:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/61825371/star2.0.jpg)
If there is a La La Land of 2018, an unabashed melodrama that revels in the trappings of show business and fame, it’s A Star Is Born, the new remake of the Hollywood classic directed by Bradley Cooper and starring Cooper and Lady Gaga. And like La La Land before it, A Star Is Born was greeted with a rapturous reception, only to face rising backlash as it made its way from the festival circuit to general release.
In this case, the argument about A Star Is Born concerns a fundamental disagreement over the way the movie thinks about art. Is A Star Is Born on the side of Bradley Cooper’s Jackson, with his cowboy hats and his wistful rock-and-roll guitar-strumming? Or is it on the side of Gaga’s Ally, with her dyed red hair and her trashy-fun lip-synched pop songs about a cute boy’s butt?
Is Jackson right to despise Ally’s solo career, or is he just old-fashioned? When Ally changes her look and starts to dance as she sings, is she becoming the star she was meant to become, or is she being corrupted by the artifice of pop?
More simply: Is the new A Star Is Born a rockist movie, equating rock with authenticity and pop with empty spectacle — or a poptimistic movie, celebrating the pleasures and possibilities of pop?
No one can seem to decide.
At Slate, A Star Is Born is definitely rockist, and what’s more, it’s dated. “The division between rock ‘authenticity’ and pop artifice feels like a holdover from a time where selling out was considered an unpardonable sin rather than a fact of life,” writes Sam Adams, “when lip-synching was a betrayal and not a spectator sport.”
For the New York Times, the movie is definitely rockist, but its rockist ethos is confused by Gaga’s presence. “It’s odd for Lady Gaga, of all people, to be pitting modern pop against authenticity,” writes Jon Pareles. “Not that long ago, her hits insisted — as drag tradition does — that the most outsized artifice could also hold something true.”
At Billboard, the pop versus rock battle has no winners. “It’s not pro-pop or anti-pop,” writes Jason Lipshutz, “but instead props up a world in which pop music becomes a wedge driven between its two protagonists; the dramatic tension mined from its main characters’ dueling points of view — Jackson’s traditionalism versus Ally’s modernism — complicates, and ultimately strengthens, the film.”
At BuzzFeed News, the ambiguity is a bonus: it’s “a tender, conflicted saga for the age of poptimism,” says Alison Willmore, “seen through the (sometimes blurry) eyes of a character who has resigned himself to vanishing with the old world order.”
There’s a reason that the rockism-poptimism debate keeps raging in Star is Born thinkpieces across the internet: you can make a damn solid case for either one. I’ve been going back and forth over the movie since I saw it, trying to figure out how it wants me to feel about art, and I have yet to come up with a coherent idea that reconciles the evidence for both sides.
Here’s where the rock vs. pop debate comes from, and how it’s playing out in A Star Is Born.
Poptimism emerged as part of a backlash to ’90s-era anti-sellout culture
The term rockism entered the mainstream in 2004, when Kelefa Sanneh published his massively influential New York Times Magazine article, “The Rap Against Rockism.” Sanneh was writing against the idea that rock is self-evidently better and more authentic and truer than pop, that there is more artistic value in an acoustic guitar lick than in a well-crafted pop hook. And to describe the ideology against which he was writing, he borrowed a term from music criticism wonkery: rockism.
“A rockist is someone who reduces rock ’n’ roll to a caricature, then uses that caricature as a weapon,” Sanneh wrote. “Rockism means idolizing the authentic old legend (or underground hero) while mocking the latest pop star; lionizing punk while barely tolerating disco; loving the live show and hating the music video; extolling the growling performer while hating the lip-syncher.”
And rockism maps neatly onto the landscape of identity politics. “Could it really be a coincidence,” wrote Sanneh, “that rockist complaints often pit straight white men against the rest of the world?” Punk codes white and masculine and straight; disco codes feminine and exuberantly gay; hip-hop codes black. Accordingly, the rockist of the ’70s lauded punk, campaigned to kill disco, and ignored hip-hop.
Over the course of the decade following Sanneh’s essay, music criticism increasingly turned against rockism. Instead, it embraced a new way of thinking about music: popism, or, more often, poptimism.
Poptimism finds value in the pop star. Poptimism loves the flash and fun of disco. Poptimism makes art out of the music video. Poptimism lip syncs along to the lip syncer.
The idea of poptimism is not to invert the values system of rockism, to say that pop is self-evidently superior to rock and carries more artistic value. Rather, the idea is to level the playing ground between them, to suggest that pop and rock can both house authentic pieces of art and can also both house trash, that one genre is not inherently better than the other. Poptimism has nothing against rock — it just also genuinely loves the pleasures and spectacle of pop.
By 2018, poptimism has gone from existing as a weirdo underground way of talking about music to becoming an ascendant ideology that’s nearly as strong as rockism. It’s not the only game in town by a long shot: Persistent institutional rockism is part of why Beyoncé’s Lemonade (black, heavily produced, poptimistic) lost the Grammy for album of the year to Adele’s 25 (white, stripped down and minimalist, rockist), or why the New Yorker didn’t review Taylor Swift’s 1989 (girly, maximalist, poptimistic) but did review Ryan Adam’s cover of Taylor Swift’s 1989 (masculine, stripped down, rockist).
But poptimism is strong enough now to have inspired its own backlash, with opponents arguing that poptimistic music critics now take it as a given that if an artist is popular, they must be good.
For many younger music critics, rockism is the aberration. Poptimism is the default.
So, is A Star Is Born rockist or poptimistic? Depends how you read it.
Here’s what A Star Is Born looks like if you read it as a rockist movie
:format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/13221175/star4.jpg)
In the rockist reading, Cooper’s Jackson performs real, authentic, soulful music, and Jackson’s greasy hair and weathered skin are an expression of his authenticity. When she is with Jackson, Lady Gaga’s Ally performs “real” music — belting out “Shallow” with a makeup-free face, her hair flowing and natural — but then she is seduced by the trappings of fame.
Despite protesting that she wants to be herself and will not dye her hair platinum, Ally ends up dying it red. Despite protesting that she doesn’t want to lose the part of herself that’s talented, at her manager’s behest, Ally stops playing her own instruments in order to dance with backup dancers. She starts wearing makeup. And most damningly of all, she writes “Why Did You Do That?” a silly piece of pop nonsense about cute boys and their butts, in which she repeatedly sings, “This is not, not like me.”
Under this reading, when Jackson responds to Ally’s transformation with mingled sorrow and disgust, the audience is supposed to feel that he is correct. He is right to advise her that she needs to write only about what she feels deep in her soul, and the further implication that she can’t possibly feel anything deep about a cute boy seems only reasonable. He is right to mockingly repeat her lyrics to her and tell her that she is embarrassing, and when he is driven to drink by the sight of Ally lip-synching her way through “Why Did You Do That?” on SNL, he is right once again.
After Jackson’s tragic death, Ally realizes that he was correct. That’s why in the movie’s final scene, when she is at last Born as a Star, she has returned to the Jackson-approved form of music. She is performing a (real, authentic) song that he wrote; she is standing alone behind a microphone the way he (really, authentically) performed, instead of dancing; her face is (really, authentically) bare of makeup in the way that he preferred. She has at last become a true artist, and in order to do so she has had to rid herself of all the artifice and spectacle of pop. She has had to embrace rockism.
There’s a certain amount of behind-the-scenes lore that would seem to suggest that this rockist reading is the way Cooper and his collaborators want their viewers to approach the movie. To begin with, there’s Cooper’s repeated assertion that in his version of A Star Is Born, for once, the man on the decline isn’t jealous of his beloved protégé’s success.
Instead, Cooper explained to the New York Times magazine, Jackson is worried for Ally. He “bemoans how the industry strangles her ability to say the kind of things she did when he found her singing ‘La Vie en Rose’ in a drag bar.” If Jackson’s concern for Ally is understood to be purely disinterested and correct, then pop and commercialism are the villains of this movie, the scheming agents of darkness from whom Ally must be saved by Jackson’s noble sacrifice.
There’s also the famous story about how, when Lady Gaga screen tested for the movie, Cooper wiped the makeup off her face and told her, “Completely open. No artifice,” in an echo of a similar scene in the Judy Garland A Star Is Born. It’s an anecdote that both Cooper and Gaga have repeated over and over again on the press tour for this movie, and it suggests a certain binary: a bare face vs. makeup; authenticity vs. artifice; rock vs. pop.
And the way Cooper tells that makeup story leaves the audience with no doubt whatsoever about what side of that binary is the good and correct side. Who wants to root against complete openness?
That’s one way of watching A Star Is Born. But it’s also possible to watch it another way.
Here’s what A Star Is Born looks like if you read it as a poptimistic movie
:format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/13294573/rev_1_ASIB_03888r_High_Res_JPEG.jpeg)
In the poptimistic reading, Jackson might think that rock is good and pop is bad, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that he is right — or even that the audience is being pushed to think that he is right. Maybe Jackson is just behind the times. His signature song, after all, begins, “Maybe it’s time to let the old ways die.” Maybe rockism is the old way, and maybe it has to give way to the age of poptimism.
Jackson himself is not purely authentic in a rockist sense. Over the course of the movie, we learn that he “stole” his voice from his brother. When Ally tapes one of her false eyebrows onto his face, mirroring in reverse their meet-cute — in which he peeled off her false brow — the scene suggests that the Jackson Maine rock persona is as much a burlesque as the Ally pop persona. And Cooper’s performance as Jackson is certainly not authentic: he may have wiped Lady Gaga’s makeup off her face when she screen tested for him, but he got a spray tan every day during shooting to create Jackson’s weathered skin.
While Jackson mourns Ally’s evolution into a pop star, he’s also framed as the figure who is holding her back from achieving her highest potential as a star, the figure who has to disappear in order for her to transcend her limitations and achieve her true identity. When he tells Ally that her butt song is embarrassing, that’s not necessarily Jackson speaking hard truths — that’s Jackson getting sloppily drunk and telling his wife that she’s ugly and embarrassing, because he wants to hurt her, because he’s a self-destructive alcoholic.
Speaking of the butt song — or, as the soundtrack would have you call it, “Why Did You Do That” — it’s silly, sure, but it’s also objectively speaking a bop. Composer Diane Warren has stated firmly that the song was not intended to be bad; it’s catchy and fun, and presumably it was written with that intent. And when Ally finishes performing it at SNL, in the routine that appalls Jackson so much it drives him to the bottle, she doesn’t look upset with herself or as though she feels that she has betrayed her truest and most authentic self. She looks satisfied with herself for having nailed a tricky performance, and delighted at the audience’s approval.
Of course, Jackson is played by Cooper, and he’s the director here, as well as one of the film’s co-writers. It’s in large part his movie. That means it’s reasonable to think that the audience’s allegiances might naturally align with Jackson in the SNL sequence. But on the other hand — Ally isn’t played by just anyone. She’s Lady Gaga, the living avatar of poptimism herself.
Gaga’s pop persona delights in layer upon layer of artifice; in building up and stripping away spectacle; in creating candy-coated dance pop with a spiky, aggressive aesthetic that challenges and entertains the ear at the same time. Sure, Joanne-era Gaga is comparatively more restrained than Gaga circa 2009, but she’s still a pop star who revels in the glamour and artificiality of pop. As Cheryl Wischhover wrote for Vox, “The irony here is that the ‘authentic’ Lady Gaga we see in A Star Is Born is a fictional character. The real Gaga — fake eyelashes, stick-on gems, and all — is authentic as hell.”
Gaga’s mere presence — the weight of her enormous star persona, the inescapable fact that for Gaga, artifice and authenticity are not a binary but are one and the same — means that it’s hard to take Jackson’s rockist declarations seriously. If the audience is supposed to agree with him that Ally is betraying her soul and her artistic potential by turning to pop, then why does the movie give us a walking, talking counterargument in Lady Gaga?
On the other hand: There’s still that rockist reading to reckon with.
The rock versus pop debate in A Star Is Born isn’t always productive, but it is baked into the movie
The rockist and poptimistic readings of A Star Is Born are in direct opposition to one another, yet as I try to decide what I think about this movie, I have found it impossible to figure out which reading meshes with it most naturally. Whenever I try to embrace one reading, I feel that I am reading against the grain. I would have to throw away half the movie to make sense of it.
For me, A Star Is Born’s ambiguity between these two aesthetic modes is both feature and bug. It’s a frustrating thematic fight, and it often feels less productively ambivalent to me than the result of an incoherent point of view driving the film.
But it’s also fundamental to the entire aesthetic of this movie and its mumblecore melodrama vibes. A Star Is Born replays its central conflict over and over again, not just in the conflict between Ally and Jackson, but in its form: in its big, sweeping, spectacular themes that just want to make you feel something, and in its ostentatiously improvised scene work and handheld cameras that want you to notice the grit and appreciate the authenticity.
The fight between spectacle and minimalism is baked into this movie, but what it proves in and of itself is that what the first poptimists argued was always true: The binary is made up. Authenticity and artifice are not mutually exclusive. They can both exist within the same piece of art. And we should have grown past this fight by now.
