What I wrote in response to this ugly little post post that I wouldn't have even noticed if I hadn't found it in a Technorati search [full disclosure, y'know], from a blog I think I'd googled once and found the only paper I know of about Soulja Boy (which I still haven't read, but maybe I should now...):

I see that you’ve linked my own blog to supporting the PR campaigns of “starlets” of “meager talent” as a hobby.

Anyway, if you want to talk about “poptimism,” I encourage you to read the Poptimists LiveJournal community — where you’ll find neither predictable consensus nor mere jouissance, nor any dearth of intellectual discussion of various types of pop music — and I also encourage you to read the actual words I’ve written about the stars whom I presume you take to be untalented, especially Ashlee Simpson (start with this post).

I’m not against authenticity arguments (see Frank Kogan’s excellent post on rockism and antirockism here for a recent conversation on the topic), and the gleeful sort of “inauthenticity”-cheerleading you’re pinning to me isn’t what I’m all about. I genuinely believe in the authentic talent of most of the pop stars I’m writing about, at least when I’m praising them, and those are the arguments I’m trying to make. So if you’re getting “regurgitating ad copy” or “promoting media conglomerates” (in fact, I bet I know more about the Disney conglomerate’s actual production and distribution practices than most people writing about Disney, at least in the blog world if not the mainstream press — and I’ve been regularly, vocally critical of them), or if you think I’m blithely promoting ALL pop “product” without listening to it critically (as you seem to be — i.e., there are actually, believe it or not, differences between Jessica Simpson, Lindsay Lohan, and Heidi Montag, and I’ve never had great praise for the former or lattermost on my blog), then you’re not reading carefully enough.

Anyway, as for your students, if they can’t make any critical arguments about why they prefer a given performer to another one, they probably lack basic critical skills; that isn’t to say that there is no reason whatsoever to prefer any given performance of something to any other, but attributing it to some sort of out-of-control poptimism as some kind of cultural “symptom” that has any major relevance outside of the LiveJournal page I linked to above (and maybe a few blogs that your students likely don’t read) is misguided.

Don't know why I even waste my time with this stuff, except that I'm procrastinating from doing other work. It just sucks to know that there are actually professors out there that are bringing these assumptions and frameworks into the classroom (and so easily conflating the aesthetic choices of students with their ability to think critically about the music they listen to -- if the problem is just critical thinking, then he needs to encourage his students to articulate WHY they like the white dudes better, and stop bringing "poptimism" into it!).