Poptimism replaced Adorno-derived rockist criticism by celebrating manufactured pop.

Evidence

For Sanneh, the solution was to reject rockism’s elitist hierarchies and celebrate pop music on its own terms. Why, he asked, should Nirvana’s “neo-punk” be considered “more respectable than Ms. [Mariah] Carey’s neo-disco?” … The anti-rockist ethos later became known as “poptimism.” Its emergence marked a seismic shift in cultural criticism. For most of the twentieth century, the spiritual leader for critics was neo-Marxist theorist Theodor Adorno, who maligned popular culture as manipulative propaganda. Writers in this lineage advocated for true artists and fought against the cynical excesses of the culture industry. They saw their job as separating art from kitsch, and in the early aughts, that meant elevating the Strokes and the White Stripes as good and impugning Creed and Hoobastank as bad. … Sanneh countered that pop music—and by obvious extension, the entirety of pop culture—shouldn’t be dismissed as kitsch nor as bad art but appreciated as a complex manufactured product. In this, poptimism not only acknowledged postmodernist trends in culture but also paid them full fealty. Echoing Fredric Jameson’s idea that “postmodernism is the consumption of sheer commodification as a process,” Sanneh implored us to enjoy pop music as a “glorious, incoherent, corporate-financed, audience-tested mess.” — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 116

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines poptimism against rockism and locates its postmodernist intellectual ancestry in Jameson.
• XREF: Connects to the Frankfurt School/culture industry critiques in ‘The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance’ already in the reader’s knowledge base.