In 2021, Rolling Stone published a revised edition of its 500 Greatest Songs of All Time list. Tucked in at number 240, between Jerry Lee Lewis and the Beatles, sat a song that two decades earlier would have been critical heresy: “I Want It That Way” by the Backstreet Boys.
Think about that for a moment. The same publication that once positioned itself as rock’s intellectual vanguard had canonized a Swedish-produced teen pop confection whose lyrics were famously nonsensical, written by songwriters who admitted “the lyric doesn’t really mean anything”. A song dismissed in its era as manufactured product for screaming tweens now shared shelf space with “Purple Haze” and “Eleanor Rigby.”
Something seismic had shifted in music criticism. The old guards had fallen. The gates had been stormed. And the kids—those dismissed, ridiculed fans who’d screamed for boy bands at TRL tapings—had won.
But the revolution didn’t happen overnight, and it didn’t happen cleanly. Between 1999 and 2021, music criticism underwent a slow-motion civil war, fought in the pages of alt-weeklies and the comment sections of Pitchfork, argued over at conferences and whispered about in record label offices. Critics call it the rise of poptimism. History might remember it as the moment we finally stopped lying about what we loved.
The Old Guard
For decades, rock criticism operated with a rigid hierarchy as immovable as church doctrine. At the top: “serious” music. Guitar-driven. Album-oriented. Preferably melancholic, definitely authentic. Rock, folk, punk, indie—music made by people who looked like they’d never smiled for a camera, played on instruments you could theoretically learn in your garage.
Rockism, as critic Kelefa Sanneh would later define it, meant “idolizing the authentic old legend (or underground hero) while mocking the latest pop star; lionizing punk while barely tolerating disco; loving the live show and hating the music video; extolling the growling performer while hating the lip-syncher”. It was critical taste as moral instruction: real music required suffering, required a guitar plugged into an amp at a dive bar at 2 AM, required the appearance of having never calculated anything.
Pop music—especially the kind marketed to teenage girls—occupied the critical underworld. It was frivolous. Manufactured. Disposable. A guilty pleasure at best, cultural pollution at worst. Critics who admitted to liking it qualified their enjoyment with apologetic distance, as if they’d been caught enjoying McDonald’s when they should’ve been at the farmer’s market.
The hierarchy wasn’t just about sound. It was about who made it and who loved it. As Sanneh later observed, “rockist complaints often pit straight white men against the rest of the world”. When young women shrieked for New Kids on the Block, it was hysteria. When young men moshed to Nirvana, it was authentic expression. When Black producers crafted immaculate R&B, it was “urban.” When white guys played guitars badly in basements, it was art.
The pattern was everywhere if you looked. The Backstreet Boys’ 1999 album Millennium sold 1.1 million copies in its first week and topped year-end charts, yet Robert Christgau gave it a mediocre review. *NSYNC, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera—they racked up sales numbers that dwarfed indie darlings, yet inhabited a critical purgatory where commercial success became evidence of inauthenticity rather than cultural impact.
Yet even within this regime, cracks appeared. When Madonna released Like a Prayer in 1989, Rolling Stone declared it “as close to art as pop music gets… proof not only that Madonna should be taken seriously as an artist but that hers is one of the most compelling voices of the Eighties”. The phrasing itself betrayed the problem: pop music could only get close to art, as if it were a different species altogether, striving toward but never quite reaching the real thing. Madonna had to confess trauma, had to bleed autobiography, had to prove depth before critics would grant her legitimacy. The assumption: pop required justification. Rock did not.
The Breaking Point
October 31, 2004. Halloween. The perfect day for Kelefa Sanneh to publish “The Rap Against Rockism” in the New York Times, a manifesto that functioned less like critical theory and more like an exorcism.
The essay arrived in the wake of Ashlee Simpson’s disastrous Saturday Night Live performance, where a backing track malfunction exposed her lip-syncing and triggered a rockist feeding frenzy. Critics used it as proof of everything wrong with modern pop: the fakery, the hollowness, the industrial production of music as commodity. Sanneh refused the narrative.
Instead, he named the disease. He identified rockism not as critical discernment but as ideology, a set of assumptions masquerading as self-evident truth. He pointed out rockers were notoriously lip-synchers on TV variety programming. He asked readers to “stop pretending that serious rock songs will last forever, as if anything could, and that shiny pop songs are inherently disposable, as if that were necessarily a bad thing”. Then he delivered the kill shot: “Van Morrison’s ‘Into the Music’ was released the same year as the Sugarhill Gang’s ‘Rapper’s Delight’; which do you hear more often?”
The essay didn’t invent poptimism—the term was already circulating in British music criticism circles—but it gave it a manifesto, a founding text, a line in the sand. More importantly, it gave permission. Critics who’d been secretly loving Ciara and Lloyd Banks while publicly championing underground indie bands could finally admit it. The closet door swung open.
Years later, Sanneh reflected that he’d embraced pop music “with the zeal of a convert”, which captures something essential about poptimism’s early days: the fervor of the newly converted, the need to evangelize, the sense that decades of injustice required aggressive correction. The essay became a rallying cry, frequently cited, endlessly debated. It told critics they weren’t crazy to love that new Beyoncé single. It suggested that maybe—just maybe—the kids screaming at TRL knew something the bearded guys at record stores didn’t.
The Shift
The Swedish Revelation
While critics were theorizing, something extraordinary had been happening behind the scenes. Swedish producers had been quietly revolutionizing pop music for decades, operating with an almost scientific precision that rockist critics had missed entirely because they’d been too busy dismissing the results as “manufactured.”
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At the center of it all: Max Martin, who rose to prominence writing hits like Britney Spears’ “…Baby One More Time” and the Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way,” eventually accumulating 28 Billboard Hot 100 number-one singles written or co-written—a staggering achievement that positioned him second only to Paul McCartney and John Lennon.
Martin emerged from Cheiron Studios in Stockholm, founded by remix pioneer Denniz PoP, who’d built a hit factory that bridged club culture and radio pop with an approach that prioritized dance-floor effectiveness and unforgettable melodies. The Cheiron method was rigorous, almost mathematical. Martin became associated with “melodic math,” with journalists describing Swedish pop music as “particle physics—every song an equation”.
This precision—once dismissed as evidence of soullessness—revealed itself as craft. Making a perfect three-minute pop song required more skill, not less. It required understanding song structure, melodic contour, harmonic movement, arrangement, production. It required sitting “day and night” in studios, as Martin recalled, “trying to learn what the hell was going on”. The idea that authenticity meant spontaneity and production meant fakery collapsed under scrutiny. Maybe the most authentic thing was making something that connected with millions.
As poptimism gained traction, critics began reassessing these Swedish masterminds. Max Martin wasn’t a Svengali manipulating puppets; he was a composer, a producer, an auteur. The realization rippled outward: if we took Quincy Jones seriously for producing Michael Jackson, why not Martin for producing everyone from Britney to The Weeknd?
“Call Me Maybe” (2012)
Then came Carly Rae Jepsen, and everything crystallized.
“Call Me Maybe” exploded into monoculture status in 2012, propelled partly by Justin Bieber’s December 2011 tweet praising it as “possibly the catchiest song I’ve ever heard”. The song became inescapable in a way that feels almost quaint now, pre-streaming atomization. Cookie Monster parodied it on Sesame Street. It topped the Village Voice Pazz and Jop poll. It received two Grammy nominations.
But something stranger happened: critics loved it without apology. No one hedged. No one called it a guilty pleasure. The song’s candy-sweet earnestness, its total lack of ironic distance, its shameless hook—all the things that would’ve marked it as critically suspect in 1999—became virtues. Even rockists couldn’t resist. The song was too perfectly constructed, too joyously itself.
Jepsen had given poptimism its first uncomplicated victory. You couldn’t defend “Call Me Maybe” by arguing it was secretly arty or subversive. It was just an immaculate pop song, and that was enough.
The “TiK ToK” Parallel
Before “Call Me Maybe” became poptimism’s uncomplicated victory, another song had tested similar waters. Kesha’s “TiK ToK” arrived in 2009, peak recession, and spent nine weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100. Critics initially dismissed it as trashy party music—Auto-Tuned valley-girl chirping over a video-game beat, lyrics about brushing teeth with Jack Daniel’s. The rockist verdict was swift: disposable, manufactured, everything wrong with modern pop.
But something strange happened. The song moved 25 million copies in North America alone, became a cultural touchstone that captured “the fast-paced and irreverent essence of internet culture,” and refused to go away. Years later, even Kesha herself articulated what critics had missed: “I tapped into a part of people’s brains that they needed,” she reflected. “It was a recession, I was giving them unadulterated joy and silliness and goofiness and ‘F—k it, we’re having fun, I don’t care what anybody thinks.'”
The poptimist reappraisal came slowly, but it came. Critics began recognizing that dismissing what millions of young people—especially young women—found meaningful said more about the critics than the music. “TiK ToK” wasn’t profound. It didn’t need to be. Its lack of pretension was the point, its unabashed fun a form of resistance. By the time “Call Me Maybe” arrived three years later, the ground had shifted just enough for critics to say it out loud: maybe we’d been wrong all along.
Emotion (2015): The Turning Point
If “Call Me Maybe” was poptimism’s breakthrough, Emotion was its PhD thesis.
Released in 2015, the album arrived at “a time when poptimism was in its early stages”, and Jepsen’s team had specifically positioned it toward critics rather than pure mainstream success. The album received widespread critical acclaim despite commercial underperformance, an inversion of the old rockist equation where sales success undermined artistic credibility.
What happened next rewrote pop’s critical geography. Pitchfork—the indie rock tastemaker that had largely ignored Jepsen—started covering her extensively. The album found its audience not among “Call Me Maybe” fans but among indie listeners, music critics, and queer communities who recognized something special: as one critic wrote, “Few artists have taken a logarithmic hit like ‘Call Me Maybe’ as a sign to push even further, to make something better, more human, and more electric”.
The coup de grâce: In 2016, Carly Rae Jepsen played the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago. The indie kids’ Mecca. She performed “Run Away With Me,” “Your Type,” “I Didn’t Just Come Here To Dance.” The crowd sang every word. The revolution was complete. Poptimism had conquered even Pitchfork.
Emotion became poptimism’s great proof of concept: a pop album that sounded like pop, made no concessions to rockist aesthetics, and still achieved critical consensus as one of the decade’s finest records. The album spawned “Cut to the Feeling,” which Jepsen now closes her shows with—a pop castoff that became more beloved than most indie bands’ entire catalogs.
As one critic observed, Jepsen had effectively become a “niche legend”, existing in that strange post-monoculture space where you could be critically adored, have a devoted fanbase, and still not interact with the mainstream at all. It was the future of pop stardom, and it looked nothing like 1999.
The Overcorrection
But every revolution eventually devours its children.
By the mid-2010s, something was shifting. Poptimism had won the critical wars, but victory brought its own pathologies. The discourse that began as liberation—you’re not crazy to love this pop song—curdled into orthodoxy. Everything was a bop. Everything slapped. Critical evaluation flattened into enthusiastic cheerleading.
Even Sanneh, poptimism’s architect, began expressing weariness: “If you had told me that I’d get sick of people name-checking Aaliyah, that would have been hard to imagine”. The observation cut deep. When appreciation becomes compulsory, when every pop release must be defended as Important and Valid, criticism dies. You can’t have critical discourse if you’ve already decided all pop is good, just as you couldn’t have it when you’d decided all pop was bad.
Music journalist Lindsay Zoladz observed that poptimism’s “eclectic open-mindedness” was threatening “to become the new rockism”—a different regime, equally restrictive, equally predictable. Saying you didn’t like a major pop album risked accusations of elitism, of being stuck in rockist thinking, of not getting it. The discourse had become as rigid as what it replaced.
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The language itself revealed the problem. “Bop” and “slaps” migrated from genuine enthusiasm to marketing copy. Brands started talking about products that “slap.” PR teams described their clients’ new singles as “bops.” The vocabulary of liberation became the vocabulary of commerce, which is always what happens when revolution succeeds. The victors build new institutions, and institutions calcify.
Critics found themselves trapped in a strange bind: poptimism had taught them to take pop seriously, but taking something seriously means being willing to call it bad. Yet doing so felt like betraying the mission, like giving ammunition to rockist holdouts. The result was a critical landscape where nearly every major pop release received favorable reviews, where distinctions between great and merely competent pop blurred, where saying Katy Perry’s latest album was mediocre felt somehow transgressive.
Today
The Current Landscape
We are, as one critic recently declared, past “the high days of poptimism”. The discourse has evolved again, fractured, multiplied. The 2025 pop landscape bears little resemblance to either 2004’s rockist consensus or 2015’s poptimist revolution.
The scoreboard tells its own story: Mariah Carey breathes down the Beatles’ necks for most #1 singles of all time, while Taylor Swift shatters records no one imagined would fall just three years ago. Pop artists don’t just compete with rock legends anymore—they’ve eclipsed them. The hierarchy rockism enforced for decades has inverted entirely, and the numbers don’t lie.
Consider the current generation: Olivia Rodrigo, Charli XCX, Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan, Billie Eilish—all “savvy young women, versed in the contours of internet discourse, plugged into specifically Zoomer kinds of nostalgia, well-trafficked in internet ‘aesthetic’ curation”. They’re post-poptimist pop stars, operating in a landscape where the old battles feel almost quaint.
Charli XCX’s Brat defined summer 2024, becoming both a critical and commercial success that suggested “a certain raising of the pop bar”. The lime-green aesthetic flooded Instagram. The album’s confessional honesty—particularly the “Girl, so confusing” remix with Lorde, which literally aired out past conflicts between the two artists—felt like a new model: pop as autobiography, pop as messy vulnerability, pop as conversation.
Meanwhile, Olivia Rodrigo gets New Yorker think pieces. Her music dissected for its references to ’90s alternative, her lyrics analyzed for their emotional intelligence, her success treated not as guilty pleasure but as cultural event. Taylor Swift dominates with an iron grip that transcends poptimism entirely—she’s simply too big, too successful, too omnipresent to fit into critical frameworks designed for underdogs.
Yet tensions remain. When Katy Perry released her 2024 album 143, critics savaged it as “mediocre pop” with “the misfortune to be scheduled in the wake of Charli xcx’s brat, Chappell Roan’s The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess and Sabrina Carpenter’s Short N’ Sweet”—a dismissal that suggested critics had regained their ability to say something was bad, that the poptimist paralysis had finally broken.
What Was Won and Lost
The gains are undeniable. Careers that would’ve been dismissed in the rockist era flourish. Carly Rae Jepsen tours consistently, releases albums to critical acclaim, exists in that beautiful middle ground where artistic autonomy and cult fandom intersect. Pop songwriters like Max Martin and his disciples receive the recognition they deserve. Fans no longer have to apologize for loving pop, which means teenage girls no longer have to justify their taste to sneering record store clerks and college radio djs.
The losses are subtler but real. Critical rigor became suspect. The ability to say “this isn’t very good” without being accused of snobbery or worse atrophied. The flattening of all pop into one undifferentiated “good” robbed us of the vocabulary to articulate why Emotion is brilliant and why some other highly-produced pop album falls flat.
And perhaps most significantly: poptimism solved rockism by inverting the hierarchy rather than dismantling it. It said pop deserves respect, but it still operated within a framework where some music is “serious” and some isn’t, where authenticity matters, where artistic intent can be decoded from aesthetic choices. The new regime was more inclusive, but it was still a regime.
Full Circle
“I Want It That Way” sits at number 240 on Rolling Stone’s list. The song doesn’t need the validation, never did. Twenty-five years after its release, its music video passed one billion views on YouTube, joining a tiny club of ’90s videos to achieve that milestone. People still play it at karaoke. It still fills dance floors. The song succeeded not because critics eventually admitted it was good, but because it was always good, and millions of people knew it before any critic picked up a pen.
Maybe that’s the real lesson of the poptimism wars. Not that critics were wrong—though they were—but that the entire framework was broken. The idea that music exists on a hierarchy, that some genres are inherently more worthy than others, that authenticity matters more than impact. The kids screaming for the Backstreet Boys in 1999 didn’t need critical permission to love what they loved. They just needed to wait for the critics to catch up.
We’re post-poptimist now, in a fragmented landscape where monoculture is dead and everyone curates their own taste from infinite options. The old battles feel distant, quaint, like arguments about how many angels can dance on a pin. Yet they mattered. They changed what was possible, who got heard, whose taste counted.
The revolution succeeded. The gates fell. The kids won.
And somewhere, Max Martin is in a Stockholm studio, crafting another perfect three-minute pop song that will dominate the charts while critics scramble to explain why it matters. Or maybe—finally—they’ll just let themselves love it without explanation.
That would be the real victory.
