The Pro-Pop Ideology, from Ashlee to Addison

The defenses of pop singer Ashlee Simpson after her 2004 lip-syncing scandal set in motion the 21st century’s core belief that the best pop culture is often the most openly manufactured

Recently I got into a Bluesky spat with Jody Rosen, former Slate music critic and author of Two Wheels Good, after I made an admittedly hyperbolic statement that Aughts critics considered Ashlee Simpson “the most important musician of her time.” After some back and forth and me getting called "bro" a lot, Rosen asked a fair follow-up question: “Why are you hung up on Ashlee Simpson?”

Indeed. If you’re above or under a certain age (or even in-between), the name Ashlee Simpson probably means very little. She had a relatively brief career, and her hit single “Pieces of Me” hasn’t exactly nestled into the pop canon as much as been “enshrined in adult contemporary eternity in a vitamin store near you.”

Ashlee Simpson's rise and fall, however, marked a clear turning point in how educated professionals valued popular culture. There was an ideological shift from pop-skeptical to pro-pop attitudes, which set a new direction for culture in the 21st century. We still live in a post-Ashlee era — as recently illustrated in our top critics' effusive praise for former TikTok star Addison Rae’s new album Addison.

In the pre-Ashlee days of the late 1980s and early 1990s, critics and sophisticated audiences aligned on a general distaste for manufactured pop acts such as Debbie Gibson, Tiffany, and New Kids on the Block. Teenpop was very uncool. MTV played the videos, but in a quarantined way that didn't contaminate the entire network. Then once alternative music broke in 1991, MTV no longer had to worry about teenpop. It was dead. The network used this opportunity to indulge in maximal anti-pop aesthetics through a full slate of weirdo shows: art-school animation showcase Liquid Television, retro Speed Racer reruns, intro-to-rave-culture AMP, and the deconstructed sketch comedy of The State (with an avant-punk theme song by Craig Wedren built around Nation of Ulysses samples).

To maintain this arty aesthetic, MTV pushed back against growing major label requests to air videos from emerging Disney-adjacent teen pop acts. In 1998, the network and the labels finally settled on a a compromise: MTV would launch a new show called Total Request Live, where teen viewers called in to request videos, which always happened to be teenpop (in the first year, only Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC took the #1 slot each week).

TRL proved to be extremely popular with younger teens, and behind the scenes at MTV, the money people at Viacom were successfully wrangling control away from the former "creatives" responsible for the 1990s' alternative years. MTV began shifting its median programming away from obscure downtown New York sensibilities towards the suburban tastes of manufactured pop acts and reality TV.

An early hit for early Aughts MTV was the TRL-adjacent reality show Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica about not-quite-Britney singer Jessica Simpson and not-quite-Justin singer Nick Lachey of 98 Degrees. Jessica gave the show its breakout moment when she semi-earnestly mused whether the term “chicken of the sea” denoted chicken or fish. That was Jessica Simpson's final moment in the sun, but no worries: her father Joe Simpson had a backup plan. He was priming his younger daughter Ashlee for her own entertainment career.

In early summer 2004, The Ashlee Simpson Show debuted on MTV, which followed Simpson#2 on her quest to become a pop singer like her sister. But instead of working with teams of songwriters to make polished dance-pop, Ashlee worked with a team of songwriters to make alternapop. At the time, Creed was burning up the charts with its laggard copies of Pearl Jam's sonic conventions, and Ashlee Simpson and Co. similarly mined the quiet-loud guitar crunch of Hole and other alternative acts to create their own radio-friendly pop hooks. Ashlee’s first album Autobiography dropped a month after her reality show debuted, and the corporate synergies set her on a course to sell millions and millions of records. She was primed to be America's next mega-star by the end of the summer.

Everything began to unravel in October, however. During her appearance on Saturday Night Live, a technical snafu revealed that she had been lip-syncing the previous track. She handled it very poorly on stage, dancing a jig and then rushing off in tears. Her fans turned on her, and the media treated the incident as a major scandal on par with Milli Vanilli's lip-synching debacle in 1990.

In the subsequent weeks, the loudest voice in support of Ashlee Simpson was not a teenage fan but one of the great American music critics, Kelefa Sanneh. He used the SNL incident as a hook for his mega-influential The New York Times essay “The Rap Against Rockism" In the piece, he dismissed the anti-Simpson backlash as a symptom of an ideology he called “rockism," which was responsible for the elevation of "authentic" white, male, guitar-oriented singer-songwriters over “inauthentic” pop acts who often came from marginalized communities.

Sanneh’s anti-rock argument was very timely, because the clearest musical innovation at the moment was happening outside of rock. And yet the main critics continue to gush over the recycled sounds of garage rock bands like The Strokes and The White Stripes while only giving brief nods to the futuristic sounds of The Neptunes and Missy Elliott/Timbaland. But to Sanneh, rockism wasn't just an outmoded value system — it was morally bankrupt. It erected “imperial” barriers that devalued the work of earnest musicians working in the pop genre. Moreover Sanneh believed teenpop in particular was serving a powerful vehicle for artistic invention: the “shape-shifting feminist hip-pop of Ms. Aguilera is every bit as radical as the punk rock of the 1970's.”

So far, Sanneh's argument — that we should no longer dismiss pop music as "lesser" — doesn’t constitute a major ideological realignment. In the second half of the essay, however, he begins to explicitly connect this pro-pop advocacy with a detente with commercialism. “A lot of great music is created,” Sanneh wrote, not despite of — but because of — “multimillion-dollar deals and spur-of-the-moment collaborations and murky commercial forces.” Critics and fans alike needed to embrace the “glorious, incoherent, corporate-financed, audience-tested mess that passes for popular music these days.” Under this framing, Ashlee Simpson was hardly a disgrace: how could one like pop music, yet cancel her for the very pop-music act of lip-synching?

Sanneh's pro-pop ideology stood in stark contrast to the belief system of the Nineties' “alternative” and "indie" movements. For most of the 20th century, the most innovative artists and their allied critics saw the mainstream industry as corrupt and hoped there could be much more earnest and fairer ways to produce and distribute music. Sanneh’s full embrace of commercialism was, then, the cultural equivalent of Mark Fisher’s capitalist realism. In accepting that pop culture is fundamentally an industrial product — and often at its best when in pursuit of extremely cynical financial goals — it became illegitimate to discriminate against pop musicians for being "manufactured." Good pop is good business — and vice versa.

Sanneh's advocacy for teenpop went much further than the average teenager, who was generally disappointed by Ashlee Simpson's lip-synching. At the time, even the manufactured pop stars themselves cared a lot about authenticity. “I'm totally against [lip-syncing] and offended by it,” said a young pop singer named Ashlee Simpson, earlier in 2004. Meanwhile Avril Lavigne wanted everyone to know that she was the primary songwriter of her first singles, a claim so dubious that the actual songwriters The Matrix had to publicly call her out.

But as teens abandoned Ashlee, many of the era's smartest critics continued to see her as a martyr whose experienced career death in the War Against Rockism. In 2009, Chuck Eddy put two different Simpson albums on his Best list, and in 2018, The New York Times’ Popcast did a two-episode series attempting to re-canonize her. (When critic Dave Moore excitedly discussed Simpson's music with a former member of her business team, the person "winced" and said, “You’re giving her way too much credit.”)

We now see why Ashlee provides a useful historical tentpole: The core defense of this MTV-made reality TV star established the idea that the more clever and “moral” position in music criticism was embracing manufactured pop — not rejecting it. Judging by the direction of criticism in the 21st century (even Pitchfork after a while), most critics found this idea very compelling. The acceptance of this ideology then fully neutralized the long-standing criticisms of cynical pop music practices such as lip-syncing, AutoTune, Frankenstein-ing vocal tracks from slivers of multiple takes, employing songwriting factories to write 99.9% of the material but still treating the artist as a "co-writer," etc. These interventions to make up for the artist's lack of talent was what made pop music good.

The most interesting thing about this ideological shift is how much it moved in the opposite direction from the century’s other consumer ethics. In the last two decades, many in the professional and creative classes have wanted to use their pocketbooks to push back against the influence of multinational corporations — à la Naomi Klein’s No Logo. We should buy young designers’ clothes, avoid highly-processed food, support independent bookstores, drink local-roasted Fair Trade coffee, etc. But when it came to music, the most moral action was to embrace the most openly manufactured pop.

The pro-pop ideology explains why the music press has spent the last few weeks so excited about Addison Rae Easterling, the 24-year-old who Google lists as an "American singer and songwriter."

Back in 2019, Addison was a breakout star on TikTok thanks to her dance routines. Talent agent WME quickly signed her, and began trying to raise her up into the A-list. Addison had some film gigs, and like other social media stars, she did the double sell-out by slapping her name on private-label cosmetics and fragrances. To be a true celebrity, however, she needed to become a pop singer. Her first release “Obsessed” dropped in 2021. It bombed.

This failure seemed to be further proof that digital-native stars were struggling to become “real” stars — even when they enjoyed backing from power players in the industry. Producer/critic Nick Sylvester made a very smart point a few weeks ago that there’s a fundamental mismatch between TikTokers and glossy pop: “Perhaps it simply isn’t believable for a social media personality to have a strong artistic point of view.”

Despite Addison’s failure to connect with large numbers of actual music fans, she was still able to generate media buzz under a fascinating storyline: “will trying hard to be a pop star make her a pop star?” When her EP AR dropped in 2023, Jon Caramanica on The Popcast still felt ambivalent about the entire Addison project. “Why does this exist?” he asked, only to quickly counter, “Why not?”

Now Addison (no longer Rae) has released her debut album, and the major publications have covered it as the year's biggest pop moment. Pitchfork gave it an 8.0. In the New York Times, Jon Caramanica calls Addison “a savvy pop ingénue,” who recorded a “breathy, sweaty, urgent album.” He continues, “Her blend of the wistful, the sultry and the unanticipated have allowed her to walk a line between mainstream legibility and progressive edge, an alliance that perhaps a performer with a longer or more beholden track record might find harder to pull off.” The review doesn’t contain a single negative statement.

In The Atlantic, Spencer Kornhaber applauds Addison’s innovative sound: “The production’s breakbeats, digital glitches, and creaking synthesizers summon an alien landscape for Rae, an avatar of popular-girl normalcy, to explore.” And lucky for her, she's deepest when she’s shallow: “Her best lyrics reframe clichés about being hot and having fun.” The sole debate around Addison's unquestionable greatness is whether she's a badass for being in full control or a genius for getting out of the way of professionals. In New York Magazine, Craig Jenkins casts Addison as an auteur, noting that her “lyrics revel in agency” while she “expresses a take-charge approach to her art and image.” Kornhaber, on the other hand, believes it's "refreshing" that she's willing to be a mere “ingredient” in her own musical career.

The most negative thing I read about Addison was in an a supportive roundtable among The Cut's staff. They rightfully point out that the opening track "New York" demonstrates a harmonic resemblance to Charli XCX (specifically "Club Classics"). They also question whether Addison exhibits much of a personality. "I think her creative team did an incredible job of curating a neon-pink, sepia-toned, photos-on-film aesthetic of an album," notes writer Emily Leibert. Yet, "This feels like a sonic mood board, not a cohesive statement about an artist."

Critics in 2004 demanded that we take pop music seriously — i.e. deploy the advanced tools of critical inquiry to find positive value in manufactured pop music. The reviews of Addison suggest that something else happened: a soft bigotry of pop expectations. In 2004, Jody Rosen’s ballot for the Village Voice Pazz & Jop poll endorsed Ashlee Simpson’s “Pieces of Me” for being “very well written & recorded & ably performed.” Is it possible that any major release today fails to meet this standard? Are there any major performers who don’t work with seasoned songwriters? Is there a way for someone not to sound good with the latest digital technology? Would recording engineers not tweak a bad performance into a good one? There are perhaps uninspired songs, but almost everything is ably written, recorded, and performed. Even the laziest production is great. The producer of Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” built the song around a few obvious Splice loops, which was cast as a democratic triumph: “Everyone can make this tune.”

The real sin is when pop artists try to make something other than unabashed pop. In the same review that Kornhaber gushes over Addison’s shallowness, he gives Miley Cyrus's new album a very hard time for having artistic pretensions.

This is the actual legacy of Sanneh linking his anti-rock ideology to an acceptance of commercialism: We live under an enduring critical contrarianism that is quick to find depth in shallowness, authenticity in artificiality, and true affirmations of life in cynical pursuit of profit. For all the demands for critics to pay attention to “popular” music, Addison's “breakout” single “Diet Pepsi” only peaked at #54 on the Billboard charts. Whether her album connects with audiences or not, critics are fully invested in the question of whether Addison can land the triumphant Harvard Business School market entry case study of using Scandinavian outsourcing to set up American TikTokers as a vehicle for future franchising across the entire media mix.

Kornhaber ends his review of Addison with the declarative axiom “Good pop is good music" — as if we're fighting the same battle against rock music from 20 years ago. Pop already won! In fact, the pro-pop view is so hegemonic that few seem to remember the old aesthetic dispositions that would be much less kind to Addison. Certainly it would be real hater shit to disqualify her music just because it was made as part of a broader business strategy. On her third track, Addison at least admits to what she's up to: "Money Is Everything."