Odds & Ends 149

plus: a post-poptimist manifesto, down the bottom so you can ignore it

Adam O’Farrill: For These Streets

Trumpeter gathers much of the usual Halvorson crew and adds an oddball (flute! euphonium!) wind palette that I can’t say is really to my taste, yet the playing is strong enough to fulfill his aim of capturing the full urbanity of his grandpa’s prewar Havana—they had concert halls there too, you know (“Swimmers”, “Rose”, “Migration”)

Chuck D Presents Enemy Radio: Radio Armageddon

Chuck’s been a radio DJ since before he was a public enemy of bourgeois grammar, so you can bet he assembles good (left) neoclassical rapping from himself and his teacher’s pets; all that’s missing is a little, what’s it called, flavor (“Black Don’t Dead”, “Here We Are Heard”, “Is God She?”)

Rubén Blades y Roberto Delgado & Orquestra: Fotografías

Not bad for a zombie-killer-turned-singer: better vocals than on Bad Bunny’s throwback album; breezy arrangements that won’t make you miss Willie Colón too much; one about the pain of “Emigrantes”—the kind who cross the Darién on foot, not something you’d do for fjucking fun, Kristi (“Eso Es Amar”, “Emigrantes”, “Señor Botánico”)

The Nightingales: The Awful Truth

Robert Lloyd has a whole new generation of emperors whose superstructurally explicable nudity he can drone on about, and his younger bandmates help make him tuneful with harmonies, active bass, Fliss Kitson’s vocal rejoinders: everything but the wi-fi password (“The New Emperor’s New Clothes”, “Same Old Riff”, “Just Before”)

Nick León: A Tropical Entropy

This Joan Didion-inspired Miami EDM debut attempts to be neither too abstract nor too eager to please, with the main novelty coming from the incorporation of Latin sounds (by which I mean alt-dembow rather than Buena Vista or whatever); still, since this is theoretically dance music, I’d like him to risk being too eager to please (“Bikini”, “Millennium Freak”, “Crush”)

Sheila Jordan with Roni Ben-Hur & Harvie S: Portrait Now

While post-1960 vocal improv isn’t my thing, compared to basically anyone else, I can hear the art in the late Jordan’s choices, made easier by her helpfully recounting how a night at Birdland made her want to sing like Parker played—not a bad way to live a life (“Relaxing at the Camarillo”, “Workshop Blues”)

Witch: Sogolo

Those who appreciate cheeseball rock more than I do (everyone) should enjoy Zambia’s premier ’70s band’s second reunion: the riffs are hard, frontman Jagari Chanda is likable even if I wish the women sang more, and there’s pleasant studio trickery that shows some technological progress over the last half century (“Kamusale”, “Tiponde Madzi”, “Nadi”)

Ninajirachi: I Love My Computer

A 26-year-old’s retromania for 2012 EDM: if you didn’t know Swedish House Mafia had albums, the sonic palette might wear on you over forty minutes, but Ms. Jirachi has a deft touch with a hook, and she does sing good, such that when she says she wants to fuck her computer, she gets across that she’s considered her alternatives (“iPod Touch”, “Infohazard”, “Sing Good”)

Najwa Karam: Halet Tawari’

The title translates to “state of emergency”, but the machines tell me the queen of Lebanese pop’s singing about possessive love, oppressive love, estranged love (and that’s just the lead single), doing a pretty good job trilling over software beats for someone forty years into her career (“Yel3an Elboaad”, “3a Touw2it Albi”)

Rescene: Glow Up mini-album

Stylish second-tier K-pop girl group, tuneful and slight apart from the NewJeansy “In My Lotion”, which somehow is about Proustian involuntary memory triggered by one’s skincare routine—A-pop lyricists, do better (“In My Lotion”, “Crash”, “Glow Up”)

Adrianne Lenker: Live at Revolution Hall

If someone unearthed two hours of intimate acoustic Neil from 1975, where “intimate” means recorded on a tape deck, I’d also enjoy listening to that exactly twice (“Vampire Empire”, “Little Things”, “Time Escaping & Wild Whistling”)

Park Jiha: All Living Things

Lacks the simplicity of 2016’s great Communion, but her knack for a tune remains rare amongst either traditionalist or avant-gardists, and the electronics don’t get in the way; the glockenspiel does a little (“Grounding”, “A Story of Little Birds”)

Down with O.P.P.: Three requests for a post-Poptimism

Arguments about “Poptimism” in 2025 are futile because the prospect of everyone agreeing on a definition is hopeless. Anti-poptimists use the word as a cudgel like they once used “neoliberalism”: so ahistorically one wonders if they’re more interested in arguing on the Internet than in music criticism. Meanwhile here’s what Carl Wilson said in an article understandably praised by poptimist sympathizers:

I’ve always favored a minimalist definition: Poptimism posited that all kinds of music have the potential to be rewarding and are worthy of serious critical attention, including the music on the pop charts.

But setting aside edge cases of “kinds of music” (like “Charlie Kirk tribute songs”), this is trivially true. It’s a won argument: every music publication with any aspiration towards generalism would agree, and if Saving Country Music might not, nobody has to read Saving Country Music.

That the modern use of “poptimism” came not from a manifesto but from Mark Fisher being sarcastic towards the ILX message board means it’s been ill-defined since the beginning. In particular three things that are only moderately related—pop the genre(s), popularity, and populism—have always been conflated to whatever extent serves the author’s argument at the time. Rather than argue about Other People’s Poptimism (or worse, posit my own definition), let me attempt to be constructive by untangling some strands of arguments made by poptimists and their associates. I’ll make three claims that are contestable yet that get to the heart of what as an ABBA-skeptic (still, sorry) I’ve found valuable in “poptimism” for more than twenty years.

1. We should apply multiple avenues of analysis to pop, and by “we” I mean Pitchfork

Pitchfork (or Stereogum or whichever indie publication peer you respect more) has always been auteurist, where the auteur might be, say, the producer. Sometimes that’s fine—every other way of talking about 2020s Taylor is worse—but this approach is limited when musical inspiration is the product of workshop craft or collective hysteria or some weird fluke. So the ’Fork struggles with K-pop (and R&B, and let’s not even get started on country-pop) unless a good writer with a good angle pitches them and doesn’t request too high a score—my reaction to them ignoring KPop Demon Hunters shouldn’t be “thank Hwanin they didn’t review KPop Demon Hunters”. Lots of formalist and sociological avenues for writing about pop are pursued occasionally in this newsletter and more consistently in The Singles Jukebox and fan spaces and who knows how many group discussions. You know the brand-name publications should be doing better when you need to go to Reddit to find words describing what a K-pop mini actually sounds like.

2. There are many kinds of popularity; music critics should pay consistent attention to more of them

The Hot 100 is increasingly limited as a measure of overall popularity (Billboard: hey, did you know that after two years, many people are still listening to “Lost Control”? If not, we’ll tell you again next week!) Part of this is outdated methodology, but part is because “overall popularity” on a weekly scale is increasingly limited as a concept: TikTok virality doesn’t imply Spotify streams or radio play, and even if you get all of these, they’re unlikely to peak at the same time. More importantly, we now have real-time measures of popularity from more places around the world than ever. You don’t need fancy data analysis to notice that “Saiyaara” and the Jazzwrld/Thukuthela chart run are historic in their markets—aren’t you a bit curious as to what these things are? And of course the answer is overwhelmingly “no”, at least in America, but the tiny proportion who say yes (which includes, I hope, most of the people who’ve scrolled down this far) adds up to a respectable number for a music publication. This potential audience can be cultivated, but to do so requires more than ad hoc Substacking and the occasional Bluesky poll.

3. Populism in music is (usually) good, and currently we should encourage it

Dave Moore asked Christgau about his 2024 year-end claim of a dearth of “catchy songs with good beats”, and Xgau responded it was mostly a dig at Pitchfork “tending toward a less songful and more abstract aesthetic than I prefer”. While it’s not hard to guess where my preferences lie, I think the issue goes well beyond Pitchfork. For 2020s vocal music outside of chart-pop and Kendrick calling Drake names, the standard preference of American music criticism—and to a large extent, of American musicians—has been for some degree of obfuscation. For a time this was realized through the championing of mushrock, but even as we emerge from that long national nightmare, the music that gets the most consistently positive reviews is the stuff that avoids big singalong choruses that deign to make apparent the meaning of each song. The best recent counterexample might be Wednesday, but I’m convinced that if everything on Bleeds was as legible and fun to sing as “Elderberry Wine” you’d knock ten points off the Metascore. (“They don’t reinvent themselves for further mass appeal”, applauds Paste.) This comes from the notion, left over from rockism, that difficulty is inherently good. What made many of us sympathetic towards poptimism in the first place was that ever since Louis Armstrong dropped his sheet music to inform us of his heebie jeebies, much of the greatest recorded music has come from artists trying to bring their vision to as wide an audience as possible. Since this newsletter has “Semipop” in the title, you shouldn’t take this to mean that music that has an inherent barrier to entry can’t be great—I doubt you’d get much out of The Ancients unless you’re steeped in the free jazz tradition. And I don’t deny there exist spaces that exclude anything with a modicum of difficulty (not that I expect criticism from gossip blogs), and if Pitchfork genuinely starts to resemble those spaces then we’re all in trouble. But I think right now formal populism deserves more appreciation, including from me, and is worth fighting for, not least as a reminder that positive-sum forms of populism do exist. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to sing along to Tyler Childers’s koala STD song.