This remark by Freddie deBoer left me completely at sea:
Poor Jill Sobule catches a stray here, but she has to – because she wasn’t ever as purely poppy an artist as Katy Perry, she is the pig who must be casually, offhandedly slaughtered in the commission of proving that dad/music critic Tom Breihan is down with the youth and, you know, feminism or whatever. This stuff wallpapers the internet. Nobody wants to appear to be a “rockist,” a category that literally no one self-identifies with and a term that describes a theoretical figure who could not possibly be more culturally marginal. (The only accusatory identifier that’s thrown around more casually than rockist is fascist, and I think there are some fringe dweebs who actually embrace the latter mantle.) White-haired hifi guys you meet at Record Store Day are careful not to appear to be rockists, now. Poptimists, I promise, the day is yours. Stereogum is a poptimist publication. So is Pitchfork, and so is The Fader, and so are rockist temples like Rolling Stone and Spin, and so is everywhere else. I will countenance any and all arguments against what I’m saying here, but for this: poptimism has hegemonic control of music criticism. There are no challengers.
Yeah, I don’t even know if this is the Med or the Aral in which I’m lost.
