• Pitchfork’s review of Måneskin’s album *Rush!* is at risk of busting at the seams due to its internal contradictions.
• The review suggests that people like the band for reasons other than the sonic quality of the music, to serve an unconscious need to appear neither cool nor popular.
• Pitchfork has gone from being a hipster review site to an enforcer of the consensus “poptimist” worldview in music criticism.
• Poptimism has been the utterly dominant ideology in music criticism for years, yet it is still treated as an oppressed discourse.
• Carly Rae Jepsen is a good example of how poptimism distorts how we discuss artists, with a level of critical defensiveness about her career.
• Poptimism is fundamentally about mandating a particular taste, and failure to properly appreciate massic pop culture commodities makes you guilty of having bad taste.
• The author would like to see celebration of more music that sounds truly different, and for people to stop mistaking their devotion to popular music for some sort of statement on social justice.
Published February 8, 2023
Visit Freddie deBoer’s Substack to read Freddie deBoer’s original post Pitchfork and the Death of Things as Themselves
