Steve Hyden, writing at the True North of the American Middlebrow: “But an album that the majority of pop fans will have no interest in hearing (in part because it’s been rigged to turn those people off) can never be meaningful.”
Once again: it’s not the “snobs” who close doors and forbid some kinds of art; it’s the anti-snobs. It’s not the “snobs” who go on and on about the illegitimacy of the art they don’t like; it’s the anti-snobs. It’s not the “snobs” who try to legislate their own taste, it’s the anti-snobs. It’s the anti-snobs who are conservative, smarmy, closed-minded, arrogant, and rude. It’s the anti-snobs. They’re the ones who shrink the world of what art can be and can do. They’re the ones living in caves, sniveling about how disrespected they are, trying with all their might to forbid the possibility that other people might like other things than they do. It’s just like I’ve been saying.
Oh, hey, Steve Hyden: fuck you, too.
Is Steve Hyden is one of the so-called “poptimist” music critics? That’s a term I haven’t heard in a while, but it was going around a lot during the Bush years and early Obama years: music critics, Ivy League-educated all, who were writing long “think pieces” in the Times, the New Yorker, and Slate, among other places, about Top 40 pop music, while expressing disdain for the singer-songwriter model of pop music. I think their clarion call was that awful The Rap Against Rockism piece by Kelefa Sanneh that appeared in the Times Sunday magazine back in ’04 (go ahead, read it: it will make you so, so angry).
Anyway, the “poptimist” critics, like Sanneh, Jody Rosen, and Sasha Frere-Jones, exemplify the very worst of the anti-snob snobs you’ve been railing against lately. I think the most jaw-dropping example of that particular school of criticism is this absurd exegesis of Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the USA.” And really, what could be creepier than some 30-something Gen-X music critic dude explaining to Slate readers the premise of Hannah Montana? That piece appeared in 2009, and I still–still!–get worked up about it.
There’s plenty of snobbery to go around. No one has a monopoly on looking down on others. More interesting: what’s the motive?
I sentence these critics Clockwork Orange style to an evening listening to Schoenberg and Webern.
If you want to punish them, scott, you’ll make them listen to Radiohead, not Webern.
What they hate isn’t the highbrow, it’s the middlebrow. That’s what puzzles me about these posts–the Roots ARE middle brow. The “singer-songwriter model of pop music” is the most middlebrow thing that ever happened.
Great, I like Radiohead too, these bastards would really hate me!
Maybe as soon as you become “anti” anything, you’re already a snob, even if 98% of the population are also snobs? It just seems like taste (and Hyden’s piece is by his own account an expression of taste) should be self-defined according to what you like rather than what you are against.
Then again, I’m naive enough to expect music writers, reviewers, critics, etc. to provide context, assume the musician knows what they are doing and highlight what a particular work does, rather than how it falls short of some of some grand measure (in Hyden’s case, how easily a song or album. “works its way” into anyone who hears it for the first time).
I’ll see your Hyden and raise you a Giraldi: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117814/50-shades-grey-academic-study-feminist-point-view
Hyden speaks for millions. Giraldi speaks for almost no one.
Are you kidding? I’ve seen that sort of sentiment expressed more times than I can remember just in the progressive blogosphere alone. TNR in particular has done this a few times that I’ve seen, sneering at the hoi polloi for their artless striving and lack of good taste. The Tboggs and the LG&Ms always have time to express some educated, professional-class liberal snobbery toward whatever kitschy trash the unsophisticated rubes are enjoying these days. I remember LG&M having a series of posts devoted to “World’s Worst Birthdays” or something along those lines. Usually it was about people like Henry Kissinger, but one time they picked the pop singer Jewel, for the unforgivable crime of her poetry book being a bestseller among the uneducated morons who don’t have the sense to be embarrassed by their wretched taste. (And the commenters, as you can imagine, jumped in with even more gusto.)
I mean, fine, whatever, I’m not interested in arguing over how we would quantify which version of snobbery is more prevalent on which sites, or which sites count as more culturally significant. But it’s simply not true to claim that this sort of “punching down” snobbery only exists in the aggressively insecure middlebrow imagination.