“Rock Music,” Anti-Poptimism, and Neoreactionary Masculine Resilience

May 7, 2026 Jacobin published a piece titled “Liberal Poptimists Tried to Kill Rock. They Failed” and “pop girlie” Charli XCX announced a new album and single titled “Rock Music.” Charli’s song takes the mocumentary tone of her recent A24 film THE MOMENT and applies it to an updated version of the Max Martin/Kelly Clarkson pop-rock sound of the aughts. With some literal and figurative winks throughout the track, “Rock Music” feels like the British club kid version of Shop Boyz’ 2007 “Party Like A Rockstar,” a crunk-adjacent rap track that makes fun of the white rock culture of the peak Linkin Park era. Lyrically and conceptually, there’s also a sly echo of a guy in a dance-punk band who joked about someone selling their turntables and buying guitars. On “Rock Music,” Charli notably continues to use the same sort of autotuned vocals that defined her sound on her club-oriented album brat; this puts her right in line with the latest Strokes record “Going Shopping,” which processes frontman Julian Casablancas’s vocals in exactly the same way.

“Rock Music” folds rock, pop, and club music together in a way that post-punk has done for 50 years. Mimi Haddon’s book What Is Post-Punk? argues that that the thing that sets post-punk apart from other rock scenes or styles is not its temporality or “post-”ness, but its incorporation of “alternative” styles of Black music — disco and reggae — rather than the blues. Acts like Gang of Four or The Slits are clear examples of this. Before Nevermind’s crossover success promulgated the mistaken view that modern rock/alt rock was mainly guitar-driven music, acts like The B-52s and The Pet Shop Boys routinely had crossover pop hits on both the US and UK charts. Not only are the lines between rock, pop, and club music historically much blurrier than they are presented in the Jacobin article, in the 2020s the main vehicles for rock’s return to the mainstream are two arena-pop megastars: Charli and Olivia Rodrigo, who has collaborated with modern rock icons from David Byrne to Robert Smith and had The Breeders open for her on her 2023 tour (The Breeders also opened for Nirvana on the In Utero tour). Rock has been alive and well in the music of women of color pop stars (Charli is half South Asian Ugandan, Rodrigo is Filipino) for a good part of the 2020s, and before that, the one place that rock thrived amid lamentations of its death was a similarly feminized pop space: emo. Nobody ever remembers that emo was huge, because it was huge largely among teen girls, and nobody ever thinks them or their tastes count. Speaking of girls, scholars like Dan DiPiero and Alyx Vesey have shown that across the 2010s indie rock in particular has been alive and well, but became associated with women artists and listeners.

Rock’s feminization is directly tied to its current market renaissance. The traditional rock/pop hierarchy that poptimism criticizes is a variation on the gendered fine art/craft distinction that goes back to Kant: “fine art” is masculine and “free,” “craft” is feminized and subordinate to social reproduction and, later, commodification. From the late 19th through most of the 20th centuries, pop/craft was devalued as a feminized commodity, whereas rock/fine art was authentic and autonomous. But in the 2020s even commercial music isn’t really a commodity. For example, Spotify no longer pays royalties on songs that have fewer than 1000 streams a month, effectively de-monetizing and de-commodifiying musical labor. The money in today’s music industry is in the licensing of IP assets; music is a leading edge of what Lisa Adkins, Melinda Cooper, and Martijn Koenings call “the asset economy,” where “asset appreciation has been engendered by a specific institutional nexus that has fundamentally redrawn the social structure–such that asset ownership is no becoming more important than employment as a determinant of class position” (6). Commodities and commodified labor don’t scale in value the way an asset can: my house made more in a year just by sitting around and being property than I did working my first year as an assistant professor. And the most scalable assets are the ones that start low…such as femininity or, in the 2010s, rock music. As I wrote in the summer 2024 issue of The Journal of Popular Music Studies,

Given its trajectory over the 2010s, indie rock’s market position in 2023 is roughly analogous to that of popular feminism’s ideal subject: a traditionally devalued resource capable, with the exercise of sufficient private responsibility, of resilient profitability. Though neoliberal cultural and economic reforms killed the original formulation of punk/post-punk/modern rock/indie as a scene that offered an alternative to the corporate mainstream, from the vantage of 2023 this looks less like a death blow and more like the first move in a cycle of creative destruction.

In the 2020s, the low cultural capital rock music has earned across the past quarter-century perfectly positions it for flipping. And it’s being flipped by people like Charli XCX and Olivia Rodrigo because, as I argued in my 2015 book Resilience & Melancholy, neoliberal resilience is definitively feminine. The asset economy scrambles the traditional gendering of the rock/pop binary such that “rock” gets coded feminine because it too is a devalued asset ripe for flipping into a hugely scalable return. 

As I have shown above with my gestures toward emo and the scholarly literature on the feminization of indie rock, rock’s 21st century devaluation coincided with its association with women and girls; rock didn’t go away so much as its narrative ceased to fit the traditional gendered rock:masculine/pop:feminine narrative that we inherited from the 20th century. The music industry slowly caught up to this when in June 2020 Billboard split the Alternative Songs chart, which from its start in 1989 until then was a radio-only chart, into two: there’s “Alternative Airplay,” which tracks radio, and “Hot Alternative,” which tracks everything else including streaming. Since the passage of the Telecommunications Act in 1996, alternative rock radio has been intentionally programmed to appeal to white men, and the airplay charts continue to reflect this. But streaming tells a different story more like the one told by scholars like DiPiero and Vesey: rock’s audiences and artists are far more diverse than the old stereotypes suggest. The idea that rock, especially the sort of alternative/indie rock that Ervin gestures to throughout his article, is and has been the domain of white men with guitars is a mistake rooted in Alternative Airplay’s narrow format, which is a legacy of the grunge crossover and the Telecom Act.

And yet, Ervin’s article continually frames “rock” as the post-grunge-influenced guitar music made by and for white men. For example, he says:

• “People are excitedly rediscovering classic rock again, and kids are joking online about the triumphant return of what they’re calling “white boy garage music.” Even butt rock and nu metal are apparently cool again.”
• “Negative sentiment was fueled by artists like Imagine Dragons — who led Billboard’s top rock artists chart in 2017 and 2018 — as well as the popularity of easily hateable über-nostalgic acts like Greta Van Fleet and Mumford & Sons.”

Butt rock, nu metal, Imagine Dragons, Greta Van Fleet, and Mumford & Sons – this is all the bread and butter of Alternative Airplay, and it’s all white guys with guitars doing more or less post-grunge. Later on, in his discussion of the recent list of top songwriters, Ervin singles out “white male rock artists associated with indie or alternative rock, like Julian Casablancas, Will Oldham, Stephen Malkmus, David Byrne, Jack White, Michael Stipe, Jeff Mangum, Conor Oberst, James Murphy, or Jeff Tweedy.” As the article proceeds, it seems that the issue is less about the status of rock and more about the status of white men and rock’s role as a synechdoche for that.

The article’s middle section about the purported evils of poptimism buries its lede: much like so-called DEI and affirmative action, the real issue with poptimism seems to be that it makes white men feel bad about themselves. As Ervin puts it, “There was something telling about commentary like this from the often white men who seemed most anxious about their white maleness….Poptimism’s vibes are very much those of “White Dudes for Harris.”” Eliding work from women and femme journalists and scholars like Susan Cook, Norma Coates, Ann Powers, Elizabeth Keenan-Penagos, and myself, (which I know Ervin knows, or at least knows of), the article presents poptimism as a view purportedly self-hating white men hold. According to this article, the problem with poptimism is that it knocks rock and the white men to which it belongs from their traditional position at the top of philosophical modernity and the music industry’s status hierarchy.

Doubling down on the idea that rock and pop are clearly distinguishable and that the former is masculine while the latter is feminine at a time when the 20th century’s gender and genre relations have been scrambled by things like the asset economy and neoliberalism, Ervin’s article seeks to restore rock, and, by implication, white men, to the status they traditionally occupied in Fordist capitalism (e.g., the era of the family wage). Like a lot of contemporary American alt-right masculinities, Ervin’s article uses anti-feminism, here in the form of anti-poptimism, to create a spectacle of grievance that drives likes, clicks, and other forms of engagement, thus restoring masculinity to high status, but in the terms of platforms and the attention economy. This spectacle of grievance is the masculine, reactionary counterpart to the neoliberal feminine resilience exhibited by femme pop stars like Rodrigo, and like rock itself in the platform era. You can read more about alt rock and neoreactionary masculine grievance in the forthcoming second edition of Resilience & Melancholy.