rockism en · NOUN
Etymology
From rock + -ism. See rock music.
Meanings
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(derogatory, uncountable) A kind of music snobbery that views rock music as superior or normative and values music with "authentic" production values over modern "manufactured" and electronic forms.
Near as a body could tell from here, rockism wasn’t just liking Yes and the Allman Brothers — it was liking London Calling.
1990 January 2, Robert Christgau, “1980–1989: Rockism Faces the World”, in The Village Voice, archived from the original on 16 Jan 2022:If the idea of rockism confused you, and you lazily thought Pink Floyd were automatically better than Gang of Four, and that good music had stopped with punk, you were a rockist and you were wrong.
2006 May 25, Paul Morley, “Rockism - it's the new rockism”, in The Guardian:By the mid-00s, rockism seemed suffocating. To move beyond it, [Kelefa] Sanneh suggested we envisage a world where “it’s impossible to separate classics from guilty pleasures” and try “to acknowledge that music videos and reality shows and glamorous layouts can be as interesting – and as influential – as an old-fashioned album”.
2025 September 28, Rachel Aroesti, “In an era of AI slop and mid TV, is it time for cultural snobbery to make a comeback?”, in The Guardian, →ISSN:The rockism debate began in earnest in the early 1980's, but over the past few years it has heated up, and today, in certain impassioned circles, there is simply nothing worse than a rockist.
2004 October 31, Kelefa Sanneh, “The Rap Against Rockism”, in The New York Times:Broadly speaking, rockism is the belief that rock is the most important form of popular music[…]
2008, Philip Auslander, Liveness: performance in a mediatized culture, page 126:You literally can't fight rockism, because the language of righteous struggle is the language of rockism itself.
2005, J. T. LeRoy, Paul Bresnick, Da Capo best music writing 2005, page 133: