Apocalypse weather

2025 Mix 35: Exorcising poptimism discourse, celebrating the real beating heart of "manufactured CRAP," plus various soundworlds, soundbaubles, and soundinstallations

Look at me, I’m in tatters

The weather’s been nice, actually, but I suppose you could have nice weather at the end of the world, like the doomsday dream in Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

And speaking of screaming out in terror even though you’re already a flaming skeleton, I just can’t seem to shake “poptimism discourse” these days. I have through a few conversations about them gained some clarity on recent anti-poptimism critiques.

The main idea in a lot of anti-poptimism screeds is a variation on the plot of Ghostbusters. The story goes: at some mythical point in the late 2000s, three interrelated monsters — (1) social media-empowered vulgar fandom swarming, (2) the industry decimation of arts coverage and criticism, and (3) the ballooning of a select few remaining American music celebrities to gargantuan proportions — were being held at bay by an invisible protective layer of skeptical or harsh treatment of pop music in music criticism.

Then a handful of well-intentioned but misguided iconoclast critics¹ served up the Key that opened the Gate—via an “ideology” called “poptimism” that says that you can and should and indeed must write positive things about music that is popular—and thus the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man carnage of the current era came to pass, full of stan armies, zombie cheerleaders squatting in the charred husk of arts journalism, and Taylor Swift stomping around as…the Marshmallow Woman?²

I don’t think this misrepresentation is worth taking seriously—and most actual published critics, who have a wide variety of opinions about different types of music, don’t take it seriously.³ That’s because the story is horseshit.

The antirockist and cheekily self-described poptimist thinkers of the aughts were just music critic nerds, full stop, and their concerns were mostly about the rise of a different form of ahistorical criticism, usually typified by Pitchfork’s reviews c. 1999-2003 (the latter being the year that OutKast’s “Hey Ya!,” Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love,” and Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me a River” got the gold-silver-bronze as singles of the year, respectively), and British rock mags before that.⁴ The concern was these outlets’ dismissal or disparagement of what in the minds of antirockist types was the promise of a global cosmopolitan future of musical abundance, with pop, rap, and R&B of the early aughts blazing the trail. (For what it’s worth, at the time both sides put far too bright a line between “rock” and “pop,” a distinction without much of a difference.)

Tom Ewing wrote a good post on the early formation of poptimism as meme, if not technically as a term, since it probably dates back at least to the late ‘80s and some version of it—“pop optimist”—was used by Robert Christgau back in 1970. In his telling, the real driver of the optimism part of the term early on (important to remember this was an epithet applied to the so-called poptimists) was not some conceptual grudge about fairness of coverage, but rather the celestial jukebox’s promise as an achievable new technology. It wasn’t about stumping for particular genres or artists on principle (unless the “principle” was “I like it”), or god forbid cheerleading for popular music simply because it was popular.

This optimism—about a world with celestial jukebox as pocket technology—also happens to be the subject of my final A-pop installment, out in a week or two. I appreciate being able to quote Tom in it from a time when I was still saving up my lunch money to buy Talking Heads CDs at a NICE PRICE at my local bookseller conglomerate.

What has animated my writing on A-pop is mostly the impact of our celestial realities. The changes have been profound, and not all of them good. But none of them have to do with some imagined crisis that critics unleashed in 2007 when Zuul crossed the Atlantic. Critics were responding to all of the same conditions that the anti-poptimists are now complaining about. But they were taking an optimistic view, not of the monsters, but of the availability of more music from more places — reasoning that this ultimately meant more music by more and different people, and written about by more and different people, too. Both of these, I should add, did in fact really happen, even as many institutions around both groups, the music makers and music writers, crumbled. (Poptimist critics, along with all of the other critics, were a casualty of these changes, not their cause.)

My line is that good music could come from anywhere, from anyone, and for any reason—including bad ones that can be articulated as such. This is also what makes music the most vital and democratic mass art form. (We need more democracy, not less.) But you really have to look for the stuff everywhere, and the looking can be difficult because of its everywhereness. I think this “problem,” music’s accessible infinity, is also a miracle. I think I’m in a long line of critics who would more or less agree with this general perception, without any of us necessarily liking any of the same music as a result.

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Previous 2025 Mixes

Tidal || YouTube || Deezer

1. YOUNG POSSE: Freestyle
South Korea

The spirit of bubblegum is alive and well in South Korea, which I suppose should be obvious to anyone paying attention but still sort of surprises me sometimes in comparison to the US, where the spirit of bubblegum is not nearly so alive. There is some bubbly pop here doing reasonably well against a particularly stolid chart’s persistent fungi, but bubbly isn’t always bubblegum.

When I asked the music chat massive which American artist could pull off anything like this track (my first thought went way back to Kris Kross), the only remotely plausible answer I got was the Beastie Boys in 1998. I also got some flak from strangers about how horrible they thought the song was, which means K-pop is currently the only music that will really get a rise out of the “manufactured crap” grumps. So there’s something to it!

2. PERSES: ห้ามขยับจับนะ (FREEZE)
Thailand

Well, wait’ll the MC Grumps get a load of Thailand! Here’s a boyband I’ve never heard, who switch things up to a phonk freakout in the final minute.

3. SadBoi, MOLIY: Johnny
Canada/Ghana

Have been interested in MOLIY since “Shake It to the Max” began its ascent on the global charts (I singled it out when it was stalled in the lower 100’s, yay me). Was disappointed in a recent Kelefa Sanneh piece about a lack of meanness in criticism that seems to fall into tedious ghostbusting anti-poptimism. But I was intrigued that the only example of contemporary pop he singled out positively was “Shake It to the Max”—see, A-pop theory in action! Anyway, this song doesn’t have much to do with “Shake It to the Max,” goes minimal with accordions and bed-squeaks, with Sadboi joining in a duet silly enough to make its come-ons sound almost sarcastic.

4. Sola Guinto, Faffi f. ALT BLK ERA: Armageddon (ALT edition)
US/UK/Netherlands

A novelty song nearly as over-the-top in its description of a futuristic apocalypse full of banal details as “Space Olympics” by the Lonely Island, but isn’t going nearly as hard for joke-jokes. (Which is good, because a bunch of them don’t land.) This originally came out in October of last year but I think the more recent addition of ALT BLK ERA gives it more heft qua song and less heft qua novelty premise, a smart re-balancing.

5. Deto Black: F.U.N [2021]
Nigeria

Ah, the rare out-of-date discovery track that made it through to my mix and was too good to change out at the last second! This is why I try to get all the damn algorithms out of my playlisting process and just let the weirdo play listers and payola MBAs decide what I should sample. From a Lagos-based artist who has also featured recently with Sadboi on a funny filthy duet (on 2024’s “D-Ride”).

6. Ava Luna: Frame of Us
US

Kitchen sink indie-funk that reminds me a bit of Tune-Yards, lots of pots and pans and clatter, but singer Felicia Douglass’s sweet soul vocals ground everything in a similar way to Yukimi Nagano in Little Dragon, albeit with a bit less grain than Nagano.

7. BXKS: Init Gyal
UK

Noisy UK rap that has some of the scrappy charm of Nigerian cruise music (I have no problem becoming the Boss Baby Tweet for cruise music), though lands in more of a cosmo-pop gumbo.

8. Yellow Claw: Touch It
Netherlands

Cynical raunch-pop with some dubstep elements that makes it sound a bit old-fashioned, and does itself no favors naming itself the same thing as Monifah’s “Touch It” from 1998 (“in our day we had proper thinly veiled smut!”), but in this case a song making me want to listen to its superior weirdly makes me more sympathetic to it.

9. Ti Nene, Dadifox, Dj Six: Tá na Quadra
Portugal

Portguese kuduro that sounds like it’s borrowing from all over the place, baile funk and cartoonish reggaeton chime-ins.

10. BabyDaiz: Matisa
South Africa

South Africa has a strong underground rap scene that I pay almost no attention to, so I can’t tell you how far aboveground this one falls. It’s certainly not even a hundredth as weird as SA’s own crop of avant mildew-rappers like Vson.

11. Reanny: Zei ze dat echt?
Netherlands

Couldn’t place this one geographically on first listen. I guessed she was singing in German but it’s Dutch: “Did She Really Say That?” Guess that depends on how many languages you speak.

12. GRISANA: DayaDaya
Ukraine

Clocked GRISANA as one to watch in Ukraine’s lead-up to Eurovision, where her song “Kohoney” sounded head and shoulders above—and more contemporary than—her competition. This song if anything goes further, suggests the sort of world-beating omnivorous pop hit with a toe kept in regional style, like Angelina Mango or Marina Satti, that I’ve been expecting to see more of in Eurovision.

13. Bassolino: Popoli del Mare
Italy

Some lush Quincy Jones-ish fusion from an Italian producer, featuring Beirut producer Charif Megarbane, whom I’ve featured a few times before for ‘70s cinematic funk pastiche.

14. Aura BAE: Ángeles
Chile

Starts sweet and dreamy, then unexpectedly introduces a driving Jersey club beat in nice counterpoint to the vocal.

15. M00tion: Brii Bass
South Africa

Ah, my South African subgenre distinction skills still need some work—I think this is quantum sound? Techy, hard-edged amapiano, and there’s a different quantum-identified track on the EP its from.

16. Sofia Kourtesis: Corazón
Peru

One from Ninja Tune artist Sofia Kourtesis’s new album, gauzy house-pop, earns a win (just barely on points) in this week’s slugfest for the Golden Beatology title.

17. Jahlys: What You Need
Martinique

Shatta with a nice cloud of synths keeping it less minimal and spiky-sounding than I expected. I’m not sure I’ve heard anything in recent shatta music like the wild dueling synth solos in the middle 8.

18. TRAKE, Uzbell: Lupin
Chile

More light (arguable) baile funk crossover, with a hint of hard clave peeking through a carnivalesque reggaeton number.

19. PALMYRA: Афродіта
Ukraine

Dark Ukrainian electro, gets more goth as it goes along. (I have put more thought into this woefully underwritten blurb than they put into the artwork :/.)

20. Nina Chuba f. makko: Fucked Up
Germany

Somehow simultaneously gloomy and upbeat, pop-punkish, and integrates sing-rap in a way that reminds me of someone like Jessie Reyez. Was surprised to see it’s from Germany, another bit of evidence for a quiet German pop renaissance (or maybe just better German pop selections in my playlists).

21. Oda Nova, Filip Solen: Zmora
Poland

An elegaic indie number from Poland, pretty and plain in a way that offers some totally arbitrary grist (just from its sequencing on the mix) for me to think through why I’m not really feeling…

22. Dijon: Baby!
US

…Dijon’s album, which I recognize abstractly as good, and has a great write-up from Ivy Nelson in Pitchfork. Dijon’s work gets close to without touching a third rail of arty or capital-E experimental pretension that puts me off—it might be why I like Dijon’s productions with other artists more, like on the (pretty good, not great) Justin Bieber album. Left to his own devices, I think the impact for me is less what Ivy calls a “soundworld,” which implies a lived-in quality, and more what I’d call a “soundinstallation,” a room with a little invisible museum rope keeping you from really getting in there and mucking around despite its claims to participatory engagement.

23. Viana Moog: És
Brazil

Sometimes it’s better to just make the guitars go fuzzy and sing it plainly, y’know? Like this group from [checks notes] Brazil? Huh. Sure.

24. Nuclear Soul System: Come and Get Your Gift [1977]
US

Ending with my one-in-a-hundred Numero group rerelease, a funk novelty from Jimmy Jules and his group Nuclear Soul System, who put out a Christmas album featuring an instrumental that’s a spiritual precursor to “Dick in a Box.” (Two Lonely Island references in one post?? “Poptimism” chat really has put me in a time warp.)

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That’s it! Until next time, please move on from the ghosts of “poptimism”—there were only ever “poptimists” anyway, and we were/are a rowdy and contradictory bunch.

—Dave Moore (the other one)

Title from Sola Guinto, Faffi f. ALT BLK ERA: Apocalypse (ALT edition)

1. Usually focused on American/Canadian critics like Jody Rosen and Carl Wilson, without acknowledging the British origins of the terminology, or the many (many) message board debates that served as a hothouse for the arguments. Popular accounts skip straight to Kelefa Sanneh’s 2004 “Rap Against Rockism” article, which is framed incorrectly as an opening salvo rather than a synthesis of debates that were already getting stale.

2. If the claim is “vulgar fandom mobs, attentional black hole megastars, and the decimation of the arts press are all bad,” I am in full agreement. To that extent and that extent only, I think some argument about all this is important, and it’s exactly the sort of argument I want to think through in the A-pop series, which doesn’t name anything like “poptimism” as a causal factor.

3. If you’d like a more level-headed conversation than I’m willing to grant them here, try clicking through some of the responses and quote posts on a recent Ann Powers thread on the issue for further reading ideas.

4. Coincidentally, I reread Mark Sinker’s 2018 essay “Other Jacksons in the House” yesterday, which you should absolutely read if you haven’t. He shares this anecdote about the NME in 1986:

A bitter office quarrel — the so-called the ‘HipHop Wars’ — had been making life at the NME miserable from some time. At issue was the current and future direction of the paper — how to give the readers what they wanted to read, week on week, while staying abreast of music’s future trends — so when the Smiths released ‘Panic’ in late 1986, it crystallised everything. “Hang the DJ!” sang Morrissey: “Burn down the disco!” Those who cared for black music at all — future and past — were appalled: to them it was very clear who this talk of burning and hanging was aimed at. His supporters scrambled for a less ugly reading: not that kind of DJ! Not those discos! Much was made of Steve Wright following a news report about Chernobyl with a Wham! song. Concluding statement for the defence: He’s not anti black musicians, he’s anti bland music — and that goes for us all, surely?