Does hating rock make you a music critic?

That's a sensible and humane suggestion, and critics would do well to bear it in mind not just when reckoning with The Céline, but other unfashionable performers and genres—Dave Matthews and frat-boy jam-band music leap to mind—that unlike, say, teen pop, aren't easily reclaimed as camp or saluted for their cool production values. In the meantime, poptimists might spend some time reflecting on what rockists got right. Rockism was a product of its own historical moment, a time when rock critics had to face down snobs on both their right and left flanks who dismissed the idea that pop music could ever be art at all. It's a pity that critics succeeded in beating back the cultural elitists by creating their own high-low hierarchies within pop, but to the extent that Madonna and Jay-Z are today spoken of as "artists" without anyone batting an eye, we all owe rockists a big-up.

It's also helpful to recognize that some truths lurk within rockist rhetoric. Traditional rock critics may spend too much time fetishizing, as Sanneh put it, "the underground hero," but if you ignore pop's fringes, you are probably missing tomorrow's chart-topping sound. (Remember that weird "techno music" that emerged from Detroit in the mid-'80s?) Sometimes pop music is crass and exploitative and vapid, and sometimes confessional songs delivered over Spartan folk-rock accompaniment do deliver emotional truths that high-gloss pop elides in its quest for the broadest possible appeal. The year 1966 was an awfully good one for pop music. So was 1972. Dylan does write one hell of a song, and I still haven't heard anyone who sings like Marvin Gaye. I'd never swap my record collection for a Mojo magazine subscriber's, but in a lot of ways the rockist canon-makers were spot on.

And it pays to remember that these categories mean little to the people who actually make music. Think of all the times that rock gods act like pop heroes and vice versa. Two of the best disco songs ever—"Miss You" and "Emotional Rescue"—were recorded by "The World's Greatest Rock 'n' Roll Band," the Rolling Stones. That supreme rockist icon, the concept album, was created by a pop singer named Frank Sinatra nearly two decades before the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

The rockist-poptimist polarity is often false, and even when it's not, must we choose sides? The overriding sentiment in those corners of the Internet where music nuts gather to discuss such issues is: I want both kinds of music, I want all kinds of music—and then some. Thanks to new technology we can gorge ourselves on the stuff like never before, and thanks to the shuffle feature all the old categories and genre distinctions start to look silly and melt into the digital haze. I shivered slightly the other day when I realized the song count on my iTunes had topped 11,000, but there's still plenty of room left on my 60 GB gadget, and I intend to fill it. Maybe the real guilty pleasure in 2006 is gluttony. As I reach for the mouse and click download again, I'm reminded of a song by ABBA, those capital-P pop wizards we have learned to love without apology: Gimme, Gimme, Gimme.