a fight for the soul of poptimism...

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

...has broken out on this thread. Since I am now using 'poptimist' with scare quotes, it may be possible that I am about to publicly 'break' with 'the' 'movement'. :-)

Comments

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

But none of those stereotypes are new! Plenty of popstars, AND their material, have been shown to be any to all of those things ever since the form began. And it's not limited to pop music either.

[dickmalone.livejournal.com]

But Paris wasn't a popstar before this--she was doing all these things as an actual human being without any legitimating entertainment-industry activities to justify all this. This is what people have such a hard time with, and it's a stance riddled with contradictions, but at the same time I think that's why you can't pretend this is Just Another Pop Album. If you're making music, there's something separate from the persona to enjoy, however flimsy, whereas with Paris prior to this, there was only the persona. And that's why I think it's pretty understandable for people to take the album as an extension of the persona and judge it based on that.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Well she wasn't a popstar but she was a TV star, or an entertainment star, or a nebulous brand star, this is surely a common enough phenomenon that it doesn't get people's backs up?

In any case I think there's a bit too much conflating of the person and the persona going on, a few too many assumptions that Simple Life Paris = real Paris. Curiously Paris seems to have a reasonably good grip of this:

Hilton says the baby voice she uses on the reality TV show "The Simple Life" is an act.

"I'm always playing a character," she says. "I don't talk like this really -- like a baby. I don't act like myself in public, because I don't really want to show everyone the real me. Because I have no privacy whatsoever, the only thing I have is who I really am." (http://www.cnn.com/2006/SHOWBIZ/Music/08/21/people.parishilton.ap/index.html)