Introduction

In the mid-2000s, music journalists pushed back against the poptimist-rockist debate. They called it a false choice that led to hardened ideological stances that undermined journalistic objectivity. At the same time, they acknowledged rock journalism’s exclusion of women and people of color from their coverage and staffing. And its over-coverage of celebrity artists.         

Individual journalists responded differently to the problems they perceived. Some created online platforms. Others launched new print publications aimed at recognizing music overlooked by the mainstream music press.

These writers warned of dilemmas facing music journalism that foreshadowed today’s events, such as Condé Nast folding Pitchfork into Gentlemen’s Quarterly. Their writings illuminate how music journalism found itself caught between its past and present and wedged between a legacy of rock-centric exclusivism and mind-spinning technological change.         

Jody Rosen on Poptimism   

Slate pop music critic Jody Rosen navigated these uncharted waters. In 2006, he wrote:  

For those who haven’t caught up with the debate, rockism is … well, no one quite knows what it is. …

Perhaps the most cogent gloss came from frequent Slate contributor Douglas Wolk, who wrote last year in Seattle Weekly that the rockists regard rock as “normative … the standard state of popular music … to which everything else is compared, explicitly or implicitly.” [i]

Rosen traced the roots of rockism:  

The term may be slippery, but it’s a useful framework for considering how ideas about taste and authenticity have infected writing and thinking about music over the years. And not just in the rock era: All who have sought to separate high from low, art from trash, the folk-authentic from the synthetic-mass-marketed, the bad new from the good old—the folk revivalists in the 1950s, the Dixieland jazz purists in 1940s, the Victorian parlor-song champions who blasted Tin Pan Alley ragtime in the 1910s—were, in their way, arch-rockists. …[ii]

I’d argue that the ragtimers, not the parlor song Protestants, were the proto-rockists, but why split hairs?

Rosen said that being branded a rockist in 2006 might land a critic on a community watch list:

One thing’s for sure: Most pop critics today would just as soon be accused of pedophilia as rockism. This was certainly the case among the journalists, academics, and geeks who gathered at the 2006 Experience Music Project Pop Conference last month.[iii]

Pitfalls Of the anti-rockist backlash 

Even rock fan Rosen professed that he identified with poptimism:        

Lest anyone think I’m getting set to make a straw-man argument about poptimists: I more or less am one. The poptimist critique of rockism squares with my sense of musical history and resonates with my taste. I love hip-hop and commercial R&B and Nashville country and teen pop and have spent much of my professional life listening to and writing about pre-rock Tin Pan Alley pop, a genre that rockists insult by ignoring completely.[iv]

But even as he outed his inner poptimism, Rosen warned of “the pitfalls of the anti-rockist backlash: poptimism as a glib exercise in pseudo-populism and in tweaking the boomers instead of a real effort to engage history and figure out what makes good music and why.”[v]

Rosen said poptimism,

should be about openness to all kinds of music – including music that seems to embody rockist ideals. … The question, for those of us who make our living at this, is how to talk about the music we love and hate intelligently and non-ideologically.[vi]

A Greater Threat Than Rockism   

As poptimists and rockists philosophized, a more tangible threat loomed. The 2008 recession hit, and print publications faced going down the drain and taking their music columns with them. Shrinking ad sales led to shrinking staff. Magazine publishers cut back on page numbers or the annual number of issues.

Publishers and writers also faced challenges posed by music streaming services like Spotify. Substack blogger Aaron Gilbreath wrote:  

Instead of buying albums, we could listen to songs online and download them on file-sharing sites. It was fantastic, but it also crippled the music industry: Album sales declined, and record label budgets plummeted, which meant they had less to spend on print ads for promotion. The listening public quickly got used to getting music and news for free, and many became less willing to regularly pay for things.[vii]

Such as print magazine subscriptions.

Online zines proliferated during this time. Gilbreath said that,

by the Great Recession, many web-savvy tastemakers had expanded upon the medium, launching music blogs … like Fluxblog, Stereogum, Aquarium Drunkard, Brooklyn Vegan, Gorilla vs. Bear, and Tiny Mix Tapes. Bloggers could respond to breaking news and post reviews more quickly than print journalists. Rather than a business, this was often pleasure; many blogs eschewed advertising completely, and the model was dependent on creating communities explicitly through sharing favorite songs. Besides a new publishing model, one unique thing blogs offered was music itself.

Online Disruptors  

Gilbreath described how online publications disrupted the norms that print music journalism operated under:

The internet created a frontier where consumer desires were no longer clear. Did people want stories anymore or just brief posts? Did they want playlists instead of album reviews?

A new reader species was evolving, climbing out of the primeval muck of the pre-blog era: 

As reading habits changed during the early 2000s, the issue of what exactly people will pay for emerged. So did the issue of how we read online, for free or not. Theorists feared technology had ruined us. Some cultural critics diagnosed us all with ADHD, no longer able to focus on stories.

Gilbreath disagreed:  

The generalization was unfair: The way we consume and digest information in print differs greatly from the way we do online, and that affected music magazines’ performance. Simon Reynolds, who grew up reading England’s music weeklies like NME and Melody Maker, articulated the different reading experiences perfectly:

“Concentration of a different kind was involved in reading the frequently very long features. It’s perfectly possible, of course, to flick desultorily through a printed magazine in just the same way one drifts shiftlessly across the infosphere. But something about the bound nature of the magazine encourages getting pulled into a story and staying with it until the end.”[viii]

Print Disruptors  

Music enthusiasts continued to read bound magazines. Legacy publications like NME and Rolling Stone rolled with the changes. But they competed with a group of relatively new publications that embraced the emergent revivals of garage rock, post-punk, and indie. 

Several of these publications launched as mimeographed fanzines in the 1980s and 90s and evolved into full-color publications with rosters of excellent critics. They offered eclectic coverage that emphasized the obscure and underrecognized. For example, The Big Takeover focused on post-punk and indie, whereas Shindig! and Ugly Things celebrated 60s-oriented garage rock.

In 2000, Under the Radar launched and covered the indie/alternative music scene. That year, Wax Poetics started and focused on overlooked genres such as jazz, blues, R&B, soul, funk, hip-hop, and reggae.

These magazines published websites that competed with Pitchfork, PopMatters, and other online music magazines. A new era of music journalism commenced, led by hybrid print-digital music magazines; Pitchfork even published a short-lived but well-respected print edition.   

These publications embodied an alternative to the legacy music magazines founded before the 1990s. The new magazines eschewed the ideologies of rockism and poptimism. They often favored marginalized artists who resisted genre categories.

Conclusion

In the mid-2000s, a group of music journalists continued critiquing their industry. Some pushed back on the rockist-poptimist debate while acknowledging rock criticism’s legacy of exclusion. Others published music magazines that featured undercovered types of music and avoided the lifestyle/celebrity journalism that diluted the music content of magazines like Rolling Stone.  

The next post in this series looks at a group of online writers who predicted the end of music journalism in the late 2000s. They got it half-right.      

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[i] Jody Rosen, “The Perils of Poptimism: Does Hating Rock Make You a Music Critic?” Slate, May 9, 2006, webpage: https://slate.com/culture/2006/05/does-hating-rock-make-you-a-music-critic.html.

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Ibid.

[v] Ibid.

[vi] Ibid.

[vii] Aaron Gilbreath, “Where Have All the Music Magazines Gone?” Jan. 2, 2022, Substack post: https://aarongilbreath.substack.com/p/where-have-all-the-music-magazines.

[viii] Ibid.