Over the past two years, readings have become all the rage. They’re how London’s literati typically socialize now. There is the Soho Reading Series, presided over by Tom Willis, which flits around the city for readings in Peckham arts centers and galas in cavernous Walthamstow warehouses. There’s Deleted Scenes by Paul Johnathan, where young women in minimal make-up and pearl necklaces crane their necks from the stairwell to listen to readings in the basement of a Soho bar basement. There are many others too, and sometimes, the readings are very good. Sometimes they’re unremarkable or actively torturous. This is largely beside the point.

I turned up to one event recently and found that there were no readings at all, but rather plates of aesthetically presented fruit slices arrayed on a table for aperitifs. This is the ideal literary reading: it’s about the party, not the writing. These events are, to a degree, reactions against the stuffy book launches of the respectable literary world, where you have to schmooze your way to editors and agents. The organizers are trying to reclaim an older mode of sociality, boozier and more irreverent, more like the literary scenes of Twenties London, where you could land in an unfamiliar city and find your feet in Soho’s pubs and the upper rooms of restaurants.

Such circles produced some of the greatest works written in English. Joyce’s Ulysses might never have found a publisher without the avant-garde literary scenes of Chicago and Paris; Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, first published by his own magazine, The Criterion, and then by Hogarth Press, made its way into the English canon through the patronage of friends. Little magazines, such as the Adelphi, the English Review, Colosseum, The Nation and Athenaeum and The New Statesman, flourished. The world of early 20th-century modernism was highly social: it meant parties at Ford Madox Ford’s house in Kensington; country retreats at Ottoline Morrell’s Garsington estate, where bohemians mixed freely with Oxford intellectuals; a secret map of pubs in Soho and Fitzrovia full of heavy drinkers and aristocrats.

While Bloomsbury has eclipsed the others in popular imagination, you couldn’t throw a stone in London without hitting some literary circle. Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound and the Vorticists met in an upstairs room of the Eiffel Tower restaurant on Percy Street, a location chosen both for its having been the haunt of imagist writer T.E. Hulme and his Poets’ Club, and for its proximity to Bloomsbury, where Lewis’s literary enemies dwelt. Contributors to Eliot’s Criterion also met there, or else at The Cock on Fleet Street. At Tom Burns’ house in St Leonard’s Terrace Chelsea, Catholics of illiberal persuasions — David Jones, Bernard Wall, Christopher Dawson — gathered for an informal salon which produced a short-lived periodical called Order. A dancing unicorn by Jones graced its cover, alongside a quotation from Aquinas’ Summa Contra Gentiles: “those are called wise who put things in their right order and control them well.”

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London’s literary scene in these years was distinguished by its unusual political and religious diversity: there were traditionalist Anglo-Catholics, romantic back-to-the-land Catholic distributists, the odd fascist, socialists and old-fashioned liberals. It was a period before these ideas had calcified into the strict polarities of Right and Left. After the First World War, writers and artists threw themselves into articulating the problems and possible trajectories of modernity, which was understood as an artistic question as much as a political or economic one. The future was unmarked territory, and the diversity of literary circles — in their views and their formal characteristics as well as the various sorts they attracted — mirrored the range of possibilities for the modern age.

By the Thirties, the notion of a “literary scene” was coming in for criticism. Roy Campbell’s verse satire The Georgiad (1931) protested the literary mediocrity of Bloomsbury: “For they’re all members of the self-same school / And drilled, like Fascists, to enforce on all / The standards of the middling and the small.” For Wyndham Lewis, the Bloomsbury scene amounted to the “societification of art, where all are geniuses, before whose creations the other members of the Club, in an invariable ritual, must swoon with appreciation”. D.H. Lawrence satirized London’s literary scene in Women in Love, as did Ezra Pound in his poem “Portrait d’une Femme”. The same forces of friendship and social status which allowed Joyce or Eliot or Pound to find an audience in the little magazines seemed, at the same time, to promote vacuity and mediocrity among socialites wary of alienating their friends.

Both Campbell and Lewis had another axe to grind, having found themselves at odds with the general political tenor of London’s literary scene. Lewis’s 1937 novel The Revenge for Love had been attacked for its pro-Franco sympathies; the publishing group Left Book Club made a coordinated attempt to prevent its being stocked by booksellers. Two years earlier, Lewis declared in his “Freedom that destroys itself” essay that a “repressive ‘Left-wing’ orthodoxy has for long existed in Great Britain”, a view echoed by Orwell in 1948 when he wrote that “Obviously, for about fifteen years past, the dominant orthodoxy, especially among the young, has been ‘Left’.”

That characterization was generally accurate. Though the Twenties had tolerated a variety of political perspectives, the beginning of the Spanish Civil War starkly divided London’s writers into two camps. The Left Review published, in 1937, a survey of writers’ support for Franco or the Republicans respectively; of the 147 responses, 126 supported the Republican cause, with only five pledging their allegiance to Franco (among them were Evelyn Waugh and Arthur Machen.) In his final edition of The Criterion in 1939, Eliot spoke of the years between 1918 and 1926 as a “period of illusions”, before which the features of the post-war world had clearly emerged. As it became necessary to take a side, to nail down one’s sympathies for socialism or fascism, so the open-ended, speculative quality of modernist writing began to seem naïve, and experimentation seemed to indicate a lack of moral fiber or a failure to appreciate the seriousness of the age. As Eliot reflected in that final editorial, “For myself, a right political philosophy came more and more to imply a right theology—and right economics to depend upon right ethics: leading to emphases which somewhat stretched the original framework of a literary review.”

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Part of the “edginess” of today’s literary readings is their laxer affiliation to the Left. At Soho Reading Series, Tom Willis introduces the proceedings with a mumbled reference to Dimes Square, the New York downtown scene which brought together it-girl writers and podcasters with start-up founders and Right-wing internet personalities, and parties that allegedly had Peter Thiel’s money behind the bar. Willis told me that the idea for Soho Reading Series came out of his time in New York, where readings had a counter-cultural excitement lacking in London’s typically fusty literary scene. Some of the readers at Soho Reading Series have been drafted in from Dimes Square, among them Honor Levy and Dean Kissick, occasioning backlash from the Left for their perceived proximity to reactionary politics.

The house style at London’s readings is alt-lit autofiction, a genre pioneered by mainly New York-based writers like Tao Lin and Mira Gonzalez in the early 2010s, and characterized by its experimental, internet-inflected style, flat affect and personal subject matter. Its popular resurgence since 2020 has kept pace with the Rightward shift in American culture; Anika Levy’s debut novel Flat Earth, for instance, is studded with references to Right-wing esoteric health trends, incels and cryptocurrency. Madeline Cash, Levy’s co-editor at Forever Magazine, gestured at the vogue for avoiding seed oils and converting to Catholicism in her 2023 short story collection Earth Angel. Both are reading at Soho Reading Series this month.

The heavily ironic style of alt lit permits a level of engagement with Right-wing culture without pinning down its writers as Right-wing; the same irony was stretched, in New York, to real-life fraternization with reactionaries. Since Trump’s second term began, however, writers who traded on Dimes Square edginess have taken pains to distance themselves and reclaim their Leftist credentials. Honor Levy gave an interview to Vanity Fair claiming that “I thought reactionary meant just reacting, for years, and now I know it means conservative, or whatever”. At London’s Soho Reading Series, Levy is billed alongside readers hailing from publications such as Jacobin and The New Left Review; their stories concern blowjobs, colonialism and black queer experience. Heterodoxy is permitted to the extent that it’s chic and exciting — and the Right, having not yet won on this side of the Atlantic, retains more of its transgressive cool — but London’s literary readings remain avowedly socialist in their outlook.

Is there any connection, then, between literary scenes and literary movements? Alt lit, at least, gave us something new and distinctive, and emerged naturally from its New York context — the era of terminally online, drug-abusing oversharers filtering a sense of self through their online brands. Clearly, great works of literature can and have come out of cool literary circles, and this relationship isn’t accidental: modernism couldn’t have been invented from a cabin in the woods, concerned as it is with the rapid transformations of urban and intellectual life, sexuality and the family, and reflecting in its style the transformations of social life that formed its social context. And yet 21st-century London has produced no distinctive style, no group of works which could be collectively recognized as a movement.

Part of this, I think, is that despite the veneer of irreverence surrounding today’s literary readings, there is too much political uniformity to permit the imaginative forays and experimentation which initiate literary innovation. Autofiction, even in its edgier formulations, is shaped by the same Leftist bona fides that govern the rest of the literary world: writing should be based on lived experience and should be fundamentally democratic — anyone can write well, everyone should be allowed to give voice to their own story. As Jeremy Corbyn has remarked: “there is a poem, a painting, a novel, a play in all of us.” The logical conclusion of such an aesthetic philosophy is that qualitative distinctions between good and bad writing are less important than maximally egalitarian expression.

As such, there is no habit of critique at readings. The poems and stories read aren’t referred to in the conversation which follows, which takes up the more important topics of parties and people. Perhaps critique does happen in private, in WhatsApp groups and collaborative Google Docs, but it is never invited in public. Rather, everything about these events emphasizes the ephemerality of the work. Organizers don’t ask to read the work beforehand or ask for submissions; they may be familiar with a writer’s published work before asking them to read, but the name on the poster is more important than the quality of what they might choose to read. There is little of the sifting and rejection which allows a literary movement to coalesce.

Therein lies one difference between the literary circles of 100 years ago and those of today. The new and experimental writing of the Twenties came out of careful thought about the aims and purpose of literature. Eliot described his editorial endeavors in The Criterion as an attempt “to maintain literary standards increasingly repudiated in the modern world”. He was prepared to be brutal in his criticism, not even sparing his friends. It is difficult to cultivate a literary scene which allows you to do this, and more difficult still without the patronage which funded The Criterion and other little magazines in the Twenties and Thirties. As a business, writing is more reliant on friendships and connections than ever before. The risk of criticizing a potentially valuable ally only makes sense for a writer with independent means and no need of the social capital to be gained from flattering bad writers at literary readings.

The second significant difference is that the social world of modernism took in intellectuals — philosophers, political theorists, sociologists, psychoanalysts, even theologians. Some of these were Marxists, particularly in the circles of the Left Review and Left Book Club which emerged in the Thirties. Today’s literary intellectuals are almost uniformly progressive. While there are contemporary equivalents to Bloomsbury and the Left Book Club, there is nothing like Bernard Wall’s The Colosseum or The English Review under Douglas Jerrold, or even Eliot’s Criterion. In the New York scene that London takes as its model, it was common for people to socialize across political divides. It seemed easier to shrug off the cancellation attempts based on guilt by association. After a reading I organized at Verdurin, a Left-wing friend of mine was criticized for attending an event where “fascists” were present and forced to issue an apology on X. While London has its own Right-wing intellectuals, these have scarcely any overlap with hyper-cool Gen Z literary readings. The British Right is the land of The Spectator and policy wonks, severely lacking in cultural clout. When there is no opportunity for writers to encounter new and unfamiliar ideas or to be challenged, intellectual and creative stagnation results.

This is not to suggest that good literature must be Right-wing. But new literary movements are intellectually expensive: they require concerted effort to dream up a philosophy and a style suited to the contemporary world. They require an ability to clearly perceive that world and to diagnose its ills. More fundamentally, a new literary movement definitionally requires the capacity to differentiate between good and bad art, to set out what’s wrong with existing literature and to do something else. Contemporary literary scenes, even in their most irreverent iterations, are too wedded to egalitarianism to accomplish this feat.

The cliché of the artist as outsider remained an essential part of the pop mythologies of several generations. Even some of the most wildly successful musicians of the late 20th century — The Beatles, Marvin Gaye, Nirvana, even Madonna — became broadly admired not just for courting enormous audiences, but for their consistent unwillingness to compromise. The masses might still gobble up whatever was served to them but they were kept partially in check by discerning and knowledgeable obsessives and critics, insistent on at least some kind of standard for artistic integrity. Even the most kitsch-hungry audiences still maintained a sense that great artists were by nature opposed to the mandates of the cynical corporate bottom line of the music industry itself. As the last young people of the 20th century, Generation X summed up the ethos perfectly: there was nothing less cool or less authentic than “selling out”.

Now, one quarter of the way through the 21st century, it seems clear that almost every vestige of the sentiment has been summarily obliterated. The reigning value system of the arts in this century — sped along by the internet’s uncanny ability to fuse micro-celebrity with social media styles of personal brand management — has been one of increasingly unabashed obsession with wild financial success, naked greed, grifting, and cynical re-branding. Beginning in the 2000s, and ramping up to a fever pitch with megastars like Lady Gaga, Drake, Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, and Ed Sheeran, pop music became a field of nakedly-corporate brand ambassadors and stars happily turning themselves into avatars of narcissistic self-actualization. 

Gaga and Swift, for instance, have developed armies of loyal fans by crafting broad messages of inclusivity and churning out vicarious anthems of personal achievement. Beyoncé has turned herself into an empty symbol of political and cultural revolution. Singers with little interest in art, from Ariana Grande to Doja Cat, have carved out huge successes by presenting themselves as simultaneously ultra-perfect and ultra-relatable. The message everywhere is the same: the greatest artists of our time are the most famous; they have everything, and they deserve everything. To say otherwise is not only snobbish but discredits the mass popularity into which millions of distracted, depressed, and over-stimulated people have invested all their attention and aspiration. 

The usual name for this strangling monopoly of the mega-famous is “poptimism” — a phenomenon that crossed over to massive TV shows, film franchises, and fashion lines. At first an obscure internet discourse conducted mostly by critics and journalists, the term has come to signify the reigning ideology of our day, in which the old values of the avant garde are dismissed as out-of-touch and elitist (and, of course, trashed as too white, straight, and/or masculine). In the meantime, pop is associated with an enlightened sense of inclusivity, conveniently ignoring the many forward-thinking avant-garde cultures historically associated with LGBTQ artists and racial minorities in Western countries. 

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One accepted starting point for this contemporary discourse is music journalist Kelefa Sanneh’s 2004 New Yorker article, “The Rap Against Rockism”. In the article, Sanneh defended the aspiring popstar Ashlee Simpson after a disastrous SNL performance. Simpson’s backing track had faltered, and people quickly realized she had been lip-syncing; the blowback essentially cost Simpson her music career. But what Sanneh articulated — which he opposed to the stereotypically old-white-guy rhetoric of an early-2000s “rockism” — was a defense of Pop as product, and popstars as patently commercial projects. His defense became central to the rhetoric of many internet critics after him. What began as a fairly anodyne plea for a more open-minded idea of “authenticity” in a music industry dominated by capitalistic necessities, became a steamrolling social ethos in which artists were valorized for their business savvy and their ability to represent popular dreams of self-actualization and economic domination. Naysayers were merely snobs and bigots, to whom the response was always the same: “Shut up and let people enjoy things.” 

But it is 2025 now — and the high days of poptimism are over. Just a few months ago, Sanneh himself penned a remarkably unselfconscious article called “How Music Criticism Lost Its Edge”, bemoaning how toothless music writers have become in a world that rewards valorizing the most popular, while disincentivizing critics from championing lesser-known artists, knowing a review of the newest popstar’s record will generate more web traffic and revenue. Sanneh himself sounds wearied by the paradigm he helped usher in two decades ago. “Poptimism intimated that critics should not just take pop music seriously but celebrate it.” he writes. “This aligned with the changing imperatives of the media industry: on blogs, you could draw a crowd with a contrary opinion, but on social media you became a ringleader by saying things that your followers could publicly agree with.”

The first sign of this slackening grip may in fact have come from Charli XCX’s Brat. Like her contemporary Lana Del Rey, Charli XCX was a confusing figure in the 2010s. Both were initially “indie”-coded artists who went through heavily-corporatized windows of popularity, before settling down to work with specially chosen producers, honing distinct internet-savvy aesthetics. They positioned themselves on the edge of genuine stardom, and yet maintained a delicate sense that they were still first and foremost creatives, willing to make occasional sacrifices to preserve their own right to self-direction. It wasn’t unusual to find listeners and critics with a lingering distaste for poptimism, who were quite willing to make an exception for them: Charli and Lana represented an interesting compromise between poptimism’s valorization of striving stars and older ideals of artistic integrity and autonomy.

On the surface, Brat was ostensibly a victory for the poptimist ideal of self-marketing — though if anything, there was something old-fashioned about the record. Even that spectacularly successful campaign and rollout saw Charli going against suggestions from all sides, releasing the album after a rough renegotiation with her label, with little concern for whether the record would be considered commercial enough. What resulted was an exciting cultural moment that was at least as exciting because of the music itself. Like Madonna bringing voguing to the masses, Brat came close to mainstreaming subgenres of hyperpop and 2010s electronic club music, the closest things to actual underground subcultures in that decade. Still, Brat wasn’t quite the monocultural success many wanted it to be: it made next to no dent on the US Billboard Singles Chart, it was denied album of the year at the Grammys, and a year later the streaming numbers are still nowhere near that of much bigger stars. But this only helps to preserve a sense of cool. Brat Summer became cringe quickly but it hardly took Charli XCX to the same heights as Taylor Swift. This is ultimately a good thing.

The question all of this begs is just what will fill the vacuum: what will the popstar of the near-future look like? The younger generation of up-and-coming popstars all seem cannily aware of their era. Singers like Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo, Chappell Roan, Sabrina Carpenter, and even Addison Rae are all savvy young women, versed in the contours of internet discourse, plugged into specifically Zoomer kinds of nostalgia, well-trafficked in internet “aesthetic” curation, and eager to declare themselves the vigilant students of previous popstars and eras. They’ve learned the lessons of Lana and Charli, working with specific producers (often Jack Antonoff, or The 1975’s Dan Nigro), rather than massive teams of rotating writers and engineers. And they each stand in unique relation to poptimist notions of “authenticity”. 

Two of these women have already reached levels of popularity to rival their forebears. Eilish initially seemed the most likely to become musically and aesthetically interesting, though she’s since backed away into far more conventional pop territory. Rodrigo has worked almost exclusively with Dan Nigro on both of her albums. And though she started off as something of a Taylor Swift copycat, her most recent record GUTS felt different. Compared to the ultra-compressed sound of contemporary pop, GUTS did spectacularly well without sacrificing great production and an actual dynamic range: certain tracks could’ve passed master on a Nineties alt-rock station. Sure, it’s pure throwback music, and the ballads are maudlin; there’s really nothing even vaguely experimental or new to be found anywhere on any of these young artists’ albums. But the anthems sounded bigger and better than just about anything else on Top 40 radio in the US or the UK Rodrigo became the first Zoomer starlet to make something that felt like good, solid, old-school pop-rock from a different time.

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This same kind of Zoomer nostalgia for the late 20th century also marks Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan’s music as well. For all Roan’s dramatic drag costumes and theatrical performances, the music is pure Eighties synth-pop and feels more cohesive and sounds better than any regular radio fare. Carpenter’s newest album Man’s Best Friend — which caused a firestorm of backlash online for its possibly-sexist album cover — is filled with lyrics straight out of the current internet discourse on dating woes and heterosexual resentment; but the music itself is pure Seventies AM radio, country, and the occasional Prince-lite Eighties disco track thrown in. Even if it’s relatively insubstantial, it still feels more “real” than most of the anonymous processed songs we’ve been subjected to for the past two decades. 

Strangest of all is Addison Rae — the massively successful TikTok dance star — who earlier this year released her debut album Addison to astonishingly good reviews, becoming the ultimate poptimist redemption story. She released a slew of grainy MTV-referencing music videos, rebranded herself as a fervent student of Madonna, and hunkered down with producers Elvira Anderfjärd and Luka Kloser to produce a record full of Nineties house, trip-hop throwbacks, and obvious nods to Brat. Infuriatingly, it sounds fantastic. Rae’s savvy turn was clearly meant to dazzle doubtful audiences with its sense of curated cool, and it worked: comments online are full of listeners in awe of the change, saying things like “this is how you rebrand”. It doesn’t matter whether she’s a particularly strong singer, or whether she actually wrote a single line. What matters to people is the sense that she played the re-brand game the smart way. Rather than chase the anonymous sounds of the charts, Rae pursued something that felt cohesive, and gestured toward an older sense of cool. It shows that the future for aspiring popstars like her may lie in cultivating good taste.

This is the strange legacy of the last days of poptimism. What began as a rejection of previous standards of cool has left us with decades of empty pop music, uncritical critics, and huge fandoms deeply resentful of anyone who suggests that the pop idols they worship are not brilliant simply because they’re massively wealthy and successful. The decline of poptimism has opened space for aspiring popstars to define themselves by their taste again. This is a step in the right direction. Still, the return of really exciting and adventurous pop music requires the return of authentic subcultures, too. This is going to be difficult: the victory of poptimism hampered the ability of subcultures to protect their sense of cool, just as it strangled the ability of critics to argue for anyone other than the most popular musical artists.

“The only alternative to criticism,” the great film critic Pauline Kael once said, “is advertising.” We have lived for many years now in a world that has increasingly collapsed the boundaries between the two. The job of critics now has to be to reject the market; to advocate again for neglected artists, and a sense of cool, and to push back against stan culture. But this also means recognizing and celebrating better pop music when it appears. If the young popstars are any indication, and the years of poptimism are giving way to a slight chance at a change for the better, then what artists need most is to be empowered to shift towards making good music for its own sake. This can only be done through the establishment of trustworthy critical voices. Such trustworthiness can only appear when enough people insist that art is not better simply because it’s more popular, and that commerce will always be a partial enemy to art. Do so long enough, and history tells us that audiences will eventually adjust. And it is at this point, when audiences really begin to adjust, that popular artists become free to make something truly new.