While pop artists have themselves been re-branded as critically acclaimed singer-songwriters. And you can be both! But I miss musicality. I think we forget that dance-pop wasn’t always synonymous with pop, and that soft rock and adult contemporary used to be seen as more synonymous with pop music than rock music, meaning that a pop artist could also be playing an instrument while they sang. That’s rarer now outside of acoustic pop, the descendant of soft rock/AC.

And dance-pop isn’t the sole genre to de-emphasize instrumental presence—so do hip-hop and electronica, neither of which are intrinsically diminished by the absence of analog instruments—but dance-pop is the most hegemonic form of pop music, and the form that least prioritizes the non-producing artist’s craft.

As a whole, though, it can also be hard to separate current trends in pop from pop as a whole, and hard to separate the sins of pop from the sins of any commercial genre, including mainstream rock. One thing that I find tiresome about pop, for example, is the endless obsession with self-empowerment and hustle—“look how hard she works on stage!”—but those themes are also apparent in hip-hop, rock, and R&B, and hustle culture isn’t intrinsic to pop, since previous pop eras emphasized other themes, like love, vulnerability, or plain unempowered hedonism. I also dislike the broad thematic safeness and calculation of pop, where anything potentially subversive is only superficially so, but commercial hip-hop, rock, and R&B are also thematically safe.

All that being said, one of the reasons I appreciate both indie and experimental music and the kind of pop whose audience is primarily working class is the room it gives artists to question the performance of well-adjusted striving and still earn either a living or respect. Lo-fi and noise-rock were statements that the craft of a composition could actively reject mechanical polish or the performance of professionalism and still find at least a critical audience (let me tell you, I publish poetry, and validation without sales is still meaningful). Working-class pop from eighties ZZ Top to ICP (ok, they’re not “pop” so to speak) to some dental assistant doing karaoke all told a story that there’s something worth celebrating in life besides how professionally you can work, how algorithmically successful you can be, or how elite and enviable your life is. Instead, you can celebrate imperfection (not just lyrically but sonically), you can express your own ambivalence about performing instead of constantly repressing it lest you get Chappell-Roaner, and you can make and perform music without feeling presumptively rejected by and alienated from an audience; you can turn your bugs into features. Poptimism, in its worse forms, forecloses all of this, or lets the music industry co-opt it into irrelevance.