koganbot | Look, there is no poptimism, unless by poptimism you mean every interesting rock critic ever

Ann Powers (All you need is the Beatles? Maybe not.): The Beatles also taught me that pop could be a serious thing. Following the group's evolution across the tracks of the Red and Blue collections, I got an inkling of what artistic evolution sounded like. Little did I know that the story of the Beatles' transformation from a fun bunch of lads imitating Little Richard and Ronnie Spector to a serious quartet influenced by Karlheinz Stockhausen and Andy Warhol would become the foundation for a whole system of defining popular music's worth, which would become known as "rockism," and which favored the more "artistic" kind of rock on the second collection. Or that, decades later, a new gang of artists and thinkers, sometimes called "poptimists," would battle that legacy -- arguing for mop-top red over granny-glasses blue.

There are just so many zillions of things I want to dispute here, I don't know where to begin. But the one that bugs me the most is the progressive narrative about rock criticism that claims that the old generation of criticism was "rockist" - still a BULLSHIT word, and please please please read this column and this column by me, thank you* - and that only years later did some newbie "poptimists" come along to combat that legacy.

I'm sorry, but Richard Goldstein and Nik Cohn (who panned Sgt. Pepper's and The White Album respectively in the Sunday New York Times Arts and Leisure section; Goldstein was wrong and Cohn was right) are not a new gang of writers and thinkers, and they weren't just blips, either. Read Charlie Gillett's Sound Of The City (I think it's 1970, though the ppbk I've got is '72). Read Greil Marcus on the Beatles in the Rolling Stone Illustrated History Of Rock & Roll (first edition was 1976), and those are not just blips either, they're part of something like... well, not critical consensus but a particular strain in criticism, a strong one, the name of which... well, it didn't have a universal name, but there was one name that kept popping up, and obviously the strain wasn't particularly aimed at the Beatles' narrative but rather at the "progressive" narrative as a whole; but I was reading voices from that strain in Fusion starting in '69 and in Creem which also dates back to then but I didn't start reading it until early '74. The strain wasn't the only one in those magazines and probably wasn't the only one in any particular critic's head either, just as there isn't only a single strain in my head, but I'd say the strain is in rock criticism from the get-go, Goldstein's got it in '66 when he's praising the Shangri-Las for their lack of cool and for sounding desperately and hopelessly involved.

I'd say it was the popular narrative among music fans that the Beatles' evolution was from primitive to better, and the dissent was mainly from critics, though I remember that some of the freaks in my high school were also dissenters (not a majority of critics, but the dissenters were ultimately the ones with more influence). But as for the strain of criticism that I'm talking about, as I said it wasn't particularly Beatles-directed (fans loved the White Album but critics didn't, in my experience, but I don't remember the diagnosis being that the White Album was too arty, just that it was relatively bad, some of its worst songs being McCartney cutesy-poo), and this is how I described the strain of criticism, taking it as a given, in Why Music Sucks #1 (February 1987):

The basic attitude had existed for years [prior to 1969**] in the writings of Richard Meltzer, Sandy Pearlman, Nick Tosches, and other Crawdaddy-Fusion writers. And such different writers as Jon Landau, Ken Emerson, Les Daniels, Richard Goldstein, Greil Marcus, Robert Christgau, Lenny Kaye, and many more than I can think of shared the same ideas: that progressive rock wasn't progressive, the hippies weren't hip, etc.

That paragraph was meant to ensure that my readers understood that it wasn't true that you only got that attitude in Creem. And I was overstating the attitude; it's more like the hippies aren't necessarily hip and progressive rock wasn't necessarily progressive. These critics did get excited by new sounds and new ideas and some of what they liked was frankly avant garde, and Goldstein wasn't claiming that the Shangri-Las were better than Dylan and the Stones. And critics don't start writing a story of decline until '69, as far as I know, since decline takes a while. And obviously, saying that progressive rock isn't progressive doesn't mean that nothing should be progressive.

But anyway, as to the word that kept popping up, here it is, in a quotation from Dave Marsh, which my passage above was elaborating on (my first sentence was actually, "Marsh also implies, with typical inaccuracy, that the three of them took a lonely position that only later was accepted by the rock press"):

Our [Lester Bangs, Greg Shaw, Dave Marsh] point of view - which suffused each issue of Creem from roughly 1969 to 1973 - was vulgar, belligerent, often less respectful to rock's major institutions than many thought proper, with the result that all of us - and especially me as the most militant of the bunch - were frequently given fish-eye glances and assaulted with the epithet: "You are such a punk."
--Dave Marsh, Fortunate Son

So there you are, the word is "such" - he italicized it - and in the May 1971 issue of Creem, in a review of a ? and the Mysterians reunion gig, Marsh applied it to some of the music he liked, calling the Mysterians "Such Rock," and the rest is history. (Well, here's the quote, "Needless to say, it was impossible to pass up such a landmark exposition of punk rock, even after two nights running of Tina Turner.")

In any event, this will be a subject for a different post, but as for my "strain of rock criticism," it includes every interesting rock critic of that era.

Look, there is no poptimism, unless by "poptimism" you mean "every interesting rock critic ever." I doubt that there's an interesting critic left who thinks you can simply dismiss pop music without listening to it and taking its measure (even if criticism often falls short in practice). But if we're stuck with the word, we need anti-poptimism poptimists (just as in 1969 Peter Laughner and Charlotte Pressler were hoping for a counter-counterculture), to counter the narrative that lauds the Slow Triumph Of Poptimism and that locates openmindedness and social worthiness and fun and (somehow) feminism and anti-racism on the brave poptimist side of criticism.****

And do you guys really think that music criticism overall is getting smarter?

h/t Tom Ewing

*Key sentence: "Antirockism is rockism with a few of the words changed."

**Years prior to 1969 couldn't be too many years; also, one might get the wrong impression that I'd read an issue of Crawdaddy; in fact, I never saw the original 'zine; I did read a Meltzer piece on Elvis that was xeroxed for me many years later and of course the stuff of Meltzer's that ended up in The Aesthetics Of Rock.

***And as for my turning my guns on postpunk and indie-alternative in my Why Music Sucks essay, I was basically revamping (and deepening, I believe) the old critique, turning it on postpunk and alternative as they were more and more trying to occupy a "progressive" role, but also trying to understand an entire social process that produced postpunk and indie, trying to understand my connection to it, my embeddedness in it, rather than foisting all the bad results on some other guy.

****I'm not laying all this on Ann, however. But you know the tendencies I'm talking about.