Nature writing needs a Poptimist revolution
That music we’re listening to: is it art? That experience we just had: was it nature?
“Poptimism” is a now-20-year-old trend in music journalism, one of those rabbit-holes that’s both absurdly esoteric and justifiably hotly debated—and if you stick with me, I promise I’ll relate it to the natural world.
Critic Ann Powers recently summarized the history of poptimism in an interview on the decline of the music-reviewing site Pitchfork. In an influential 2004 New York Times article, she said, Kelefa Sanneh wrote that too many music critics were old straight white men who loved masculine-coded stuff like guitar solos. To remedy this situation, you can’t just hire a queer Black female who likes guitar solos. You have to hire diverse critics and then also take seriously the music they love.
Maybe that’s rap. Or maybe it’s country or klezmer or catstep. Maybe it’s types of music “that happen to be dominated by African-American artists, by women. Let's make a space for that,” Powers said. Yet as music criticism made space for people who had previously faced discrimination, a funny thing happened. It also had to make space for pop.
There are plenty of debates about what makes music pop—format, rhythm, tempo, accessibility, commercialism, etc.—but one general rule of thumb is that it’s music that happens to be popular. It’s music loved by non-elites. But by definition—it’s music, it’s loved—it has to be art. If a music critic tries to dismiss, say, Taylor Swift, that critic is a failure. The job of the critic is to see the art.
Poptimism was first said to be crazy. Then it was obvious. Then it was overblown. Then it was accused of being a sellout to commercial interests. (This, of course, is precisely the cycle of elitist music criticism I remember from the ‘80s—a band was fringe, and then obviously wonderful, and then maybe not as good as all the other critics claimed… until finally a song sniffed the Top 40 charts, and everyone could agree the band was a sellout.)
Regardless of what you think of pop music and its critics, a core idea here is essential to today’s discussions of diversity and racial justice: you can’t just inaugurate diverse faces into the old gatekeeping roles. You have to be willing to allow for change in the form of the criticism itself. In poptimism’s heyday, there were calls for “poptimist revolutions” in books, television, and food.
Much nature writing is essentially criticism. “Go here not there.” “Experience it this way not that way.” “Here’s what makes this vista, this mountain, this ecosystem so profound.”
And too many nature writers are old straight white men who love masculine-coded stuff like individualistic feats of dangerous athleticism. To remedy this situation, you can’t just hire a queer Black female rock-climbing wilderness advocates. You have to hire diverse writers and then also take seriously the nature they love.
What is that nature and how is it different from what we call nature today? As an old straight white male myself, my vote shouldn’t count. But I did start wondering if I and my contemporaries should make more space for expressions of nature loved by non-elites. Maybe that means cat videos? Zoos? People experiencing “wilderness” in a weedy subdivision backyard? Admiring an “ecosystem” of cockroaches and Twinkies? Regardless of my own peculiar tastes, great nature writing will always be about explaining the artistry, the wonder, the profundity of whatever a writer defines as nature.
And then I started wondering: maybe this stuff is already here? In December, NASA did some pretty gnarly science—extending to 19 million miles the frontier from which humans can send visual communications—using a cat video, of an orange tabby named Taters chasing a laser pointer. One of the most famed conservationists in American history was William T. Hornaday, founder of the Bronx Zoo. (He was rightly criticized for racism. Nevertheless, his zoo was taken seriously as nature.) Aldo Leopold’s book A Sand County Almanac defined wilderness as a worn-out Wisconsin farm. The movie Wall-E depicted a cockroach sleeping in a generic Twinkie.
Are these natural stories? If we say they are not, shouldn’t we articulate why cat videos (deep space!), zoos (conservation!), weedy backyards (wilderness!), and cockroaches (cockroaches!) should not be considered nature? Yet if we say they are, doesn’t that have implications for the genre of criticism we call nature writing?
Discussion:
Sources are embedded as links in the text.
If I were submitting this essay to an editor (gatekeeper!), I’d be nervous: is it too obscure, too personal, too unrelated to headlines? Do I have the right to write about music, or is this whole thing too much of a stretch? The glory of an email newsletter, in theory, is that you can avoid the elitism of gatekeeping to share more intimacy with readers. I’ll be curious to see how this works out in practice!