A commenter named Scraps writes:

Where I’m coming from, the Popist thing started because of the perception of a lot of people — I am one — that the music we always loved was dismissed by rock-and-roll snobs — particularly in the criticism of the 1970s — as inherently not worth doing, mostly for no more reason than the way it sounded. Not the content, not the craft, not the passion (though critics often maintained it was about passion), but a simple, nasty, condescending rationalization for a personal preference. And it still looks that way. Contempt for (say) the Fifth Dimension had a lot more to do with Coolness than merit, while eminently criticizable musicians like the Jefferson Airplane were not called to account for their many inadequacies and stupidities; or rather, the Jefferson Airplane would be forgiven their flaws because they were doing the right sort of thing, while the Fifth Dimension’s flaws were proof of the inherent inadequacy of their entire approach, period.

Popism was about recognizing there were a lot of us who felt this way, and that we didn’t have to accept from the cool crowd that our taste was worse — in most cases not because we didn’t like rock, but because we could like pop as well — and talk seriously about the value of what we loved. And the response of a lot of the old-guard rockist crowd has been to impute our motives and reassert the same old standard line of what’s worth doing and what isn’t. I enjoy your analysis and your writing and your cultural observations very much. But it does annoy me that when you talk about the Popist revisionism and the Rockist reactions to it, you repeatedly frame it in terms that implicitly motive-bash. Popism questions the set of assumptions that the rockist critical consensus was built on. The Rockist reaction to this, by and large, is to say that Popism is about apologizing for crass commercialism and shit. It’d be nice, at this late date, to have the big discussions of taste and style without the (even at this articulate level) dismissals and reassertions of inherent authenticity and inherent garbage.

I think if you go way back—waaay back—you can find a few interesting examples of the phenomenon you’re talking about. It’s true, for example, that Rolling Stone writers twitted the first few Led Zeppelin albums. And it sounds, from your Fifth Dimension/Jefferson Airplane recollections, that there are probably some others. But in fairness, those were the early days of the form (of the form of rock criticism, I mean), and I don’t know how long it lasted.

By the 1980s, certainly, if you look at the Village Voice Pazz & Jop Poll, a pop artist like Michael Jackson would win handily, and evanescence by people like Lisa Lisa or Paul Young would dot the singles lists. And speaking as someone who was a critic close to full-time from the mid-1980s to the late 1990s, doing the panels at SXSW blah blah blah, I don’t remember this being a part of the debate. Who didn’t think “Karma Chameleon” was a great single? (And who doesn’t think “Wedding Bell Blues” is one, too?)

And as time went on, it was implicit in the second wave of punk rock in the early 1990s that pop was cool, though I grant there was a species of reverse hipsterism at work as well. There were a few anti-pop fanzine writers, I guess, but even in the underground world there was an implicit approval of a great pop song. (Cf. Ciccone Youth, “Into the Groovey.”) So again, while your Airplane/Fifth Dimension juxstaposition sounds real, in my experience the idea that there was a “set of assumptions,” that there were rockist critics out there dissin’ pop, is a straw man.

And let’s not forget that the rockist term was coined by the popists, dismissively.

Take a step back and the idea that there is a cadre of big bad (probably boy) critics insisting on pondering high art and dissing pop culture is even more far-fetched. Serious criticism has been under attack across the board in much of the mainstream press for some time. I’m not talking about the existence of it—the internet has given many people a platform. But before the internet really started screwing things up for papers, space given to the fine arts was shrinking; resources instead were being focussed toward highly mainstream genres like TV and the most popular films; and critics who dared to say that popular artists sucked came under a lot of negative pressure.

So in daily newspapering and the general interest magazines the tension between the things that get good play (blockbuster movies, for example) and those that get good reviews (what the critics like) has been around for a long time. I’m sure that if you went back and talked to the folks who did the hype-laden Time and Newsweek cover stories on crappy big-budget action movies you wouldn’t get a lot of blather about popism. They knew what their job was.