I miss the news for a couple of days and when I return, Merrittgate is heating up the Internet. I don’t really feel like wading into the grand issue of whether rockism = racism, but will point out that Jody Rosen seems to have a sensible reaction to the new “poptimism.”
[U]ltimately, the Blender list seemed to embody the pitfalls of the anti-rockist backlash: poptimism as a glib exercise in pseudo-populism and in tweaking the boomers instead of a real effort to engage history and figure out what makes good music and why….
To me the frustrating thing about this is seeing not only my beloved rock maligned but seeing my entire generation eclipsed in this battle between Boomers and Gen Y. Not only has out time passed, but we don’t even register in the defining cultural battles of the day, even though anti-rockist sentiment seems as much a reaction against Gen X alternaculture as it does against Boomer culture. I’ll remember the cultural shock I felt going to grad school, from South to North, public university to private, and seeing how you only heard rock music at nerdy grad student parties, never undergraduate ones, which were dominated by house, pop and hiphop. And that was at a time when rock, American and British, were in a vibrant period.
So I’ll have to console myself with the aging hipster ethos of Magnet magazine, or with Details, which lately seems to be the only cultural product in the world addressing thirtysomething gay men. That, and Stephin Merritt songs.
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