The good thing about this kind of Taste, if you really believe in it, is that it is surprisingly democratic. If you read the right things, and talk to the right people, they can tell you exactly what Taste is. Then you just go out and buy some. The bad thing about it is that it is intentionally calculated to elude most people, no matter how hard they work: The right people only talk to each other, the right reading only shows up in college or grad school and sometimes not even then, all of it seems cut to flatter white men’s egos and no-one else’s, and everything you’re supposed to love is always exactly difficult enough or expensive enough or rare enough or well-hidden enough that you’ll never get your greasy paws on it, you fucking peasant, you.

Meanwhile, populist critics have adopted the idea of taste as natural and inherent. Basically, they argue for nature over nurture: They write about their love of (most often) pop music as if it’s a physical thing, a repressed desire that has always existed somewhere, waiting to be set free. This also frames pop culture itself as something forbidden and shameful that needs to be de-stigmatized. People don’t get into pop; they admit to it. I have almost never read anyone who is learning about pop, or trying to understand pop. (Carl Wilson’s Journey to the End of Taste might be the big exception, but even that comes down to a sort of epiphanic moment, a memory of listening to love songs with his ex-girlfriend and realizing that things could be simple and true and good.) What I read them doing is re-connecting. Or re-discovering. Or they reclaim, or own, or embrace. They validate their own “guilty pleasures,” they re-experience the innocent joy of dancing around in their bedrooms as children, they repudiate the shaming of an anti-pop social circle to proclaim their truths.

In the old model, Taste is transcendent, like God, existing outside the material universe. In the new one, it is immanent, a wellspring that is only found within. Taste is always already there. It’s only the listener who changes.

Sady Doyle took the time to open the Twitter cage and let her complaints about “poptimism” out to breathe in essay form, and the result is impressive (hint, hint).

I would love to see Sady and Freddie de Boer together on a poptimism feature some time. They’re the two most vocal, best critics of the tendency I’ve ever come across, but the specific things they find fault with in it - and the way this focus varies between them - map so perfectly to the broader differences in style and worldview that have had them at each others’ throats before that I think the tension could be fascinating.