rockism

rockism noun: 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.

Noun

rockism (uncountable)

(derogatory) 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
- 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
Antonyms:

popism, poptimism

Examples of rockism in a sentence

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:
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:
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:
By the mid-00s, rockism seemed suffocating.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...

Antonyms of rockism

Origin of rockism

From rock + -ism. See rock music.

Words formed from rockism

rockist

Questions about rockism

What does rockism mean?: Rockism means 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.
How do you use rockism in a sentence?: You literally can't fight rockism, because the language of righteous struggle is the language of rockism itself.
What part of speech is rockism?: Rockism is a noun.

Words near rockism in the dictionary

Adapted from Wiktionary: rockism (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated: 2026-09-02

Cite this entry: “rockism.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/rockism. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.