an open letter apology for accidentally inventing ‘poptimism’

So fall 2003 was a dif­fer­ent cul­tur­al land­scape. This was pre-stream­ing so lots of new mu­sic was still cob­bled to­geth­er from LimeWire as (of­ten mis­la­beled) mp3s and as­sem­bled into full albums.

I was bored at work and want­ed new stuff to lis­ten to. Timberlake’s ‘Rock Your Body’ was a great sum­mer sin­gle that year and pret­ty much every­one agreed with that. Plus, ‘Cry Me a Riv­er’ was a big hit and I read some piece or oth­er about how it man­aged to get polyrhythms into the Top 40. 

So I down­loaded Jus­ti­fied as one of those full al­bum mp3s that were every­where back in those days and it was … re­al­ly good. Like re­al­ly good. That took some soul search­ing on my part since the world was still very much de­mar­cat­ed be­tween SRS MU­SIC and every­thing else. And this could­n’t be SRS … or could it?

I loved that al­bum. When I tried to play it for friends but I couldn’t get any­one to bite. 

I’d play it in the car when I had a cap­tive au­di­ence. I’d tell peo­ple how it was the 21st cen­tu­ry Off The Wall (vin­di­cat­ed on that BTW). Of­ten you could see peo­ple fight­ing their en­joy­ment of it when they found out who it was. I was evan­gel­i­cal about Tim­ber­lake and Jus­ti­fied. And I was, as his­to­ry has borne out, com­plete­ly right.

So yeah. Sor­ry about all the Pop­ti­mism. My bad.

Also,
re­mem­ber when En­tourage was new and we all en­joyed the cheap plea­sure of the episod­ic tri­fle of Tur­tle and John­ny Dra­ma bare­ly con­tain­ing them­selves in the pres­ence of, like, who­ev­er was big on the WB at the time but then the 2008 fi­nan­cial melt­down hit and overnight the whole thing just be­came ob­nox­ious and in poor taste due to the new con­text and zeitgeist?

That’s what the new TS sin­gle feels like.

 
 

—ja­son malmberg

Flom­mist Ja­son Malm­berg is a sim­ple man who be­lieves in brown liquor and small dogs. He also makes art some­times. Copy­right © 2017 Ja­son Malmberg.

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