Postcards from the wrong side of history

Happy Indigenous Peoples' Day (or Columbus Day, depending on where you're reading). This post about the triumph of poptimism originally ran this summer for paid subscribers.

Maya Dehlin Spach / Staff

Today is a federal holiday (in this house, Christopher Columbus is a hero — end of story) so as usual we are ungating an older article from behind the paywall.

This piece is about the declining popularity and cultural significance of the rock music that I grew up not only loving, but believing to be predestined to be the most important music of its time. It’s not really about Taylor Swift, though I do use her as an illustration of the triumphant poptimism of our times. But I was thinking about it specifically in terms of her feud with Charli XCX. My son is somewhat negatively polarized against his Swiftie classmates, so when “Sympathy is a Knife” came out, I played it for him. And I would say he liked the idea of an anti-Taylor song more than he really got what the song is about. By contrast, when I played “Actually Romantic” for him, he was genuinely impressed by Swift’s burns. And to me that’s very much the contrast between the two artists — Charlie, long the critical darling of the pop music world, has a song about insecurity and status competition that is emotionally deep in a way that is a bit above the head of my ten-year-old, whereas Taylor is right on his wavelength.

What’s interesting to me is that Swift seems to have long had a kind of complex about not being respected by artists who she respects. Red has two different songs that complain that Jake Gyllenhaal liked indie rock more than her music. But for better or worse, she got the last laugh — The Life of a Showgirl is the fastest-selling album of all time, and if the critics think her diss track is dumb, the reality is that nobody cares what critics think anymore.

I hope everyone who has today off enjoys the vacation! And if you enjoy this post, I hope you’ll consider becoming a paid subscriber.

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At my high school in New York in the 90s, there were basically three kinds of people: the kids who listened to the Top 40 station Z100, the ones who preferred Hot 97 playing rap and hip-hop, and those (like me) who listened to 92.3 K-Rock.

One station wasn’t the limit of my musical horizons, of course, or anyone else’s. I heard what was playing on the other stations and sometimes dipped into classic rock radio. I watched VH1 and MTV. Back then we had snobbish Record Store Guys to sell us music that wasn’t on the radio. My friend Tim got into some cool stuff via his older brother.

But given the physics of terrestrial radio, K-Rock was a useful signifier. If you met a kid from another N.Y.C. high school or even the suburbs or N.Y.U., he’d have a go-to local FM radio station. What you listened to said something about who you were, and I was an alternative rock person.

The world changed with the arrival of the internet, and by the time I was out of college and living near U Street in D.C., the importance of radio was fading. But indie rock music was still an incredibly important part of my life. I was seeing shows at the Black Cat and the 9:30 Club and smaller venues like DC9 and Velvet Lounge most weekends.

By the heady days of the 2000s, I was aware that my guitar bands were no longer the most popular music around. But I felt almost unquestioningly confident that it was the real music of our time.

It’s a distinction one takes for granted in many other modes of art. The number one movie at the box office last year was “Inside Out 2,” which was not a bad movie. But the best movie of the year was “Anora,” which was 65th at the global box office. If you tell me that you disagree and actually the best movie was something else, I’ll listen and we can agree to disagree. But if you’re telling me that any of the five highest-grossing movies of the year (“Inside Out 2,” “Deadpool & Wolverine,” “Moana 2,” “Despicable Me 4,” and “Wicked”) were better than “Anora,” you’re telling me you have terrible taste and absolutely everyone who is remotely serious about movies will agree with me. Obviously nobody is going to look back twenty-five years from now and think that “Moana 2” was an all-time classic. With “Anora,” they might.

And to me that’s what being an indie rock fan was. We were, musically speaking, the people with the good taste. The people on the right side of history. Until eventually it all came crashing down.

The poptimists defeated rockism on the battlefield of discourse just as I was aging out of the “going to lots of shows” and “caring a lot about new music” phase of life. Now, as an uncool middle aged dad, I’m not just old and out of it — the stuff that I thought was the cool good shit when I was young and cool has been tossed on the dustbin of history. I of course heard (and enjoyed) “Love Story” when it came out. But it sincerely never occurred to me at the time that in the future serious people would consider Taylor Swift to be a more significant artist than The Kills, Lykke Li, Metric, or TV on the Radio, who put out my favorite albums of that year.

I was on the wrong side of history.

The commanding heights

Our self-confidence and self-regard were bolstered by two factors.

One is that rock music had, by that time, a distinguished legacy as an American popular art form par excellence, one that was recognized around the world and had an established canon. Almost everyone enjoys listening to new stuff. But the music fans of 2007 also knew and respected the music of 1977. You could sit around and talk about The Clash or The Rolling Stones and the bands that were both upstream and downstream of them.

There was such a thing as an all-time classic rock album. That meant that while any given new rock album you heard and enjoyed probably would not become an all-time classic, it was at least possible. It was an aspiration.

When Arcade Fire put out “Funeral” in 2004, I thought it was brilliant from the get-go. I saw them play on that tour to an electric crowd at the 9:30 Club, a not very large venue, and not only had a blast but was convinced that one day, looking back, this would be like having seen The Who on their first tour.

The other factor is that, history aside, the particular demographic group that I belong to — college-educated white guys — is both the demographic group that was most into indie rock, and has also historically punched way above its weight in terms of representation in jobs like magazine editor or movie director or television showrunner.

As a result, our idiosyncratic niche culture had a tendency to worm its way into aspects of mass culture. Our music was popping up on “Gossip Girl” and “The O.C.” The Shins were in “Garden State.” Feist was in Apple commercials and “(500) Days of Summer.”

In retrospect this is just arbitrary and silly.

These bands would show up on random soundtracks in part because they weren’t particularly popular or successful, and their music was cheap. The fact that people who look like me happened to be overrepresented in the commanding heights of cultural production was not evidence in favor of the enduring power of my taste, but evidence against it. Things I liked were being propped up by happenstance. The spirit of the times, even back in the aughts, was clearly in favor of opening up the doors to a wider range of voices.

Meanwhile, the internet was fragmenting mass culture. The idea of network television chokepoints that defined what was “mainstream” and thereby allowed a cabal of white boy tastemakers to foist our music on the broad public was clearly on its way out.

At the time, these dynamics sort of obscured from me the objective reality that these were extremely niche tastes. Even so, I was noticing things. One time, on a trip to the west coast, I had the chance to meet a guy from a band I deeply admired, and I was sort of shocked by how normal and non-rich he was. This was a rock star? Travis Morrison from The Dismemberment Plan was working in I.T. for The Washington Post and married to a colleague of mine at Slate who’d never heard of the band when she met him. Rock was a skeletal presence propped up by a narrow elite cabal. And the media landscape itself was in the process of being radically destabilized by the internet.

The triumph of the poptimists

I can’t do justice to the Rockism Wars in one article (here’s a Wikipedia page if you’re interested), but I do want to observe, as a digital media professional, that there was a big base/superstructure issue in terms of cultural criticism in the 2010s.

The media industry moved firmly online in the wake of the Great Recession, and the predominant business model was ad-supported media on the free web. Succeeding meant getting a lot of clicks, and getting clicks meant getting shares on Facebook or search traffic from Google. And in the cultural domain, this entailed what was practically a 180-degree reversal of the primary role of cultural writing.

The key value-add of a newspaper critic — whether focused on books, music, movies, or TV shows — was to draw readers’ attention to things they wouldn’t otherwise have heard about. If you were lucky, your hometown paper employed one or more critics whose taste you respected and who covered areas you were interested in. You could then read those people in hopes of them recommending something you loved.

The logic of the ad-supported web inverted this.

Critics were now incentivized to write articles about the things that people already knew they wanted to read about. That’s not exactly the same as “the most popular stuff.” There was always more interest in “Mad Men” recaps than “Blue Bloods” recaps, even though “Blue Bloods” had more viewers. But it’s related. Marvel movies were popular, so people wanted to read about Marvel movies. And the people who wanted to read about Marvel movies didn’t want to read a hater dunking on them. The incentive, objectively, was to be a sincere fan and appreciator of things that had big fandoms.

This is not the only reason that poptimism emerged victorious in the musical world, but I do think it’s important to understand the material conditions under which the Poptimist Revolution took place.

Readers wanted positive, respectful, validating coverage of the most popular acts in music, and so such coverage started rising to the fore. Beyond that, music is strongly linked to social identity, and rockism was associated with white men, which meant it was destined to buckle under the pressure of the Great Awokening. But while I think these extrinsic factors matter, the fact is we lost the argument. From my side, I didn’t even have an argument. I’m obviously not a music critic and never have been, but I do write a lot on the internet. And while of course in some sense you can never prove anything about matters of taste, there are definitely fields of artistic endeavor where I feel comfortable making a case for my views. But I can’t even begin to imagine explaining why I think “Run Fast” was one of the best albums of 2013. It just is, to me. The point is: We lost.

Predictions are hard, especially about the future

To segue back to politics: When I went to the 1997 Tibetan Freedom Concert on Randall’s Island, it was mostly because I wanted to see Rancid, Björk, Pavement, Alanis Morissette, and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.

But I did also favor freedom for Tibet!

I was earnest and sincere about this, I talked about the issue with people, and when I got to college and met lefty anti-globalization activists who had opinions about international trade that I found to be cringe and wrongheaded, I was nonetheless sympathetic to the view that permanent normal trade relations with China risked letting them off the hook for serious human-rights abuses.

What I don’t remember is exactly what I thought was going to happen with Tibet. How going to the concert or saying nice things about the Dalai Lama or watching “Kundun” was supposed to lead to Tibet’s liberation. But I’m pretty sure that I thought it somehow would! I wasn’t a naïve moron who believed that good always triumphs over evil. But I did think that drawing the attention of the world to a cause that was just would lead to victory, that the main risk in life was of something bad being neglected or overlooked. Hence the concerts and the movies — we needed the world not to turn its eyes away from Tibet.

And for a while, it didn’t. Freedom for Tibet was a mainstream topic of political, cultural, and social conversation, and when I went on a weird C.C.P.-led propaganda tour of China for journalists in 2009, it’s something I pestered various party officials about. But that era was the last time I remember anyone having much to say about Tibet. Because it turned out nobody had a concrete, actionable plan for doing anything to change the dynamic, at least not one that involved acceptable costs and benefits.

I think the idea that sometimes you just lose is a little bit underrated.

The Taliban stronghold, Kandahar, was founded by Alexander the Great and was a Greek-speaking city for longer than the United States of America has existed. Today, the idea of southern Afghanistan as a center of Hellenistic culture seems bizarre — almost absurd — and yet, that’s what it was until it wasn’t. I’m no expert in Chinese politics, but it sure seems like the Tibetans and Uyghurs both will be ground down over time by the Han Chinese.

I don’t want to be too morbid about this or draw a close analogy between the cultural eclipse of a genre of music I like and the collapse of whole civilizations. But precisely because the music case is trivial, it sticks in my head a bit.

Sitting in the Red Room in 2009, having a couple of beers while waiting to go upstairs to see the band, there was no real reason to think critically about the assumption that the tides of history were on my side. And I didn’t. And I was wrong. I’m struck, though, by how often I see people who are dealing with weightier matters make similar assumptions without much thought, that not only are they in the right but that they will triumph and be acknowledged to have been in the right all along. Maybe!

I remember after the 2004 election listening to some old liberals whining about how gay marriage cost John Kerry, and my attitude was basically that we’re winning this fight one way or the other, so get on the bus. And we did, which was cool. And I think that if you’re someone who spent the mid-aughts passionately arguing for the anti-equality side, you probably don’t brag about that much these days.

But not every argument turns out that way, and when you’re in the middle of things it’s often actually not at all clear which way the tides of history are flowing.