who were known for their genre-transcending experimentation in the 2000s and 2010s, have been coerced into producing this sound, which is largely the effect of record labels having a tighter grip on the bands’ sounds…

8. A&H: “All mass culture under monopoly is identical.”

9. 1990s pop music was basically generic (but very polished) R&B, hip hop, and alt rock, with a judicious pinch of Eurodance tossed in. The industry perceived that the tide had turned against patently prefabricated song & dance acts and adjusted its output accordingly. The explosive success of the Spice Girls in 1997 was a signal that the stars were realigning.

10. Of course, most narratives of aesthetic quantum leaps achieved by genius superstar musicians are more mythological than factual.

11. Riffing on a line from Society of the Spectacle:

The spectacle presents itself as something enormously positive, indisputable and inaccessible. It says nothing more than “that which appears is good, that which is good appears.” The attitude which it demands in principle is passive acceptance which in fact it already obtained by its manner of appearing without reply, by its monopoly of appearance.

12. I’d also like to draw your attention to a recent opinion column from a staff writer at the Washington Post—one of the United States’ three major newspapers of record—titled: “Beyonce was was robbed at the Oscars. We need to hear from her now.”