Our Idols Ditched Us For the Popular Kids Before We Could Even Kill Them*
Trying to impose a narrative on a decade’s music might be like trying to blanket a sprawling metropolis with a handkerchief—it’s all just too vast—but in retrospect it does seem significant, that over a six month stretch in 2010 nearly every major indie act of the ’00s released an album that signaled a sort of bowing out. Broken Social Scene and the Hold Steady released solid, unimaginative retreads of their best work, indie comfort food that suggested their greatest days had ended with the Bush administration; Sufjan Stevens offered a cool, innovative fuck-you to everyone that’d fallen in love with Illinois; Wolf Parade and LCD Soundsystem up and quit, to be shortly followed by BSS in ‘11; and The National and Arcade Fire (and LCD Soundsystem, and to varying degrees all bands thus far mentioned) stopped being “indie rock” bands and, in sound and spirit and sales, became the major no-qualifier Rock bands they’d been angling to become since before some intern ever said “how about a trend piece on hipsters?”**
It wasn’t an out-of-nowhere invasion of the mainstream, a la Nirvana and the grunge that still haunts our archaic radios; think of it more like a slow migration, or a loosening of border security. The Big Moments, when the bands that belonged to “us”*** definitively took up residence in the Greater Mainstream—LCD Soundsystem’s MSG show, Arcade Fire’s Grammy win, the National’s #3 Billboard debut, behind Bieber—were, collectively, the explosive overture to a decade in which the word “indie” became a sort of Rorschach test: To you it could mean a certain strand of guitar rock, or a certain style of jean, or the systematic destruction of long-held subcultural ideals by cunning vodka and footwear executives, or—what it certainly means to the handful of Americans without Tumblrs, and probably many with Tumblrs—nothing.
At some point last year, after the confetti from that MSG show had been cleared and you finally unfollowed the Who is Arcade Fire? Tumblr, it became clear that things would never be the same in Indieland, that this aforementioned and long-gestating border-loosening had permanently changed indie’s relationship with itself and with whatever now can plausibly be said to constitute the mainstream. Poptimism reached its peak: Beyonce and Lady Gaga were given just as much if not more critical attention and adulation as the “big” indie acts; suddenly, at least to me, the ingrained alt-divisions between “us” and “them” started to seem even more pathetically meaningless, inherited relics of an earlier era. (Maybe this is growing up?) This was of course abetted by yet another exciting product of this border-loosening: Acts like the Weeknd and Frank Ocean, products of mainstream/indie cross-pollinations that were/are exponentially more exciting than the heroes we’re just now in the process of building up, like for example Bon Iver, who couldn’t even wait to get to album #2 before flying away from “us” in a Kanye-piloted jet fueled by Bushmill’s whiskey.
And yet even as we take extended trips across the border into the Greater Mainstream, putting aside long-held cultural assumptions and prejudices to the point where saying you dislike pop music is roughly as cool as wearing a t-shirt with a hilarious ironic slogan plastered on it, we’ve at the same time taken a tip from the US government and strengthened our own border controls. For a little while last year Lana Del Rey tried posing as a native, dressing up in our clothes and using our audio/visual signifiers and attracting the attention of our media. And when she was outed as an impostor—when her passport was discovered to have been doctored by a team of specialists—we made her shame-walk back over the border, yelling in her ear the whole time. What Sasha Frere-Jones gets wrong when he says that nobody complains about Meryl Streep not really being a queen so why should we care about Lana Del Rey not really being a gangster Nancy Sinatra is this: Indie listeners expect that sort of thing from mainstream pop music. It’s part of the fun—all these people and all this money expended in the service of creating the sort of larger-than-life personas that can, in a rational and increasingly destitute universe, make a cool million simply by sipping a Sprite on television. But in the indie world which LDR at first appeared to grow organically out of, authenticity is paramount—one gets the sense, after all this nauseating back and forth which here I am contributing to, that the ideal indie record would be the band’s hearts hand-pressed into CD shapes and sold directly to the fans though Etsy. Ironically, had LDR marketed herself a mainstream pop star with a taste for alt-aesthetics, as opposed to an alt-musician with crossover appeal, none of this apocalyptic, internet-consuming stuff might ever have happened. (I think this is also why some indie-leaning folks feel personally slighted by the existence of inoffensive acts like Foster the People.)
Of course, it’d be insane to suggest that the rise of Poptimism and PBR+B and anti-LDR sentiment is entirely attributable to a couple of (mostly) unrelated bands doing their jobs, i.e. releasing music and touring behind it and not shying away when more people than they might otherwise have expected take a liking to it. These bands quitting, or leaving “our” world, or making comforting cases for their irrelevance: They gave us room to breathe, an opportunity for us to make some new idols. Every member of every act under discussion (sans LDR) is over 30. Our new heroes are just beginning to emerge, a whole new crop of twentysomethings who never got the memo that guitar rock is irrelevant, who are priming their lungs to command MSG’s microphone in 2018, who are reinterpreting sets of influences far removed from the post-punk/Springsteen/AM radio hodgepodge that sustained ’00s indie (think Cloud Nothings, whose unironic embrace of emo/pop-punk influences a girl I’ve met twice but have been texting regularly for two years once offered as evidence of a significant generational shift). They’re the bands whose reunion tour tickets kids currently suffering through high school math will be buying, secondhand, ten years from now, and to this future breed of hipsters, kids who may never really have gotten the “us vs. them” mentality , the Hold Steady’ll just be another band mentioned offhand in record reviews. “Craig Finn’s verbal dexterity melded to music that recalls Arcade Fire at their everything-including-the-church-organ peak,” this future music critic will write, tearing up at the fond remembrance of knowing who Arcade Fire was when other people did not, and laughing at those people. “Recommended.”
*Not that we would have anyway.
**Other big ’00s acts that, in the time since, have proved that they’ll probably never do anything to exciting again: Interpol, The Strokes, The New Pornographers,
***Sorry if you take offense at my persistently using “us” and “we” in this post, either because you’d rather not be associated with a mouth-breathing miscreant like myself or because you consider yourself a member of any one of the thousands of other equally valid and important musical subcultures out there.
