The real thing?

AN APPARENTLY INNOCUOUS article by music critic Jody Rosen of Slate magazine entitled ''The Perils of Poptimism," in which he discusses the critical schools of ''rockism" and ''popism" and tenderly suggests that perhaps it is time for these crumbling oppositions to be retired, has triggered a webwide tizzy. Music writers, who notoriously have nothing better to do, are re-fighting the ancient battle Valkyrie-style in cyberspace, and Rosen has been accused of (among other things) ''pop gluttony"-"a non-discriminating, non-taxonomizing ingestion of all the varieties of music we can jam on a 60 GB iPod," writes Rob Horning on the website PopMatters.

Some clarification may be in order. Rockist is a pejorative term first developed by the British music press of the '80s-roughly equivalent in moral force, at the time, to ''sexist." Antihegemony was in the air, and bands were routinely being screened for their ''ideological soundness." To be rockist, in this context, was to be guilty of a complex conflation of offenses. The rockist was white, male, straight, possibly bearded, certainly guitar-infatuated. He stuffily venerated the Important and the Real, and hated slick rhythm-based pop music. He was simultaneously a leftover from the folk-rock earnestness of the '60s and an entirely new kind of elitist, who preferred 15 minutes of tooth-rattling feedback to one song by Miami Sound Machine.

An actual self-declared rockist, of course, is a rare bird indeed: Rockism is something of which one accuses others. Popism, on the other hand, is proud: It delights in artifice, flash, the here-and-now, the buzz and twinkle of the hit. Rosen is being a popist, or ''poptimist," when he writes in his Slate article ''I think that Britney Spears's 'Toxic' is one of the greatest songs of the new century." (Actually, he's being a rockist-the construction of ''greatness" being a rockist endeavor-but anyway....)

In the invisible halls of discourse, rockists and popists supposedly clash most viciously over the idea of ''authenticity." Does the singer write his own songs? Play his own instrument? Is he from the Mississippi Delta? The working class? To the rockist, chewing on his beard, these are questions of the utmost gravity. To the pippety-poppety-poptimist, not at all.

Categories have their place, of course, but rockism and popism will only get us so far, as Philip Auslander's new ''Performing Glam Rock" (Michigan) reminds us. Long before rockism was invented, it had been popistically subverted-by rock musicians. According to Auslander, the beginnings of the process were discernible even at Woodstock-that muddy cradle of authenticity-when the bogus doo-wop act Sha Na Na came swaggering on with gold lamé suits and carnivorous Italian accents, taunting ''hippies" and doing hits from the Fifties. These were not immobile virtuosos, groaningly authentic, singing songs of the times-they were an act. ''We know we've succeeded," said group founder Rich Joffe later, ''if people go around saying, 'Are they for real?"'

Auslander finds in Sha Na Na's aggressive theatricality ''a harbinger of glam rock spectacle," and a gateway into the world of costumes, characters, slippery genders, exaggeration, and celebratory inauthenticity that was definitively ushered in by Marc Bolan (of T Rex) and David Bowie in the '70s. In glam rock, the howl of guitar-hero feedback blended with the shrilling of the teeny-bopper, and the rockist embraced the popist amid layers of comedic/erotic pageantry. ''[Bolan] turned his profile to the audience," writes Auslander of a T Rex performance of ''Jeepster," ''put his hand on his hip and squealed girlishly, then crouched into a Chuck Berry-like duck walk, stood back up part way and Charlestoned with his knees bent....None of these movements had any specific formal or thematic association with the music being played or the effort and pleasure of producing it. It seemed, rather, that Bolan performed them for their own sake."

Now really-what could be more rocko-poptimistic than that?

James Parker's column appears biweekly in Ideas. E-mail cultural.studies@globe.com.