Last week, I bought a new MacBook Air. I haven’t really needed a great or powerful personal computer since I can do most of my digital life on my phone, iPad, and Kobo eReader. And I just watch all my TV and movies on our Google TV (… and I can “sail the high seas” in different ways lol). And during the workday, I only use my work laptop. Over the past year, I’ve been writing with Rebecca’s old 2018 MacBook Pro that’s super slow and laggy with a terrible broken keyboard. But hey — it was a crazy surprise that I accumulated a whole bunch of “Air Miles”/“Blue Rewards” points and it subsidized a huge amount of the price of a new laptop! And oh man, it’s a great experience typing on this new MacBook. Now I have no excuse not to write more!
The new Olivia Rodrigo album has been on repeat for me this past week. It’s such a great record. It’s also raised a lot of thoughts about “poptimism.” So I started writing this piece a week ago, after having a back and forth on one of my group chats. I think there’s a lot more to explore on “poptimism” and I don’t think this piece is exhaustive. But I hope you enjoy a few of my thoughts “On Olivia Rodrigo and ‘Poptimism’”!
Last Friday, Olivia Rodrigo released her new album you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love. The two singles that were released before the album — “drop dead” and “the cure” — have been bangers that had been on repeat for me. The songs showcase Olivia’s growth as a songwriter. “Driver’s License” was a beautiful song and GUTS proved that she wasn’t a fluke. I’ve loved the pop-punk inspiration behind GUTS, having grown up listening to Paramore.
Since then, Olivia has been befriending and playing with her musical heroes and inspirations. After meeting her, Jack White said “She’s very cool, very real and very much a lover of music.” And more recently, Olivia played a medley of White Stripes songs with Feist to induct the band into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. David Byrne joined Olivia at Governors Ball in 2025 to play “Burning Down the House.” He listed Olivia as one of the best American songwriters, covered “drivers license” for the song’s fifth anniversary, and wrote “I discovered that her song resonates (I changed a few words!) and is universal – we all have those feelings and have had that experience…”
But you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love is an incredible third album and her best one yet. The 80s inspired record is full of bangers. Her songwriting has taken a huge leap. She’s no longer just a young girl scorned by love, but someone in her early 20s more mature for her age. She pays homage to her 80s inspirations without ever sounding pastiche. It’s only right that after referencing “Just Like Heaven” and The Cure on her first two singles, she invited her new best friend Robert Smith (from The Cure) to sing on a pivotal track in the record, “What’s Wrong with Me.” The latest single off the album, “stupid song,” has been on repeat on my drives to work.
She’s no longer the vindictive ex-lover. She understands that love won’t make her whole — love won’t save her. She has to find fulfillment elsewhere — not in some boy.
But it don’t matter how your love feels anymore/It’ll never be the cure.
Also, she’s Filipino, so our community is very proud of her! 🇵🇭 🇵🇭 🇵🇭
I knew this album was going to be incredible, but I didn’t expect that Pitchfork — PITCHFORK, of all the publications! — would love the record as much as they did. Pitchfork rewarded you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love with an 8.3 and honoured the album with a Best New Music. It’s well-deserved. Olivia’s new album is certainly a contender for Album of the Year. This feels a lot like Olivia’s E•MO•TION moment, when a pop star’s music evolves in a way that inspires critical publications to write glowing reviews, leading to new audiences discovering their music — much like Carly Rae Jepsen in 2015.
Pitchfork has always been a pretentious website that has favoured rock music and sneered at pop. Throughout its history, especially early on, its reviews have been tinged with misogyny and racism. It once reviewed a Jet album with a 0.0 and wrote no words, only posting a YouTube link to a monkey pissing. Over the years, Pitchfork has changed as they started to hire writers who weren’t just old white men.
The discussion recently about you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love has revived the discourse around “poptimism.” This concept in music criticism arose around 15 years ago, as backlash to the “rockist” philosophy of music sites like Pitchfork. In Such Great Heights: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion, Chris DeVille (Managing Editor at Pitchfork-contemporary Stereogum) writes:
In short, “poptimism” is supposed to mean that all music deserves a fair shake regardless of artist, genre, or how the sausage was made. Under poptimism, there’s no such thing as a guilty pleasure, no need to qualify your enjoyment of a song by appealing to assumed biases about what constitutes real, respectable music. It is poptimism that moves critics to treat blockbuster pop albums as serious works of art worthy of the same deep thought and critical rigor as a new Radiohead LP. Theoretically, the philosophy is not about equating popularity with quality, but just refusing to write off any music based on your presuppositions.
I know it’s cliche to bring things back to Taylor Swift any time we talk about modern-day pop music, but she is a once-in-a-generation rarity whose gravitational pull means she cannot be ignored or dismissed easily. Before 2020, I was what you could call… a hater. Sure I enjoyed a few songs off 1989, but I hated everything Taylor stood for. When folklore and evermore dropped, I was forced to reckon with the idea that she was a more talented songwriter than I gave her credit for — if she was paired with the right collaborators and she could let her walls down so we could see the real her, not just “Taylor Swift: The Brand.” And when Midnights dropped and her superstardom went galactic, I realized she was an historic phenomenon. And as a history major and a music nerd, I began to see her as a historical figure and concept that needed to be studied, contextualized, and analyzed like any other “serious” historical topic.
I’ve since told literally anyone who’ll listen that — like her or not — you have to take her seriously. You have to evaluate her music and songwriting for its merits, not just as gossip about her personal life. You have to take her immense influence on the music industry seriously, such as the way her Eras Tour changed the economics of live music (including shining a light on the monopoly of Ticketmaster) or how she’s championed the revival of vinyl as a music listening format. But, like with any academic subject, you need to apply a critical lens to her music and actions. We need to call out Taylor’s reflection of whiteness or her surface-level feminism. Or, to also think about her influence on vinyl, we need to question why Taylor releases new collector variants every time another female pop star contemporary (rival?) drops new music, undercutting Sabrina Carpenter’s or Billie Eilish’s or Olivia Rodrigo’s album release sales. (Tbh, I really did not enjoy Taylor’s recent works and she’s just gone back to being “Taylor Swift: The Brand” and a symbol of late-stage capitalism.)
Look, I get that was a bit of a long tangent, but what I’m trying to say that — with the release of you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love and the critical acclaim it’s receiving from a wide-range of music publications — “poptimism” is back. And, like with every viral moment, the backlash is swift and the “Hegelian discourse” continues on, as if we can’t just enjoy the moment.
My friend James shared a Substack article a day after you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love dropped that basically read as: “I hate pop music and I hate women making pop music, but no I actually don’t hate pop music and don’t say that I hate pop music. But yeah I hate pop music.” The writer literally quoted George W. Bush’s phrase, “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” And of course, the article sounded more like a critique of Taylor Swift rather than actually engaging with Olivia’s record. The writer clearly hated that music critics were so effusive in their praise of you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love.
Beneath the garbage writing and the seething hatred for “poptimism,” there might be a sliver of a reasonable argument — Has “poptimism” gone too far? Have we lost our capacity to be critical, allowing ourselves to be lulled into a boring cultural consensus on what is “good music”? DeVille opined that perhaps, sometimes, “poptimism” led to a form of “virtue signalling”:
“Thanks to the rise of poptimism- the philosophy that rejected many of the old rock-critic truisms as the product of racist, sexist, and homophobic biases-leaning into sounds traditionally beloved by women, minorities, and queer people became a way not only to push stuffy rock fans’ buttons, but to show off your progressive credentials.”
However, I think the battle against “poptimism” is over and should be laid to rest. I believe that the acceptance of “pop” as a “serious” music genre to be discussed and analyzed has been a good thing for culture. It has opened up the acceptance that people are complex and everyone’s individual music tastes are valid. It is ok to like the music that you like. We shouldn’t be judgmental and sneer at each other’s music tastes. “Poptimism” has forced record labels to invest in wider range of musical artists and sounds and that is a very good thing for art as a whole. But most importantly, it forced our culture to recognize that music made and enjoyed by women, people of colour, queer people, and other people from minority communities should be taken just as seriously as any record made by Wilco or Radiohead or ***insert your favourite white indie band***. (Don’t get me wrong, I love Death Cab and Weezer and the National and the Antlers and ***insert your favourite white indie band*** just as much as I love listening to Olivia Rodrigo or Carly Rae Jepsen.)
DeVille wrote in 2014:
“In the internet era, the idea of a musical guilty pleasure has been rendered irrelevant, rightly dismissed as the product of racism, sexism, and convoluted concepts of authenticity. This is truer than ever in an era when the boundaries between genres are disintegrating before our eyes.”
One of the things I love so much about Olivia is that she’s a music nerd just as much as any of us music nerds. I love Feist and the Talking Heads and she’s hanging out and playing music with them! She’s fangirling over Nardwuar like the rest of us! In a recent interview with Anthony Fantano — the same MELON who’s known for his (perhaps overly) critical reviews and scores — Olivia was geeking out over how Weezer’s Pinkerton “might be one of my favourite albums ever” and how New Order is better than Joy Division (“Age of Consent” was her no.1 song on Spotify Wrapped last year). As the phrase goes: Olivia “knows ball.” Her genuine love for and deep knowledge of music is so lovely and refreshing.
All this to say that I love Olivia’s music. And as a Filipino, I’m so proud of our “kapatid.” For all the criticism about Pitchfork, it is an incredible achievement for you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love to be bestowed the Best New Music honourific. I know this is just the beginning for Olivia and, while she should enjoy this moment, I really can’t wait for what’s to come.