page_title: Rockism and poptimism
section_title: Early rock criticism
hierarchical_section_title: Rockism and poptimism / Background / Early rock criticism
caption_attribution_description: Critic Robert Christgau (Rolling Stone, ex-Village Voice) at 2007 Pop Conference, Experience Music Project, Seattle, Washington.
context_page_description: Rockism is the belief that rock music is dependent on values such as authenticity and artfulness, and that such values elevate the genre over other forms of popular music. A rockist may also be someone who regards rock music as the normative state of popular music or who promotes the artifices stereotyped with the genre. Poptimism is the belief that pop music is as worthy of professional critique and interest as rock music. Detractors of poptimism describe it as a counterpart of rockism that unfairly privileges the most famous or best-selling pop, hip-hop, and R&B acts.
  The term "rockism" was coined in 1981 by English rock musician Pete Wylie. It soon became a pejorative used humorously by self-described "anti-rockist" music journalists. The term was not generally used beyond the music press until the mid 2000s, partly due to the increasing number of bloggers who used it more seriously in analytical debate. In the 2000s, a critical reassessment of pop music was underway, and by the next decade, poptimism supplanted rockism as the prevailing ideology in popular music criticism.
context_section_description: Until the late 1960s, "pop" was considered to have the same definition as "rock" or "rock and roll". From the 1960s to the 1970s, music magazines such as Rolling Stone and Creem laid the foundation for popular music criticism in an attempt to make popular music worthy of study. Following the release of the Beatles' 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, such magazines began drawing a contrast between "pop" and "rock" (with "rock and roll" now referring to the 1950s style), creating a division that gave generic significance to both terms.
  "Pop" became associated with music that was more commercial, ephemeral, and accessible. "Rock" became associated with a style of music that was usually heavier and centered on the electric guitar. Besides general differences in musical style, the two words became associated with differing values. Many early rock reporters believed that rock embodied a particular set of values, such as rebelliousness, innovation, seriousness, and sociopolitical intent. However, not all critics supported the idea of integrating high culture values into rock music, nor did they all argue for the importance of personal expression. In addition, some believed that such values were merely impositions of the cultural establishment. Nonetheless, a widespread belief among music critics in the 1960s and 1970s was that truly artistic music was made by singer-songwriters using traditional rock instruments on long-playing albums, and that pop hits reside on a lower aesthetic plane, a source of "guilty pleasure".
  In an essay published in Ulrich Beck's Global America?: The Cultural Consequences of Globalization (2004), sociologist Motti Regev says the canonizing of rock music in the 1960s and 1970s among professional critics had created a status structure and orthodoxy that carried over into other developments in popular music through the next century; as examples of this "continuous canonization" he cites Robert Christgau's series of decade-end "Consumer Guide" collections (for the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s) and Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums book.
caption: Robert Christgau, pictured in 2005, became one of the first professional rock and pop critics. He later criticized Rolling Stone for promoting the "boring rock-as-idealism myth".[11]
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