RIP Popjustice
a eulogy for a fixture in the online pop music community, and what it means for the pop conversation
The first time I engaged with Kylie Minogue’s music outside of her aughts radio hits was on a blog called Popjustice, which catered to pop fans worldwide but from a distinctly UK slant. They’d premiered her 2011 video for “Get Outta My Way,” and 15-year-old gay me was shook by both the visuals and the song. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, let alone that I’d had to go looking to stumble upon it. I couldn’t comprehend why this track wasn’t everywhere, even in rural Texas where I lived at the time.
Not that this online ecosystem of search-and-find was novel in 2011. (I’d missed the boat on Myspace and Napster. I was pirating music off LimeWire and Mediafire and MegaUpload, but I mostly stuck to Top 40 or whatever indie my band friends put me on.) The tools for finding music were everywhere. What I didn’t have was a way to find what was mine.
And there were blogs like Popjustice: curated platforms serving niche pop and European artists I surely would never have encountered otherwise. Sound of Arrows, Alphabeat, Nicola Roberts (her solo debut off Girls Aloud that went nowhere and now exists nowhere). Pitchfork existed as a tastemaker then, as did smaller outfits still in existence, Gorilla vs. Bear, Line of Best Fit, and the like. But they all turned their noses up at pop. (They’ve since come around, largely thanks to Carly Rae Jepsen, but that’s a story for another time.) So building a taste as a gay teen who loved pop meant something else entirely: spending days of my life in the Popjustice forums, trading gossip and recommendations, building a sense of humor with insufferable gay guys from around the world outdoing each other.
I love telling my boyfriend that I owe my career to Lady Gaga. I learned Photoshop and Premiere making graphics and fan tributes on Gagaboards, the forum offshoot of the GagaDaily fansite. Those fan edits were my first design education, years before I knew you could get paid for any of this.
I recently watched the movie All About Lily Chou-Chou on recommendation from a friend. Shunji Iwai’s 2001 film follows a group of Japanese teenagers whose offline lives are almost unwatchably cruel and whose only happiness happens on a fan forum devoted to an ethereal pop singer who doesn’t exist. They post into the dark about the Ether, their word for whatever it is her music does to them, and Iwai renders the messages as glowing text on a black screen. The film understands something I knew at fifteen and couldn’t have articulated: that shared devotion to pop music can be load-bearing. The kids don’t log on to be less alone, exactly. They gather around her, and the being less alone happens sideways.
It’s a bleak movie. The board can’t save anyone in it, and the film itself ends in a cruel turn, with anonymity keeping the boys tender online but merciless in person. (Iwai wrote the story in real time on an actual BBS, with users posting alongside him, so the film about a forum was literally born on one. The artifact and the subject are the same thing.) Iwai’s answer is that the Ether can’t hold. My story turned out a bit differently.
Friends I made on Popjustice and Gagaboards are still in my life. Some have families now. Some I see at Knockdown Center. When we do talk about it all, those early 2010’s feel like a fever dream we shared.
And now these sites are vanishing.
The end came fast. On April 10 of this year, Peter Robinson (who founded Popjustice in 2000 and had been mostly absent from it for years) posted that the forum would shut down on Sunday, April 26, severely short notice after 26 years of operation, with no archive plan and no explanation beyond a nod to there being lots of reasons.
The same day, the forum went members-only. Registrations had been closed for years, so the ending played out behind a locked door: those of us who lurked the forum were shut out of the goodbye. Robinson framed the closure as an opportunity, the chance to start over being not necessarily a bad thing. The members took him up on it, out of spite as much as sentiment. A group of them built Pop Square, a new forum without Robinson at the helm.
On April 26 the forum closed as planned. Twenty-six years, millions of posts: the gossip, the recommendation threads, the fights, the collective record of how pop fandom talked to itself for a quarter century. On Reddit, people called the deletion cruel and theorized that it had less to do with hosting costs than with a founder who had potentially come to resent the forums he built.
And Gagaboards hasn’t been spared from changing times either. The site, now an ad-riddled mess, was founded and run by a man the community knew only as Kirill. He went silent in February 2022, in the months after Russia invaded Ukraine, and the current admin will say only that he is alive, that his situation is “sensitive.” Kirill is gay, Russian, and said to have taken part in anti-war protests. I can only worry about what “sensitive” means.
In addition to Pop Square, the forum that rose to fill the Popjustice void, I find the spirit of the boards I loved in the r/popheads subreddit. It was founded as an offshoot of r/indieheads, after the latter wouldn’t allow new music posts for Carly Rae Jepsen’s 2015 Emotion (they’ve since come around, see a trend?), and the same silly, obsessive, insufferable, fun energy of those 2010s threads I lived in carries through.
I can only hope that gay teens in rural areas find the community and solace I did, as the places built for them keep disappearing into this Instagram hellscape, where everything is for sale and almost nothing is up for discussion.
EDIT: Important to note that another massive pop forum from the era, ATRL, is still live, though admittedly the ATRL experience was extremely intimidating for teen me and leaned a bit Britney-heavy for my own tastes :P
Thanks, as always, for reading! This was a fun piece to work on. Going to link to some of my favorite music that Popjustice introduced me to for nostalgia’s sake.
your mind <3