There’s actually a shitload of hiphop artists rapping about finding hidden artifacts in temples & rooms and it’s not strictly limited to sonic adventure 2
I'm sure the shift over the last 5 years from hip-hop to country as the "youthful rebellion music" of choice has been written about to death in some circles, but I haven't seen much of that discourse myself and so I'll add my two cents here - I hope I'm wrong about this and that the situation is much more complicated/simple than what I'm about to say, but I have several non-mutually-exclusive theories that could explain it:
An aging millennial generation is finding it harder to keep up with the constant churn of hip-hop culture's turnover of stars/slang/styles and is retreating to country as a "simpler" kind of music that they can follow more easily.
A more risk-averse gen-Z is less captivated by the stylistic adventurousness of hip-hop than previous generations; to them, it appears too "fad-ish" (never mind the past near-50 years of the genre) and they look to something seemingly more "timeless" like country.
Both generations have been subject to such hyper-moralizing tendencies over the last decade that a kind of exhaustion has set in with trying to separate "good" from "bad" in hip-hop, therefore they turn to country (which is not necessarily better on a moral level, but has historically made appearing to be moral a major part of the genre's image).
Somewhat related to that last point: intensified discourse about racism and cultural appropriation over the last decade has left white people of both generations increasingly wary of engaging with a culture that isn't "their own", thus they turn towards country as a mythical substitute for their "own" culture.
Somewhere between the 80s and the 2000s, the sound of rock music changed drastically, marking a near-complete break with the influences that went into the genre prior to that point. Then, between the 2000s and 2020s, it changed again. Join me in a 5-ish part essay series as I investigate exactly how this happened, and the roles that "emo" and "indie rock" as cultural phenomena can be said to have played in the process.
An addendum to my series of essays, The Big Split.
Introduction
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Despite my best attempts to distinguish the emo/pop-punk and indie scenes as separate phenomena, the facts cannot be ignored: like almost all dichotomies, it is a false one. Several bands during the period I have been writing about could not easily be categorized as one or the other, and I will attempt to collect all those I can think of below and explain how their hybrid approaches prevented them from sitting comfortably in either camp. It should also be noted: every one of the bands below has made at least some great music and is worth checking out if you’re a fan of either side of the (once again, false) binary.
Los Campesinos!
Perhaps the most obvious example, this high-energy band may owe something of its mixed heritage to its originating from Wales. I know nothing whatsoever about the Welsh music scene, I’m just speculating that perhaps weird stuff goes on there! Listen to their excellent debut “Hold On Now, Youngster...” and you’ll hear the ricochet guitar lines and driving punk beats of emo, but there’s also something undeniably twee and clever and open-hearted in the lyrics that signifies an indie rock upbringing (not to mention weird voices, all kinds of messy group vocals and violin/glockenspiel riffs).
Funny enough, “Hold On Now, Youngster...” came out in 2008, almost exactly the year in which you can start to notice a shift from emo towards indie rock in the cultural preference. Even funnier, Los Campesinos! defiantly avoided chasing this trend; with subsequent releases, they seemed to get more aggressively emo-like in spite of that sound going out of fashion. A strange case for sure.
Modest Mouse
I know what you’re thinking: “Come on, Modest Mouse is obviously an indie rock band! Float On is one of the all-time hipsters-made-it-too-big-for-them-to-consider-it-cool-anymore anthems!” Ah, but what do you know about Modest Mouse prior to “Float On”? If you go back far enough, you’ll hit their 1996 debut album “This Is A Long Drive For Someone With Nothing To Think About”, on which you’ll hear the ragged roar of “Head South” which sports a chorus abrasive enough for an At The Drive-In song. And though Modest Mouse’s sound on those early albums might seem more rooted in the classic off-kilter funk of post-punk bands of the 80s, they clearly absorbed some Fugazi and Rites Of Spring in there too; even their last album prior to hitting it big, “The Moon And Antarctica”, ends with the raging “What People Are Made Of”, which could definitely fit in alongside a number of other proto-emo groups (albeit outshining most of them in all likelihood).
Given this context, some of their output even post-“Good News For People Who Love Bad News” can reveal its emo influence if examined from the right angle. The longer-form jams on the underrated “No One’s First And You’re Next” EP(?) are a case in point.
The Front Bottoms
These guys emerged adjacent to the booming “folk-punk” scene that I have neglected to mention in my discussion partly because it’s something of an anomaly in the narrative: while the whole indie rock craze was taking place, a whole new generation of kids raised on pop-punk created a small, parallel scene that sort of co-existed with indie rock by ditching emo bombast for fuck-you protest folk as its MO. Aside from a few notable exceptions (the single greatest album of this era is probably Wingnut Dishwashers Union’s “Burn The Earth, Leave It Behind” if you want to hear folk-punk at its best), most of it sucked; the songwriting was spotty at best and tended towards a kind of hopelessness that did little to inspire the politics its scenesters tended to preach.
So calling the Front Bottoms “folk-punk” would be misleading, but it seems like they nevertheless got some kind of boost from a loose association with it because of Brian Sella’s awkward voice and delivery – plus they used acoustic guitars at least as much as electric, so they must be “folk”, right? The band did hit a lot of familiar notes from the emo songbook in terms of broken relationships, but fortunately, Sella has an ear for detail and a knack for cutting remarks that made his band stand out from the crowd (if his voice and their sound weren’t enough alone). Even as the band moved towards the more “professional” and got less folky and more straight-up “rock” on later releases, the voice and lyrics never compromised, giving them a scrappier sound than most pop-punk bands and ensuring they had at least some appeal towards the indie sphere as well.
The Dismemberment Plan
Probably the oldest band I’ll write about here, the Dismemberment Plan’s heyday ends prior to the takeoff of either of the two subgenres I focused on – they released their last pre-reunion album of their “classic” era in 2001 before their first breakup in 2003. Wikipedia describes them as an ‘“emo-tinged” indie rock band’, but I’d say it’s more accurate to reverse that and call them an “indie-tinged” emo band. There’s no lack of technical display in their complex grooves to the point that you might even consider them precursors to later prog-emo fusions like Protest The Hero. But they’ve also got a knack for jagged funk you usually only hear in those raised on the Minutemen and Gang Of Four (influences that carried over into the indie movement, but rarely into emo), plus singer Travis Morrison liked to ditch the professionalism for detours into speak-singing as on the iconic “The Ice Of Boston”.
Their progginess tending less towards an opportunity for showboating than a desire to disorient the audience (and possibly themselves), the group sometimes feels like the emo-world equivalent of Radiohead, and with their 1999 masterpiece “Emergency & I”, they made their very own “OK Computer” and “Kid A” combined into one. This reference point again aligns them somewhat more with indie (at least by the British understanding of it) than emo, but they remain hard to pin down: there are keyboards, minimalist moves and ambiguous tonalities all over “Emergency”, but they textures are less hazy than crisp and distinct in the production. Few other bands on either side of the divide sound like them, and they’ve been better off for it.
Bomb The Music Industry!
Possibly the least-known band I’m writing about here, this one started as a one-man-band side project from ska-punks The Arrogant Sons Of Bitches, which I would normally say aligns them definitively with the pop-punk side of things, and the early albums don’t necessarily disprove that assumption (though the songwriting is better and wittier than the contemporary average).
But once Jeff Rosenstock took on the project as his main band and continued to build its lineup and sound, his non-pop-punk influences crept into the picture, making things (to paraphrase one of his songs) “saddr and weirdr”. One of the group’s pinnacles, 2009’s “Scrambles”, takes a Springsteenian attack on the quarter-life-crisis anthem (actually, there’s more than one on the album) “Fresh Attitude Young Body”, which I could easily imagine another punk-oriented indie rock band like the Japandroids covering. Their next (and sadly, last) full album, “Vacation”, took the Beach Boys’ harmonies into the fold and doubled down on the Arcade Fire-style maximalism – if glockenspiels are a sign of kindred spirits to indie rock, “Why, Oh Why, Oh Why (Oh Oh Oh Oh)” had them covered on that front. Plus, jokes about it in “Vocal Coach” aside, Rosenstock never really learned to sing “properly”, giving him a hoarse shout that always left him more than a bit at odds with the professionalism of big-name pop-punk. [I’m not writing a whole thing here about them, but for more of this kind of approach, see another of Rosenstock’s major influences and contemporaries, Titus Andronicus, especially “The Monitor”.]
Les Savy Fav
Or is this the least-known band I’ll be covering? It feels like they never really got their due, but maybe this was partly because their hybrid sound failed to appeal enough to either side of the divide. Maybe they just had bad timing? Like Los Campesinos!, they released a breakthrough album (though not their debut) in 2007. For Les Savy Fav, it marked a shift from post-hardcore to a more experimental sound leaning towards indie rock at times (as on the minimalist approach of opener “Pots & Pans” or the dubby “Brace Yourself”). “Let’s Stay Friends” is a great album, but maybe it just wasn’t committed enough to one side or the other to break them through commercially. The follow-up “Root For Ruin” continued in the same vein and is also worth hearing for those seeking a middle-ground between emo and indie rock, though it leaned a little heavier back into the post-hardcore.
The band proceeded to not release anything for another 14(!) years, though they broke the streak and apparently released one last year. I haven’t heard it yet and therefore can’t report back on whether or not they’ve continued on the same subgenre-agnostic path.
Brand New
Let’s get it out of the way: lead singer Jesse Lacey was accused of sexual assault in the past. You can read about it if you want, and the story certainly doesn’t make him look good. The band has seemingly been in limbo ever since the allegation came forward in 2017.
But I’m not writing this blurb about that, so I won’t say anything more about it. Instead, I need to include these guys here because of one particular album they made that single-handedly changed their trajectory and now feels weirdly prophetic in hindsight: 2006’s “The Devil And God Are Raging Inside Me”. On that album, what was formerly a mediocre cookie-cutter emo band just three years prior transformed into a seething ball of noise, somehow seemingly predicting the fall of the squeaky-clean production that dominated the Scene at the time by making its expressive limitations more obvious than ever. It opens with a tetralogy of brooding anthems before diving into a sort of trance with the slow-burning “Limousine”, featuring a fuzzed-out, repetitious ending that seems to draw more from post-rock than post-hardcore. Similarly, instrumentals like “Welcome To Bangkok” and “-” feel out-of-place in the 2006 emo landscape, sounding more like a goth version of Broken Social Scene. Even Pitchfork liked this one! If I had been a few years older and heard it when it came out (rather than circa 2010), I might have predicted this as a sign that the band was set to become the emo version of Sonic Youth.
Shame about what happened – it seems like they might have really been on to something for a minute there.
The Big Split, Pt. 4: The Decline Of Indie And Conclusion
Part 4 in my series of essays, The Big Split.
Introduction
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Loose Ends
In January of 2012, Pitchfork’s excellent column “Why We Fight”, written by Nitsuh Abebe, published an article titled “Your Chemical Romance”. If you haven’t read this article, you should stop reading this right now and go do that first, because it’s going to be essential context for understanding what I’m about to get into next. But before we go there, there’s a last bit of indie rock history to finish covering.
Mumford & Sons formed in 2007, the same year Bon Iver released his acclaimed “For Emma, Forever Ago”. They released their debut in 2009, one year after the Fleet Foxes had released their own to Pitchfork’s enthusiastic embrace. This is not to imply that Mumford & Sons sounded anything like Bon Iver or the Fleet Foxes; far from it, they instead felt like a kind of Jungian shadow to these two more well-received artists. If Bon Iver and the Fleet Foxes made folk music that felt insular and, at times, mystical, Mumford & Sons made brash, loud folk music made for shout-along choruses in barrooms and concert halls. One side appealed to the bookish tastes of critics and indie “snobs”, the other appealed to the lowest common denominator.
This populist approach to folkiness wasn’t entirely without precedent in indie rock. Not to sound like a broken record, but Arcade Fire (once again) had a certain folky approach to much of their earlier rock, and “brash, loud folk music made for shout-along choruses” also describes several of the songs from “Funeral” through to “The Suburbs”, with possibly “Neon Bible” having the highest quotient. You can even trace a bit of this back to Neutral Milk Hotel, who, while not exactly “anthemic” by the usual standards, nevertheless featured a number of raucous, rousing melodies on “In The Aeroplane Over The Sea”.
But something felt different about the way Mumford & Sons did it; whereas the other bands felt like they were pouring their hearts out by sheer coincidence of the power of the sentiment their songs happened to be tackling, Mumford & Sons’ songs sounded... “arena-ready”, for lack of a better word. Calculated. Like they were designed in a lab to get the crowds going, playing to certain songwriting tropes involving gradual dynamic builds and strategically-placed rhythmic cut-off points. One of the closest precedents for their sound I can see prior to the band’s explosion in popularity is the much-less-well-known Canadian indie rock band Hey Rosetta!, themselves sounding a little like Arcade Fire-apers with stomping, frantically strummed anthems all over their 2008 album “Into Your Lungs”.
There was little else to describe what Mumford & Sons had done within the genre in 2009 other than to keep calling it “indie folk”, albeit in a watered-down form, as many critics (and myself) would quickly allege. But in the years since the peak of the band’s popularity (and the peak of those other also-rans that accompanied their meteoric rise in the early 2010s), some clever people on the internet have been so helpful as to provide us with a new name for this subgenre: “stomp-clap-hey”, in mockery of its most frequently leaned-on musical devices. And this, it turned out, was the rope from which the indie movement would secure its demise.
***
Stomp-clap-hey didn’t take off immediately, though. That first Mumford & Sons album was a hit, but it didn’t dominate the conversation just yet. The somewhat-memorable “Little Lion Man” got a good bit of exposure and the album earned itself a harsh review from Pitchfork, even by their standards. That review speaks to something interesting in the air, something that might help to reveal how the indie rock scene would eventually tear itself apart in the wake of what was to come: Pitchfork specifically zeroed in on the album’s use of “expressiveness” and “authenticity” as empty signifiers put to use for pure showmanship in order to get the crowds going. This really plays into that paradox I had previously mentioned about indie rock and its dilemma in relation to irony and sincerity: a band could be achingly sincere or bitingly ironic, but if a band was suspected of being insincerely sincere (only “posturing” as sincere), that would not be tolerated in the slightest. Folkiness was expected to be sincere, so for a band like Mumford & Sons to be commercializing that sentiment seemed almost sacreligious.
The band’s legend, however, grew over the next several years; it turns out there was quite an appetite for this kind of forced sincerity among those who didn’t read Pitchfork. To them, it likely felt like a more palatable form of Arcade Fire, who, while breaking through to the mainstream after their Grammy, had something unmistakably “weird” about them (and “The Suburbs” really leans into that weirdness on some moments like the noisy textures of “Empty Room” and “Month Of May”, or the eerie chant of the chorus on “Rococo”). Here was a band with an urgent, emotional sound and old-timey instruments that also seemed safe enough to play as background music at a bar.
By 2012, the indie boom was in full swing, and it was then that Mumford & Sons really went in for the kill. Their second album “Babel” didn’t sell quite as well as their first, but it had their biggest-ever hit single which became virtually inescapable for the year following its release: “I Will Wait”, perhaps the epitome of the stomp-clap-hey sound with its slow build, swelling chorus and frantic banjo picking, proved a mega-hit that temporarily eclipsed the whole indie-sphere.
It may seem a little strange to think of now, but this song single-handedly caused a bit of an identity crisis for the indie movement at the time. On the one hand, indie bands (and the press that followed them, such as Pitchfork) were just getting comfortable with the idea of becoming more famous than they had ever previously dreamed of being. On the other hand, fans and journalists in the scene didn’t want their movement misunderstood or misrepresented. The sudden rise of a band like Mumford & Sons which, to many, had all the hallmarks of an “indie folk” group, was a seemingly worst-case scenario: not only was a new band becoming instantly famous (almost suspiciously so, some would think), this band was playing a bastardization of the tradition these erstwhile-outsiders had spent so long developing.
And Mumford & Sons wasn’t the end of it; the whole next year would prove that the public had quite an appetite for this new stomp-clap-hey sound. Two months prior to the single release of “I Will Wait”, an American folk band with only slightly more subtelty to their sound released their own take on the formula with “Ho Hey”. The song took off not long after “I Will Wait” did, demonstrating the new vogue for faux-artisinal campfire singalongs. A year later, Australian folky Vance Joy got in on the trend with his own dully anthemic “Riptide”, cut from the same cloth as “Ho Hey”.
To be clear, none of these artists were collaborating at the time to my knowledge, and there was no broader or dedicated effort to push this kind of stuff onto the charts. That doesn’t matter, and in fact only furthers my point about the trend: stomp-clap-hey was not born from a true movement, set of ideals, or scene – it was simply the result of a public that jumped on what was perceived to be a new sound and decided it was more meaningful to them than whatever Arcade Fire, The Strokes, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, TV On The Radio, Broken Social Scene, Spoon, etc. were up to at the time.
Well, maybe “new” is the wrong word for the stomp-clap-hey sound – some of the appeal almost certainly lay in its hollow rusticism. There’s an interesting way in which you can frame the sudden boom in the sound’s popularity as a reaction to an indie scene that was increasingly dabbling with (and making concessions to) the heavily-synthesized production of mainstream pop. There was certainly a search for something “real”, and though it would be a bit of a mockery of indie folk to call the stomp-clap-hey wave “real”, it was real enough to the impressionable teenagers and young adults who fell in love with it at the tail end of the early-2010s.
But unlike the indie rock movement, whose music was difficult to pin down to a specific sound, stomp-clap-hey followed certain very formulaic genre conventions which made it ripe for parody. Indeed, by 2013, Mumford & Sons were even poking fun of their own image with their video for the song “Hopeless Wanderer”. And, following the natural life cycle of trends like these, the hype began to die down. Stomp-clap-hey didn’t exactly disappear overnight (its influence can, unfortunately, still be felt today, proving there’s still quite an audience that looks upon its moment with a kind of nostalgia at least), but it seemed to get diminishing returns as the 2010s wore on. Mumford & Sons themselves got tired of the “authenic folk” schtick and tried on arena rock and radio-friendly pop costumes for their next two albums in 2015 and 2018 respectively. Can you even name a Vance Joy or Lumineers song post-2016?
***
So stomp-clap-hey arrived on the scene, pulled an effective party foul on the whole indie rock boom, and promptly faded into irrelevance, seemingly dragging the movement it had embarrassed to much with it. But is that the whole story, or is there another reason the indie scene lost its grip in the wake of its cultural ascent? I had previously claimed that it was sincerity, not irony, that doomed the hipsters – specifically the cringe-inducing sincerity of the stomp-clap-hey hitmakers. Perhaps, however, I’ve neglected to take note of a misstep on the other side of that dichotomy.
Right at the peak of stomp-clap-hey’s moment in the spotlight, a certain singer-songwriter happened to release her second EP – self-titled, as was the publicly-and-critically-ignored album that preceded it. One particular song off that EP became a breakaway hit over the course of 2012; it was a mournful ballad with lyrics that seemed to hint at a relationship gone wrong through neglect, boredom and anhedonia, featuring lush, expensive-sounding production with swelling piano chords and strings. This song was “Video Games”, and it was the first major success of the singer now known as Lana Del Rey.
At the time, an anonymous blogger under the name of Carles happened to run a sort of parody site around the whole indie rock culture called “Hipster Runoff”. His whole style epitomized the mocking irony that had become synonymous with hipster culture – he was significantly more unhinged-sounding than even early Pitchfork reviews, albeit Carles did it with a kind of winking self-awareness, always joking about staying “alt and relevant”. Something about Lana Del Rey’s sudden rise, however, seemed to break this guy. I mention this particular case, footnote in the culture that it may be, because it now feels like a bit of canary in the coal mine for what was about to happen to the state of the indie rock scene over the next few years.
Because the kind of image Lana Del Rey projected turned out to be a complicated and divisive one. Part of the reason she uniquely seemed to be able to drive Carles insane was due to it being very difficult to tell how much of her performance was meant to be interpreted with a kind of winking irony. Her arrival in the music scene took place largely through “indie”-aligned blogs and sites hyping her, but she clearly came from the mainstream industry. The retro/nostalgia orientation in her musical and visual aesthetics could be seen as a genuine love for old things, or she could be parodying nostalgia in the sense of exposing its “dark side” in a more ham-handed version of what David Lynch accomplished with “Blue Velvet”. And though “Video Games” seemed like a lament for a hopeless relationship, Lana herself claimed that its chorus was meant to be taken at face-value and that there was nothing ironic about it.
Essentially, it was impossible to tell if she was joking or not, and not in a fun, winking way where we could all laugh about it – those who entered the “Is she serious?” debate surrounding Lana Del Rey tended to walk away with strong convictions. People tended to love her or hate her, and often those in the same camp would love or hate her for entirely different reasons than others (actually, all of this is still true about Lana, who has had an unfortunately lengthy career and is still generating buzz at the time of writing this). This very confusion surrounding the Shcrodinger’s-hipster aspect of her image was an effective marketing tool in some ways, but it alienated others in other ways, and neither turned out to be good news for the world of indie rock that had previously thrived in this type of ambiguity. For those who found the whole thing to convoluted to bother to work it out, the ride stopped there; I can’t say Lana Del Rey was solely responsible, but many who were previously on board for the indie boom certainly starting to lose interest in it in the years after she rose to prominence. I strongly suspect this was at least partially based in an exasperation with a culture that seemed unable to make up its mind over whether or not irony was a desirable goal or not.
By contrast, those who stuck it out with Lana largely came to view her as some kind of genius (albeit, again, often for very different reasons among the fanbase). This led to a kind of worship, which, if it could ever be maintained for something purely ironic, couldn’t usually last very long that way unless the object of worship became venerated as a genuine deity of sorts. And so Lana Del Rey came to be seen (somehow) as a “truly great” “songwriter” among her fans, a reputation that demanded some kind of serious respect if you were to buy into it at all. Those on this track would likely find themselves gradually abandoning the hipster cult of irony given that it would be hard to maintain if they wanted to be even half-consistent in their principles.
***
And that’s the best I can explain it. Somewhere between Mumford & Sons and Lana Del Rey, the indie movement went astray and landed somewhere in the weeds as its biggest stars deviated further and further from its original ideals and the remaining hangers-on found diminishing returns from a dwindling fanbase that had any interest in how they could ride the momentum of their earlier careers into something new.
Speaking of which, there was one last nail in the indie rock coffin that seemed to seal its fate: in 2017, 4 years after “Reflektor”, Arcade Fire released their most controversial album to date. Its wind-up was promising at first, with a well-received ABBA-inspired lead single that mocked the excesses of modern consumerist capitalism while simultaneously reaching out for some kind of lost spiritual connection across space and time that seemed possible only through those very excesses. But the album, “Everything Now”, was almost instantly reviled on release; critics complained that it was too cynical and floundered in its vision and songwriting.
Personally, I never understood these criticisms, and my view aligns very much (unfortunately) with Win Butler’s own comments about said reviews: it was as if a new generation of rock critics with no sense of humour had suddenly come into power, and this cohort had no patience for the ironic cleverness that anchored most of the album’s songs. But it wasn’t just the critics: Arcade Fire even managed to alienate a good chunk of their fanbase with the album, leaving the band scrambling to figure out their next move and the indie rock scene suddenly devoid of an at-creation champion still actively producing albums to get excited about. If ever there was a sign, it was this: “Everything Now” was living proof that by 2017, “indie rock” had lost much of the lustre that carried it through the earlier years of the decade.
***
But, as I argued at the beginning of this series, indie rock’s death, like emo’s, did not mean it disappeared entirely from the pop landscape. The influence of both genres has, over the last 6 years, heavily shaped the sounds of various up-and-coming rock bands, leading to a new generation of rock radio wildly removed from the post-grunge masses that used to dominate.
Granted, those post-grunge bands are gone entirely; “dad rock”, which in my day used to mean Steely Dan and Steppenwolf, has now moved up a couple generations to semantically accommodate the endless Nickelback impersonators that still occupy a not-insignificant share of the modern rock market. What’s significant is that that now seems to be the niche. Whereas before this “dad rock” (back when most of those dads were still teenagers) would have taken the centre stage while the pop-punk and indie stuff got relegated to “alternative” status, the “alternative” is now the mainstream...much like how the originally-“alternative” grunge bands of the 90s slowly morphed into the mainstream post-grunge bands of the 2000s.
This is significant, and its impact is clearly visible on further examination. For one thing, the biggest modern rock band in the world (to my knowledge), Imagine Dragons, sounds like the worst possible combination of emo and indie influences: all of the bombast and vagueness, none of the interesting lyrics or musical ideas. Same goes for the (not quite as popular, but still big) Bastille. But there are other, less awful examples. Twenty One Pilots have managed to concoct a strange blend of indie rock, pop-punk, electronic music and hip-hop that somehow isn’t as terrible as that sounds (at least most of the time). The 1975 might be the most complete synthesis of indie and emo aesthetics to date, and they’ve even written a few decent songs (though rarely enough for a fully album by my estimates – see my past review of “A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships” for more on this). The overall trend in the mainstream notion of what “rock” is right now has, it seems, been undeniably shaped by the twin forces of the two genres whose histories I have just outlined, and it’s reached the point that this new conception of “rock” often bears little resemblance to what would have been pointed to as the gold standard in the genre 20 years ago. Contrary to popular belief, this is not simply the work of some deterritorializing “monogenre” in pop music as a whole; it is the specific result of two different traditions in alternative music coming together to change the face of one very specific genre by normalizing what were once fringe tendencies. And that’s why both the vagueness/fuzziness/scrappiness/irony of indie rock AND the high drama/technical accomplishment/precision/clarity of pop-punk and emo are now recognizably parts of what constitute rock as a genre in the modern sense of it.
Even in the underground, this phenomenon seems to be taking hold, which speaks to future generations that might also end up absorbing both influences by proxy: hyperpop chaos gremlins 100 gecs clearly paid attention to the early-2000s electroclash-y NYC “indie sleaze” days, but they also must have absorbed at least as much pop-punk and emo. I wouldn’t be surprised if we continue to see more (and stranger) hybrids emerging over the years, some of which is likely to catch on in the mainstream.
***
I wish I could say the story ends here, but I still have some loose ends to tie up. You see, of the two genres whose histories I’ve just tried to summarize, one has made a major comeback over the last several years. If you’ve read the Pitchfork article I added as a prerequisite to the start of this section, you probably know what’s coming. Just as Abebe predicted, demographic shifts ensured that an aging millennial population would eventually come into play as a major commercial force of nostalgia, and most of this nostalgia turned out to be for the early-2000s wave of pop-punk and emo.
There were some memes in the earlier days of the phenomenon, mostly within the tail end of the indie rock era. The main one became something of a slogan: “Defend pop-punk!” It was meant to be semi-ironic, considering most people had realized at this point that pop-punk was hardly considered “cool” anymore, but that dynamic turned out to be just what was needed to provide the genre with some underdog status, which emboldened the slogan’s users to become more and more sincere in their rallying cry.
Just what was pop-punk being “defended” from? The nasty critics and hipsters, most likely, who thought it was too “lowbrow” for them. By contrast, pop-punk was being championed as a new music “for the people”, and regardless of whether this was actually true, the generational numbers were there to back up the claim. Within a few years, pop-punk (and emo by extension) came to be seen as a phenomenon that, once the shame of millennials, should instead be embraced by that very cohort as its “own” music, the mythical “generation-defining” sound.
This particular wave of nostalgia’s power has been near-absolute in its historical revisionism; to many, it’s now as if the whole indie rock movement never even happened, or was at best a footnote or blip in the history of pop-punk’s rise to cultural dominance. One key sign of the shift in the form of a notable cultural event: disgraced white rapper Machine Gun Kelly’s choosing pop-punk as his genre of choice when he (wisely) decided to pivot away from hip-hop (recent reports tell me this trend-hopper has since moved on to country!). But the biggest sign of the shift came in the form of the announcement of the When We Were Young music festival, which I actually thought was a joke when I first saw it: a quick glance at the list on any given year since its beginnings in 2022* typically contains a laundry list of names seeming curated to invoke some sort of sleeper response in millennials that will cause them to shuffle mindlessly to the nearest Hot Topic.
***
What are we missing here? We’re missing a rich history, and we’re partially obscuring the very origins of the kinds of rock we’re about to see redefine the genre in the near future. We’re also losing the sonic diversity of the indie rock movement, which I have always seen as containing a far wider variety of interesting artistic ideas than emo (even if not all of them worked). So my final statement in this history is something of a call to arms: don’t let them forget, there’s more than one side to the story! As we veer ever deeper into a world of commercially-controlled musical landscape and anti-consumer-choice design with the advent of streaming, I feel it’s more important than ever to preserve the memory of those moments in musical history when the music of the time didn’t align as smoothly with corporate interests as the those at the top would have liked it to be – those times when the “next big thing” really did come from out of left-field rather than the backrooms of the industry.
[Footnotes]
*Apparently the first version took place in 2017, but by all signs it didn’t really come into its own until 2022, so I’m treating that year as its first real one.
The Big Split, Pt. 3: The Fall Of Emo, The Rise Of Indie
Part 3 in my series of essays, The Big Split.
Introduction
Part 1
Part 2
Part 4
Loose Ends
In 2010, indie rock band Arcade Fire released their album “The Suburbs”. It was a loose concept album about...growing up in the suburbs, but it also touched briefly on impending climate crisis, cultural divisions, urban sprawl and the pains of leaving childhood (and then adolescence) behind. It featured unconventional instruments and arrangements for a rock band at that time, including violins and french horns. Despite competition featuring household names like Eminem, Lady Gaga and Katy Perry, the band won Album Of The Year at the 53rd Grammys, making them the first independent artist to do so and prompting a flurry of people frantically googling “Who is Arcade Fire?”. And with this sudden bump in exposure, the band nearly broke through to platinum sales with the album despite failing to reach gold certification in the US with their previous two.*
You’ve probably already heard this story. Outside of Win Butler’s recent disgraces, it’s the story you’re most likely to hear about Arcade Fire if someone wanted to explain how they got so big. But the success of “The Suburbs” meant more than a simple triumph for Arcade Fire; this one moment in rock history, like the releases of “American Idiot” and “The Black Parade” before it, changed the culture of the genre almost overnight. And to understand just how we got to that point, I think it’s only appropriate that we take a few steps back to pick up where we last left the Scene kids standing.
As we all know, the tides of culture are fickle; movements come and go over the years, and the emo craze was no exception. Somewhere between the release of “The Black Parade” and the Grammy victory for “The Suburbs”, the Scene took a wrong turn and steered itself out of fashion. But how exactly did this happen? I don’t necessarily have a definitive answer to that question, but I can speculate on a few possibilities.
The first is the fate of most subcultures: oversaturation. At the peak of the Scene phase, Scene kids were seemingly everywhere in media, especially online. As with hippies and punks before them, the broader population outside the Scene probably just got sick of seeing the same style being emulated by so many people, eventually coming to view them as “mindless followers” of the latest fashion trend. Over time, the aesthetic stopped being desirable; people were ready to move on to something different.
But I suspect there’s more to it than simple cultural fatigue with the caricatured punchline Scene kids became – there’s almost certainly a musical aspect to this as well. You see, it was all fine when “The Black Parade” took the rock world by storm; mainstream radio stations had little problem playing the hit title song or “Teenagers” to death. Similarly, Fall Out Boy made their big pop move the next year with “Infinity On High”, one-upping Panic! At The Disco’s theatrical ambitions with their goofily orchestral “Thnks Fr Th Mmrs” and bringing the house down with the dancefloor stomper “This Ain’t A Scene, It’s An Arms Race”. Meanwhile, Panic!’s own post-Black Parade follow-up, “Pretty. Odd.” mixed in Beatles pastiche to marginally improved results. Both bands broke through on mainstream rock radio, confirming that 2007-2008 was the Age Of Emo.
And if that’s how the sound of the Scene had stayed, who knows, it might have lasted a few more years! But by the time “Scene kid” was actually an in-use term within pop culture, the Scene kids themselves had largely outgrown this pedestrian “mainstream” version of emo; their tastes got heavier, more garish, and increasingly harder to reconcile with what could conceivably be played on rock radio. This, I would argue, is the other piece of the puzzle as to what led to the subculture’s downfall.
***
Scene kids didn’t invent metalcore as a genre – far from it. The origins of metalcore lie somewhere around the time Refused was defining “The Shape Of Punk To Come”, in fact, and given the similarity of that album to the genre that would come to sweep the “punk” Scene of the late 2000s, the title could hardly be more apt (whether this is to Refused’s chagrin or not). But though the fusion of hardcore punk and death metal had been around for at least a decade by the time the Scene came into the spotlight, few (if any) bands had had as much success with it as those who found their audience in the Scene kids.
I’m going to be completely honest: I find very little redeeming about this era of music and I’ll fully admit to never having actively listened to most of these bands. But I know their sound, because it is a shockingly uniform one, not to mention one that every second-rate local “hardcore” band was trying to imitate at the time. So I’ll just rattle off some names here to give you an idea of what the Scene kids started to flock to circa 2008 and you can do the listening yourself if you really want to: Asking Alexandria, A Day To Remember, Bring Me The Horizon, Bullet For My Valentine, Pierce The Veil (yes, they really did all have names like this), Black Veil Brides. Etc.
I’d argue that Scene kids’ embrace of metalcore in their search for heavier, edgier and more offensive music was the first nail in the coffin that began to doom the culture to irrelevance. The funny thing about metalcore is that it wasn’t just too abrasive for most mainstream rock stations to play it (misogynistic lyrics and sloppy songwriting were fine, but it turns out that most people just don’t want to hear those guttural growls derivative of death metal in a public place!) – it was also simply too tame to attract many innovators who might have experimented enough for the genre to evolve (with perhaps a few notable exceptions – I’ll put in a decent word here for Protest The Hero’s 3-5-minute prog-metalcore odysseys, and Converge seems like they mastered the art of fusing death metal’s technical proficiency with punk’s impulse for pure noise pretty well). Several metalcore albums sold surprisingly well during the peak of the Scene phase (yes, it was “just a phase” after all, wasn’t it?), but while these bands had rabid fanbases and many continued to tour on the strength of those alone well past their best-before dates, none reached the heights of My Chemical Romance, let alone Green Day. Plus there’s the fact that the average listener wondering what the big fuss was about would be hard-pressed to tell many of these bands apart by their sound (or appearance); it was, after all, a shockingly stagnant genre for a Scene effectively trying to embody the new “shock rock” aesthetic.
But the Scene wasn’t entirely devoid of experimentation. At least one very specific subgenre emerged in the late-2000s alongside metalcore, and where the latter seemed to inspire increasing apathy and eye-rolling among the general public, this new one might have provoked the very reactions of hatred and scorn that the Scene kids were seeking all along in their quest to become edgier-than-thou. The name still sends shivers down the spines of punks at parties when spoken today: crunkcore.
Some credit the origin of crunkcore to pop duo 3OH!3, citing their 2007 debut as containing the roots of the genre shortly before it blew up on a larger scale – but I don’t really hear it. Sure, these guys might have come up in the same scene as many of the emo bands of the moment, but their sound lacked the metalcore-inspired screams that would come to make the genre so uniquely grating on the ears of, well, most people; they mostly just sound like white guys trying their hardest to imitate Lil Jon’s energetic yelp, so maybe 3OH!3 were less “crunkcore” than simply “white boy crunk” (and this too, it turned out, was just a phase – one album later, the due would get their breakthrough as a more conventional pop group, dropping most of the crunk influence to content themselves with becoming a sort of lesser LMFAO).
I’m not sure it even matters that much where crunkcore actually came from as long as we recognize that it was clearly the invention of scene kids and that it was effectively epitomized by the notorious (I’m only going to do this stylization once) brokenCYDE. There have been many musical artists whose arrival seemed to sound some sort of “harbinger of the apocalypse” call, whether for music as a whole (someone comes up with a new one of these every year, and they’ve been wrong every time so far) or just for a particular genre or scene. But Brokencyde has the impressive legacy of having actually followed through on this promise; they were met with vitriol and scorn by elder punks on arrival who thought they were proof that there was nothing too low for the Scene kids to sink to, and sure enough, the whole Scene culture that they catered to would vanish** within a few years of their debut, making them true bringers of the “end times” for their own genre.
What’s ironic about crunkcore is that it wasn’t even the genre’s penchant for the “extreme” that bothered people so much; instead, the genre occupied a kind of dull middle ground like metalcore: for all its attempts to “innovate” Scene music (the word being applied loosely here, as I suppose you could call metal screaming over club beats “innovation” in a sense), it ended up being both too abrasive for the radio, but not weird enough to inspire a devotional cult beyond the Scene of the moment. And it’s that latter point that was really the problem; perhaps it crunkcore had been weirder, it could have earned some later fame as a misunderstood subgenre-within-a-subgenre that took risks just as the Scene was becoming stagnant, rejecting mass appeal for an attempt at forging a bold new path. Instead, the majority of crunkcore acts seemed interested primarily in appealing to the lowest common denominator to take advantage of the Scene’s “gold rush” moment, making the whole thing feel deeply tacky and commercially motivated. There was a deep cynicism about these groups reflected in Brokencyde’s debut album title: “I’m Not A Fan, But The Kids Like It!” (did you know E-40 was featured on one of its songs? Weird times!) It’s almost as if part of the appeal of the crunkcore phenomenon was that the kids were supposed to revel in the fact that they were being pandered to in the crassest ways possible – as if this was the logical endpoint of punk: offending everyone by admitting you truly have no particular values whatsoever and will do anything for money even while honestly admitting your intentions (come to think of it, this was supposed to be the premise behind the Sex Pistols, but they ended up being too good for that – all of this exists in a complicated dialogue with irony, the 80s, the 90s, David Foster Wallace and the later indie rock phenomenon, but we’ll get to that in due time).
And if they weren’t simply regressive in their blatant attempts at commercial appeal and attitudes towards women (because you’d better believe the misogyny got amped up to 11 with this new wave), many of the groups seemed to be looking backward musically as well towards the sound that dominated rock music before the whole emo explosion even happened – that is to say, crunkcore turned out to reside right next door to the nu-metal of the new millennium if Hollywood Undead is any proof. Can a Scene really be said to persist when its so-called “cutting edge” even seems to wish they could just go back to a simpler time 10 years earlier?
***
Broken Social Scene’s self-titled 2005 album ends with one of their masterpieces, a near-10-minute epic titled “It’s All Gonna Break”. When they came up with that title, it’s highly unlikely they were considering the fate of the parallel emo scene that happened to be rising at that very moment, but it seems appropriate to mention here since that’s exactly what happened to the Scene by 2010: it all broke. Only it wasn’t so much with a bang, but with a whimper: it wasn’t like metalcore and crunkcore were necessarily scandals enough to turn Scene kids into laughingstocks overnight so much as it was that the general public just started to lose their patience with the whole spectacle. And so it collapsed, slowly and steadily, until one day in the midst of the 2010s you’d realize you hadn’t seen a wild-haired emo fan for several years.
And while it did, something new was rising in its place.
***
I would say we should start from the beginning, but the “beginning” in the story of indie rock is a bit more complicated than that of the beginning of modern emo. More than the difficulty of reconciling two sub-genres (pop-punk and emo in the previous case) that happened to unite in one scene, the indie rock phenomenon has roots in possibly three different scenes, all offset by a few years, spanning two continents and at least three countries. The timeline is nowhere near as clean as it was for emo, but I’m going to do my best here to sort it out.
I’ve already mentioned post-rock as one of the major influences towards what would come to be called “indie rock” in the historical introduction. I’ve also mentioned Pavement and movements towards simplicity and amateurishness. I’ll add a couple more elements in as background here: first of all, there’s a little band that happened to be part of a larger collective which would prove surprisingly influential in a big way about a decade after their original heyday. This band shared some sonic elements with post-post-rock (or, sorry, I know that sounds stupid, so let’s call them “proto-indie rock”) bands like Broken Social Scene in that they favoured eclectic mixes of instruments often not found in rock music of the time. They were also considered a “folk” band, but were anything but traditional in their approach, with a rather polarizing lead singer who wrote surreal lyrics ranging from psychedelic ruminations on death to historical tragedy. This band was Neutral Milk Hotel, and you can probably blame a large number of the earlier and more eccentric “indie folk” bands to come on their influence.
But a year before Neutral Milk Hotel would release their magnum opus and subsequently disbanded, something important for the future indie rock scene happened across the pond in the UK: remember how Nirvana is purported to have “killed hair metal” with the release of “Nevermind”? Well, the UK had been having its own regressive “hair metal” moment with Britpop during the 90s, and 6 years after the release of “Nevermind”, one of those would-be-Britpop bands searching for something more released their very own Britpop-kryptonite: Radiohead’s “OK Computer” landed in 1997 and changed the UK rock scene forever.
I neglected to mention Radiohead in the introduction and I’m still hesitant about dwelling too long on them; they’re one of those bands that often gets written about too much and is sometimes given more credit than they deserve. But if we want to talk about the history of indie rock in the UK as well as the US and Canada (and as I’ve implied before, there was certainly a good amount of crossover influence during the coming era of indie), I can’t deny that they’re an important piece of the puzzle. I won’t rehash the same old stories about Radiohead here; the saga has been recorded to death at this point. Just know that the two big ones are “OK Computer” and “Kid A”, and that the latter, even more than the former, changed the very notion of what a rock band could sound like after its release with its experimental delves into minimalism and electronic music.
So we have the background: Pavement, post-rock, Neutral Milk Hotel, “OK Computer” / “Kid A”, the Velvet Underground revival, “back-to-basics” punk blues, The Strokes, Broken Social Scene, etc. What happened next? Well, to pull a rather notorious line from an album that coincidentally happened to be very prevalent in the coming storm, “Question: what do these things all have in common?”
***
Pitchfork is an online music journalism site founded in 1996. You already know this, because they have, over the past couple decades, finally supplanted Rolling Stone as THE music journalism publication known across generations. It’s happening as I’m saying this: the boomers are retiring and dying off, and millennials who grew up reading that pretentious “hipster” site are growing up to replace them – Pitchfork is what they know, and likely already what their kids know too.
But Pitchfork wasn’t always a household name. In its early days of the late-90s-to-early-2000s, the site was in more of a “scrappy upstart” mode, publishing polarizing reviews with wildly high and low (mostly low, earning Pitchfork a reputation as a sort of “haters’ site” which they’ll probably never fully shake) scores for highly anticipated albums. It was talked about, but mostly by those “in the know”, the kinds of music nerds who would track down whatever obscurity the site was championing at the time even if the band had come out of virtually nowhere, the kind of nerd that definitely wasn’t interested in whatever was on the radio. It catered to a certain “underground” scene, almost seeming at times like it actively hoped that no band it hyped up would achieve superstar status and viciously tearing into any that appeared to embrace that.
If you haven’t guessed it by now, almost all of the bands, albums and phenomena that I listed in the final paragraph of the previous section are things lauded (or at the very least, reported on) at one point by Pitchfork. With the exception of Radiohead, almost all of these trends flew at least slightly under the “mainstream” radar; maybe they were reported on by old-guard magazines like Rolling Stone, but they probably never made the cover story. Pitchfork was cultivating a certain taste during these early years, and though its image would change drastically over the next two decades, this taste proved to be enormously influential somewhere in the middle of that period.
***
In terms of a timeline, we know that Pavement, post-rock, Radiohead and Neutral Milk Hotel predate all of this; we also know that by the time emo went mainstream, Broken Social Scene, The Strokes and The White Stripes were already fully-formed bands with their own followings. These are the collective beginnings of “indie” as a scene, so where do we go from here?
Well, unfortunately for those of us who had high hopes for them, it would seem that the most obvious path forward leads directly through Arcade Fire. A few years into the new millennium’s wave of bands, this large collective of musicians somewhat resembling Broken Social Scene in structure and approach (yes, I know, we’ve been over this before) released their debut album, “Funeral”, to critical adoration. Many publications spoke favourably of it, including the old-guard NME and, yes, Rolling Stone – but few were quite as ecstatic about it as Pitchfork seemed to be, who gave it as close to a perfect score as they’d get on anything not released by Radiohead (a 9.7!). This Montreal-based group suddenly became the first Merge-signed act (remember what I said about Merge?) to land an album charting in the Billboard 200 and were quickly held up to the spotlight as the new poster children for...something. The thing is, prior to Arcade Fire, their sound didn’t really have a name yet. “Indie rock” might have existed as a term, but it didn’t necessarily mean a coherent sound; it was more of a term you used to explain the status of a band as not having broken into the mainstream yet. But “indie rock” turned out to be the term that stuck for those trying to describe this new band that had just stumbled into its first modest success, which made sense to a degree – they were on Merge, an independent label after all.
All this is to say that there was a lot of hype about Arcade Fire, and many younger internet-dwellers would have found out about them through Pitchfork’s hype specifically – which then may have led them to discover the world of other “indie” groups Pitchfork tended to favour. I can’t give Arcade Fire all the credit for this; the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were also making something of a splash in New York at the time with a new version of post-punk that seemed geared towards dancefloor mania, and The Strokes had already broken through to the big time with an RCA-released debut and follow-up (note that this was already a sign of the corruption of the term “indie”: how could The Strokes and Yeah Yeah Yeahs release major label albums and still be described as “indie rock”?). Both these bands were also early Pitchfork darlings (though the Yeah Yeah Yeahs received significantly less praise in the reviews, being awarded only a 7.4 for their debut), and both must also have played a role in attracting significant attention towards whatever this new “indie rock” thing was shaping up to be.
The next few years would see a number of bands spark similar waves of interest, albeit none as big as Arcade Fire had with “Funeral” (yet). To list a few, TV On The Radio, The National, The Arctic Monkeys, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Bloc Party, The Hold Steady, Death Cab For Cutie, Franz Ferdinand, The Mountain Goats, Bright Eyes, Animal Collective, The Rapture, Tokyo Police Club, Spoon, and Of Montreal all either formed and released their debuts or had some kind of breakthrough success during the period from about 2004-2007.
These were also, notably, the peak years of the emo boom, which meant that whatever “success” these bands had was somewhat muted; they might have been celebrated on Pitchfork (in fact, almost all of the above were), but even the most popular of these bands weren’t really getting the same kind of mainstream attention as, say, My Chemical Romance (though some of them might have risen to the same level of semi-fame as many of the later metalcore bands that were just too abrasive for the radio). What’s more, it should be observed that this era seems to be precisely where the term “indie rock” as a genre starts to get especially blurry in definition; most of these bands played entirely different genres from each other, yet because they were largely independent and praised by Pitchfork, many began to see them as a “genre” in themselves simply because they didn’t really fit in with anything else that most people would recognize (quick, someone tell me what “genre” TV On The Radio is?).
The exceptions to this rule are the British bands on the list, especially The Arctic Monkeys and Franz Ferdinand. Because I have yet to mention a somewhat important detail in this story regarding the state of UK rock music during this whole period: unlike the US, the UK didn’t really get the whole emo explosion, or not nearly to the same extent. Sure, there were British Scene kids, but the phenomenon never seemed to rise to the point of dominating mainstream rock discourse like it did in North America (OK, the US and Canada – I’m not going to pretend to know what was going on in Mexican rock music at the time, though I’m sure someone else out there has a fascinating story about that). Instead, the British scene got its own indie rock boom a few years earlier, creating what seemed for a while like a separate ecosystem insusceptible to US/Canadian trends.
***
What exactly was it that led to this UK version of “indie rock” taking off in the first place? I’m even less clear on the details of this than I am on the details of the American/Canadian story (if any Brits want to correct me on whatever I get wrong here, you’re welcome to), but my best understanding is that it had a lot to do with Radiohead and the fall of Britpop. Britpop effectively being to the UK what grunge was to the US in the 90s, it had also basically run its course by the end of the decade, with Radiohead emerging as a seemingly “anti-Britpop” band with its more sombre mood and experimental tendencies. And Radiohead’s influence was so huge, it sparked a new wave of what were effectively “post-Britpop” bands trying to reinvent their sound for more commercial aims. Muse took the heavier, proggier direction and made obnoxiously pretentious anthems for many British teens who probably would have been Scene kids had they lived in the US; Coldplay focused on ballads and wrote a couple genuinely pretty songs across their first few albums before turning to mass-market mush.
And at the same time, rising up in stark opposition to this were the Libertines, who arrived just in time to remind everyone that punk (still) wasn’t dead, God damn it! While Muse and Coldplay seemed stuck on figuring out a way to repackage Radiohead for the masses, the Libertines looked further back for a way to emulate their main (and obvious) influence The Clash and...shockingly, they actually succeeded. The band’s first two albums (but especially the first) manage to capture some of that riotous, chaotic energy of the early Clash albums with hooks just as sharp. If the Strokes and White Stripes can be credited with bringing punk back into the light of the US mainstream, the Libertines managed to do it for the UK right around the same time.
From here, we have a split-within-a-split. By the mid-2000s, the UK is faced with two forces in opposition: the post-Radiohead arena bands and the punk revivalism of the Libertines. What happens to the young British bands coming up around this time? Naturally, they often end up sounding like a mix of both. And from here, you get the origins of the British “indie” wave, which, having fewer Scene kids to get in the way of things, effectively launched from this point. The whole phenomenon was such a hit, it spawned the retrospective term “landfill indie” to describe the glut of new bands that formed loosely around their ambitions to find some modicum of success in the new rock landscape.
***
In some ways, I’d like to relegate the British indie rock scene to a footnote in this story; it isn’t as influential as the respective American and Canadian scenes in the narrative of how American rock music began to change fundamentally after emo, and it was, as previously mentioned, sort of its own “ecosystem” that would probably have existed even if the fall of emo had never happened. But there is at least one important coincidence of simultaneous artistic impulses that makes it difficult for me to discount the movement entirely: maybe something was in the air in the early 2000s, but just as the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and LCD Soundsystem were bringing the sound of post-punk back from the 80s, the more immediately successful Franz Ferdinand and Arctic Monkeys were doing the very same thing in the UK. There’s a reason why (before the term “indie rock” had been fully codified in the language) you might have heard some of these bands being described as “post-punk revival” (along with the Strokes, though I’ve never heard it quite as much in them unless you count the Velvet Underground as “post-punk”, which seems backwards to me).
This revival happened to be a very influential part of the indie rock “sound” insofar as their could even be one, or at least a part of its ethos. For what it’s worth, many noted the post-punk influence on bands like Arcade Fire as well; “Neighbourhood #3” from their first album is a dead ringer for it, and the entire album “Reflektor” is based on leaning right into that impulse. Funny enough, some of the US bands that took the post-punk revival to heart the most ended up being more popular in the UK than the US – in the case of The Rapture, the title song of their breakout album became the theme song to the British TV show “Misfits”, something I can’t imagine happening in their own country given how unpleasantly abrasive that song would have sounded to most Americans. So I can’t count the Brits out entirely; think of them from now on as existing in a kind of corner of their own that we’ll pan back to whenever it turns out to be relevant.
***
So we have a general cluster of bands starting to form something less than a movement, less than a scene, but an observable phenomenon nonetheless. These bands are bubbling just under the level of mainstream success that put many of the pop-punk and emo bands over into superstardom during the mid-2000s. Most of them had achieved some level of recognition by 2007; what happened after that?
I’ve already chronicled how the following three years would come to represent the slow burnout of the Scene boom, and as it turns out, this is precisely the period in which the newly-formed indie rock sphere kicked into its next gear. Of those bands previously mentioned, a number of them released either even more successful or even more acclaimed follow-up albums than before during the 2007-2009 stretch, some of the most notable being The Yeah Yeah Yeah’s’ “It’s Blitz!” (2009), TV On The Radio’s “Dear Science” (2008), Animal Collective’s “Merriweather Post Pavillion” (2009), LCD Soundsystem’s “Sound Of Silver” (2007, and shockingly, winner of the Pazz & Jop poll for that year) and, of course, Arcade Fire’s “Funeral” follow-up, “Neon Bible” (2007). All of these albums were likely boosted in some part by the Pitchfork stamp of approval (even if the site was slightly less enthusiastic about “Neon Bible” than it was about “Funeral”). Some of them spawned actual hits; “Heads Will Roll” from “It’s Blitz!” would reach #1 on the US Dance charts and eventually ended up in, uh, Glee. “Indie rock” was quickly transforming from a buzzword into what looked like “the next big thing”.
But it wasn’t just these “first generation” bands that drove the shift; a new generation of Pitchfork darlings was starting to crop up and generate almost as much buzz as the previous one within the same time frame as all those landmark albums. I will admit here that many of these bands would lapse pretty quickly into becoming the American equivalent of “landfill indie”, but there are at least three worth bringing up. The bright, quirky, art-poppy Vampire Weekend released their self-titled debut in 2008, bolstered by a hit single that temporarily confused everyone by making them think they were a ska band. Possibly more important to this story, however, are the other two: the Fleet Foxes also released their self-titled debut in 2008, only in contrast to Vampire Weekend’s peppy zip and tendency towards “modernist” sounds, these guys gave off the impression that they wanted to bring folk music back a couple centuries, evoking some kind of pastoral fantasy with their harmonically complex acoustic arrangements; and Bon Iver legendarily released his own celebrated folky debut “For Emma, Forever Ago” in 2007 after disappearing into a cabin in the woods for a year to record it.
I’m going to be completely honest and also foreshadow something here: I don’t particularly like that Bon Iver album, but one reason it needs to be mentioned is because it is arguably the genesis of a sound that would eventually lead to the downfall of indie rock, just like crunkcore helped topple the Scene. I’d mentioned previously that acoustic instruments (especially unconventional ones) would figure into the new sound of whatever started to be called “indie rock”, but with Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver, the folkiness was more fetishistic than a mere element of the sound. Many would even describe these two as belonging to a subgenre dubbed “indie folk” to differentiate them, a lineage that originated with oddballs like Neutral Milk Hotel before stretching into something with more aspirations to “The Sublime” in the late 2000s. But I’d argue that the line can be thin there; when does a Bright Eyes song stop being indie “folk” and start being indie “rock”? How many electric guitars does it take? The distinction is meaningless, and even Bon Iver and the Fleet Foxes had some electric guitar on their respective debuts, plus these guys were all playing the same festivals anyway. But keep this in mind if you didn’t live through it or hear about it from someone else: that folkiness would come back to haunt everyone in a big way just a few years on.
***
You can basically see where all of this has been leading. Somewhere between 2008 and 2010, emo begins to lose its subcultural grip, and some kind of new subculture formed around Pitchfork and all the bands it boosted during the previous decade. Granted, this new subculture was even looser than your average one; many people involved in it during those early years would probably have bristled at being associated with Pitchfork, a site they would have considered to be littler more than obnoxious “haters” (because let’s not forget that during this whole time, Pitchfork was also regularly handing out 6-and-much-lower/10 scores to those artists it didn’t deem hype-worthy enough, often hurting the feelings of those who wanted to root for their local/rising star heroes). As I mentioned before, the subculture favoured obscurity, and this newfound spotlight didn’t always sit will with many of its “old-guard” members who were on board since the days of post-rock; the anxiety around indie bands “selling out” during this period was remarkably high, and several groups found their reputations dashed against the rocks the minute they started to look like they might be breaking through to the mainstream.
But the breakthrough was inevitable at this point; with everyone moving on from emo, the masses were looking for the next big thing. You could say the watershed moment happened with Arcade Fire winning that Grammy, and you’d be mostly right – but there were a few subtler warning signs outside the “indie” sphere in the years leading up to that moment for those who were paying attention. First, in 2004, not-actually-indie rock band The Killers released their debut “Hot Fuss” to wild commercial success. Unlike many of the albums I’ve mentioned previously, this one did not land well with Pitchfork, and it’s not hard to see why: the album effectively cherry-picked a lot of the hot new sounds in indie rock (post-punk revival! Icy new wave pastiche! Springsteen imitations!) and repackaged them in a more pop-friendly form with major label production gloss. Nevertheless, many adored it, and the Killers have been stars ever since, even if they effectively ran out of steam by the second album.
Then, in the midst of that pre-watershed era, also-not-actually-indie rock band Kings Of Leon released their biggest hit album to date, “Only By The Night”. Previously more of a “back-to-basics” southern rock band in the vein of the White Stripes, the band here took a turn for the anthemic, while also embracing synthesizers and fuzzy, echo-y production sounds, sounding almost like a more radio-friendly version of (ha) TV On The Radio. The inane “Sex On Fire” and “Use Somebody” took off to become megahits that year, with the latter winning Record Of The Year and Best Song at the Grammies that year. Finally, in the UK that same year, Coldplay (remember them?) threw their hat in the art rock ring with their attempted magnum opus “Viva La Vida”, featuring prestigious textural treatments from ambient masters Brian Eno and Jon Hopkins. That album, boring though it was, ended up winning Best Rock Album at the Grammys that year, which definitely signified something: slowly but surely, the sound of rock music was shifting, and it wasn’t the sound of emo that was poised to come out on top.
***
Fast forward to the Grammys two years later and that shift seems to have happened overnight – only not everyone had noticed it yet. The Arcade Fire win was a big moment because it signified two separate things: 1) that a genuine “indie rock” band was now able to get big enough to garner mainstream critical attention and prestige awards, and 2) that the relative familiarity one had with the band created a sort of rift in pop music – you had either already heard of Arcade Fire and therefore were not surprised to learn that critics favoured them, or you were completely ignorant of their background and this win came as a complete left-field shock to you.
This second point is important: that divide would come to signify a lot in the coming years, because after 2010, a new subcultural stereotype from the indie rock sphere, the “hipster”, would come to replace the Scene kids of yesteryear, and much of the hipster’s personality would be based around them having been “in the know” for longer than others – liking something “before it was cool”, as many would come to claim.
The next several years were effectively a flurry of everyone trying to process what had just happened, while emo’s triumphal moment quietly faded into the background. Pitchfork suddenly become more important than ever as those looking for the origins of this new indie phenomenon realized that the site had been an early booster of most of its biggest players. A new gold rush (albeit smaller than the previous one) akin to that sparked by grunge took effect, with major labels looking to scout smaller bands that might appeal enough to the hipster crowd to become the Next Big Thing (this would ultimately prove to be a bust in most cases, since hipsters generally prided themselves in shunning things that got “too mainstream”, but at least a couple bands’ successes from it would have further-reaching consequences). Acoustics, vague production textures and 80s revivalism (this last one probably a product of the post-punk revivalists’ aesthetic choices) were all in, as were unusual singing voices and the concept of “rawness”. The next four years or so would see all these trends solidify and maintain a strong grip on the music industry – until they became punchlines, that is.
***
Arcade Fire wasn’t the only band to break through circa 2010 either. With a name and general sound so similar you’d be forgiven for confusing them with the White Stripes if only they weren’t significantly less distinct-sounding, the Black Keys released their sixth album “Brothers” in the same year, and this just so happened to be the big one. Quite frankly, I’ve never really understood this one – “Brothers” is a totally fine album, but isn’t substantially different from the kind of bluesy back-to-basics rock these guys had been crafting over the course of the previous five. Maybe people were just hungry for another rock band that evoked the same kind of no-nonsense “rawness” as the White Stripes, who hadn’t done anything since 2007 at that point (they would break up the next year, leaving the Black Keys to completely fill the void they left).
At the same time, a little Australian “band” (which turned out to be more of a solo project with a rotating cast of backup musicians) released a marginally-less-successful debut that nevertheless laid the groundwork for them to become one of the most popular indie acts of the next decade. This was none other than Tame Impala. While “Innerspeaker” was a more modest success than “The Suburbs” or “Brothers”, it marks an important point in the history of indie rock: unlike Arcade Fire and the Black Keys, Tame Impala debuted right at the start of the forthcoming indie craze, and, bolstered once again by repeated Pitchfork exposure, came to have bigger and bigger hits with each album until the end of the decade as a result; they rode that “next big thing” wave harder than many of the bands that were just getting used to being popular.
***
There’s another interesting detail about Tame Impala that make them worth mentioning: Kevin Parker, the man behind it all, was more than just a one-man-band for the project; leveraging his newfound fame, he turned into a full-on producer and industry collaborator in his own right, working with names as big as Lady Gaga, Rihanna and The Weeknd. If formerly obscure indie musicians were just getting used to being famous outside their local scenes and the Pitchfork-reading obsessives who had heard of them “before they got big”, this was an even more drastic shift: more than during the grunge era, indie musicians were now crossing over fully into mainstream pop, taking on production and songwriting roles in collaborations that you might hear on pop radio.
Perhaps the biggest success story (and one of the weirder unintended consequence of this whole thing) comes in the form of Jack Antonoff. Antonoff, for those who aren’t familiar with the story, began as a multi-instrumentalist for the “indie” band (I say this with scare quotes only because the band so obviously had pop ambitions from the start it’s hard to imagine them ever aligning with any of the original ideals of whatever constituted indie rock prior – yes, I can be a snob about this too) fun (yes, it’s spelled lower-case and there’s a period too, only my sentence structure here makes that impractical). These guys released their first album in 2009, right in the midst of that hype-building moment for the new indie rock sound. The album didn’t quite break them through to the mainstream, but it did develop a rabid cult following, and the band moved to Fueled By Ramen to release their follow-up in 2012, “Some Nights”.
A brief side note before we continue: it’s significant in itself that this album was released on Fueled By Ramen considering that label was not only founded in conjunction with members of Fall Out Boy, it was effectively THE pop-punk emo/label in the years of the Scene’s growing popularity. That the label chose to release an album from an indie rock band in 2012 says something; it’s as if they realized that the pop-punk stuff was actually on the way out and saw that bands like fun. were the next big thing, so they were wise to get in on the action.
Anyway, the move paid off well for the label, as the album spawned a megahit arguably bigger than any single song by Arcade Fire so far: the inescapable and obnoxious anthem-for-a-generation “We Are Young”, where the gang vocals in the chorus threaten to “SET THE WORLD ON FIIII-YAH!” This was a true crossover hit, getting near-constant play on pop radio when it came out and once again marking a shift in the culture: indie rock was now what the people wanted to hear, even if it was mostly crossing over in a laughably diluted and cringe-inducing form.
Presumably, it’s from this point onward that Jack Antonoff’s career as a producer and collaborator (much like Kevin Parker’s) skyrocketed. Somehow, the guy ended up on Taylor Swift’s career-making stylistic reset “1989” contributing 3 songs (none of which are anywhere near the best on the album and one of which is easily one of the worst***). From there, he moved on to the Kevin Parker-tier track, producing and writing for St. Vincent, Kendrick Lamar, Lana Del Rey, Lorde, The 1975 (more on them later) and P!nk, to name a few. Needless to say, the guy became a big deal in the mainstream pop industry for a member of a one-hit wonder indie band.
The interesting thing about this is that Parker and Antonoff’s careers were not necessarily atypical in the post-2011 indie rock landscape. Prior to the breakthrough, many indie musicians would have likely felt some degree of moral conflict working in such a transparently commercial setting as a pop song aimed at the top-40. But after that Arcade Fire Grammy, it’s as if the parameters for success started to shift in terms of what was thought to be possible: if indie bands could win Grammys now, why shouldn’t they also take opportunities at getting in on mainstream radio money if they were given the chance? Despite the early 2010s hipsters reaching a fever pitch in their discourse of “selling out”, many of the bands that emerged on top at the time were quite content to do just that; if they weren’t collaborating with Taylor Swift, they were more than likely licensing out their songs for TV ads.
Pitchfork, too, played an interesting role in shifting this discourse. Just as indie rock was breaking into the mainstream, Pitchfork’s focus began to move ever so slowly towards that mainstream they had once mostly shunned in favour of finding the “next big thing” you’ve never heard of. There are many factors at play here, namely the rise of a certain music journalism philosophy now known as “poptimism”****. But I also suspect the move had something to do with some of the artists Pitchfork had hyped up earlier simply becoming mainstream figures overnight, making the site look silly and contrarian if they suddenly ignored, say, The Weeknd simply because he had graduated from being an “alt-R&B” start to a full-on pop star that got regular radio airplay. By the mid-2010s, this shift was complete, and Pitchfork was even starting to fill in the gaps for mainstream phenomena they had ignored earlier; at one point, they retroactively reviewed every past Taylor Swift album upon the release of one of her latest, which feels particularly significant in tracking the moment they stopped being a purely “indie” music publication.
***
It was more than a shift in journalism and production work, too; indie “rock” was starting to adapt itself to its newfound mainstream popularity, and the (half-ironic) philosophy that seemed to follow often seemed to be “give the people what they want” – meaning more “pop” than ever before. Indie “pop” is often set apart as a separate genre, but in truth, rock music has always been pop anyway, and the fluidity of many bands that started out as “rock” in this era just serves to further do away with the distinction. Take Arcade Fire as an example: their follow-up to “The Suburbs” was a double-album dive into Bowie-esque new wave and disco, with some obvious influence from LCD Soundsystem (not to mention production from James Murphy himself).
They were hardly the only band to pull some kind of move like this – we’ve already talked about fun. and there were several others who, post-2011, geared their sound more towards pop than they had previously dared to. This raises an interesting philosophical question which I can only touch on briefly here (as it’s really properly the subject of an entirely different and probably much longer essay): how exactly were indie bands able to pull off an overt shift towards pop music while simultaneously retaining critical acclaim and hipster “credibility” in the 2010s? The answer hinges a lot on the role of irony in the indie rock scene.
Irony had been identified as a subcultural mainstay since at least the 80s, but something seemed to really take off with regard to the concept in the 2010s: hipsters as a subculture were perhaps most notorious for doing things “ironically” – such as drinking shitty beer, growing bad moustaches and wearing dorky-looking clothes. If you had asked someone in the 80s or 90s why they were doing something ironically, the more thoughtful of these people might have considered the behaviour to be a sort of self-performance of satire, making fun of a society they were ashamed to be a part of by embracing its most glaringly tacky elements. By the 2010s, it seemed like this reference point was increasingly lost to time and that the ironic posturing was mostly done in place of a true fashion sense or coherent subcultural identity.
I will defend this stance somewhat (though again, I won’t get into it too much here since this really deserves a deeper philosophical exploration): there is a definite discomfort in seeing subcultures become increasingly commodified and feeling like whatever identity you do latch on to is doomed to re-appear the next year as the “latest trend” when being “trendy” is exactly what you were trying to avoid. So to a degree, I get it: why bother to craft a style you care a lot about at all? Why not turn yourself into a walking shapeless void of culture, displaying only trash externally because it’s harder to pin you down when no one can tell what you actually like? And isn’t self-awareness important? Isn’t it good to be critical and maintain some degree of distance from even those things you really do love? Embracing something wholeheartedly without criticism can be a slippery slope towards obsessive fanaticism, which can block self-expression in itself and make one easily manipulated by marketing.
There’s something admirably punk about this attitude to me that the Scene kids never seemed to get. That being said, the attitude runs into problems when everyone starts doing the same things ironically, at which point it becomes just another subcultural fashion trend – and of course this is exactly what happened. Everyone knows that hipsters drink Pabst Blue Ribbon and ride fixed-gear bikes, right?
The other problem facing the irony of the hipsters comes in the form of the greatest paradox of indie rock: this is the confusing fact that as much as the culture and music were steeped in a background of irony, indie rock bands were simultaneously celebrated as being some of the most “sincere” songwriters of their generation. In truth, many were both, and you hardly need to look further than (once again) Arcade Fire: the disco was ironic, but the song about lost childhood innocence was sincere; the satire of show-business pedophile fathers was ironic, but the avant-Springsteenian rock orchestra was sincere; “Do you like rock ‘n’ roll music? ‘Cause I don’t know if I do...” was ironic, but “Daddy, how come you’re never around? This happy family is everything now” was sincere.
But don’t just take Arcade Fire’s word: many bands from this era could be ironic and sincere at the same time. Consider the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Karen O seeming to both roll her eyes at explicit sexuality while also fully embracing it as a part of her performance, Spoon’s Britt Daniel delivering all his lyrics in a strained deadpan while displaying an obsessive attention to compositional details in his minimalist pieces, or The Strokes’ Julian Casablancas sounding both bored with everything and also desperate to “live, live, live” as he put it in one of his last great songs. The arrival of a figure like Lana del Rey only served to further complicate the whole thing: from the start, nobody seemed to be able to agree on whether or not she was being ironic at all, a debate that still rages to this day in spite of the artist’s own denial of the accusations.
Irony, prevalent though it may have been, was not the instrument of indie rock’s subsequent downfall, no matter how much many would like to blame it. That honour belongs instead to an excess of sincerity, something that I will elaborate on further in the next part of this series.
[Footnotes]
* “Funeral” is now gold, but almost certainly wasn’t at the time “The Suburbs” came out judging by the way it currently sits just over the threshold of sales for gold certification.
**For a while anyway – I’ll get to the revival in the next chapter of this series.
***That would be “Out Of The Woods”, for those curious – don’t ask me why, I could write a whole separate essay about why that song is an exemplar of deeply mediocre pop songwriting.
****I’m not going to rehash all the discourse about that here, that’s a whole other essay – look it up yourself, there’s no end of thinkpieces on it.
In 2006, emo band My Chemical Romance released their album “The Black Parade”. It was a concept album about a man dying of cancer, featuring meditations on death, the banality of youthful rebellion, the futility of romance, the dark urges that lurk at the corners of human desire and more. It featured bombastic, multi-part songs with turns towards metal, cabaret-style melodies, piano ballads and straightforward punk rock. Even with all this seemingly fragmentary stuff going on, the album’s production and lead singer’s vocals were so consistently similar throughout that nothing on it sounded “out of place”, per se. And in spite of all its apparent (and largely deliberate) strangeness, the album would become a blockbuster hit as far as rock albums go, selling multi-platinum across multiple countries.
If you weren’t paying attention to (or weren’t born in time to remember) the early 2000s, this might have seemed a little mystifying. But the trajectory of rock radio in the early 2000s is precisely why the success of “The Black Parade” was anything but surprising. Let’s rewind a little bit and we’ll see exactly why My Chemical Romance happened to release their “magnum opus” at exactly the right moment to make emo history.
As I ended the previous section noting, the early 2000s were a rough time for rock music in general. Post-grunge and nu-metal were in full swing commercially, but they existed largely in the context of “rock radio”, usually failing to make much of an impression in broader pop culture except as “token” rock bands tossed in alongside the mega-stars of pop and hip-hop during that time. But pop-punk was still around, and following the success of several of its biggest breakout stars in the 90s, some of these bands found themselves in the surprising new position of “carrying the torch” for the earlier punk movements of the 70s and beyond. So the bands soldiered on and kept making hits, some of which would prove to be the most commercially successful “punk” songs of the 2000s. Blink-182 released their last classic, “Take Off Your Pants And Jacket”, in 2001, then scored another few hits off their self-titled album a couple years later. Green Day experimented with folkier, protest-y sounding music on “Warning” in 2000 but probably had their biggest impact on the pop-punk of the time with the anthemic “Waiting”, proof that they could write an arena-sized rocker better than, say, Nickelback (both of these new sides of Green will be very important to remember in a few paragraphs; bear with me if you don’t already know what’s coming). Jimmy Eat World found success in 2001 with the uncharacteristically-chipper sounding “The Middle”, another cornerstone in the shape of pop-punk to come.
But the genre had its impacts on a new generation already in the 90s, and this generation was now starting to make music of its own, music that sounded...a lot like the stuff it was raised on. Like, nearly identical. Uncannily so. In fact, the miniscule change in sound between the first and second generations of pop-punk is a testament to how much the sound of the genre had been standardized by that time. Few other multi-generational chains of influence would contain so little variation between them.
So who was this new generation? Well, like any, it was a sprawling assortment of artists who didn’t necessarily all get along or agree with each other’s approaches, but if you were to reach into the grab-bag of second-generation pop-punk acts, you might get a handful that would include Good Charlotte, Fall Out Boy, Panic! At The Disco and Avril Lavigne. Of these, Good Charlotte and Avril Lavigne struck first, albeit with very different career trajectories. Good Charlotte was effectively cut from the same cloth as the old emo/pop-punk bands, working their way up the touring circuit by opening for bigger and bigger bands until they became stars (sort of) in their own right. Avril Lavigne, by contrast, represented a new development in pop-punk: a full-on manufactured pop star who just happened to make music that fell squarely within this shiny new iteration of punk. Both released their landmark albums in 2002 to considerable commercial success, but Lavigne, of course, was the one with the bigger weight of the music industry behind her, and therefore skyrocketed beyond the dreams of most of the more “organically” formed bands of the time into a long career that is somehow still going today. The very existence of Avril Lavigne, however one may feel about her, was significant in itself: it was a sign that the mainstream pop industry noticed the commercial possibilities of pop-punk and was starting to actively market new artists as being aligned with it for “cool” points.
Fall Out Boy and Panic! have arguably been the more influential bands for the blueprint of most of what followed, but before we talk about their successes, we need to talk about the biggest landmark event in this story prior to the release of “The Black Parade”: in 2004, a little over 10 years after Green Day had released “Dookie” and effectively invented the sound of modern pop-punk, the band released what might be their next most important album. This was, of course, “American Idiot”, and it had an absolute stranglehold on the mainstream rock sphere when it came out. The politics were one thing; Green Day were correct in their Bush-bashing, if a little ham-fisted, and it was encouraging to see signs that people might actually be sick of the “War On Terror” so quickly after it began. But the lasting impact of the album wasn’t exactly a political one; instead, it had more to do with the direction Green Day had taken on their last big hit prior to the album, “Waiting”. The most significant thing about “American Idiot” turned out to be that it marked the band’s full transition from a “punk” band to an “arena rock” band.
While it may seem unimportant to modern audiences that likely see no contradiction in a punk band also selling out huge arenas, Green Day’s arrival as an arena rock band is kind of a big deal. Prior to this point, punk as a genre was defined in part by its near-total opposition to this type of thing. The punk bands of the 70s arose partially in reaction to the arena rock of the same period, rebelling against the big-name show business of the establishment by doing things cheaply, ironically, independently, and/or otherwise subverting the expected path for a rock band that wanted to leave an impact on pop culture. While some punk bands certainly played large shows and arenas (it was sort of inevitable when they got to a certain level of popularity), it was something that was frowned upon in the broader punk culture as a whole; playing big shows (especially when punk started to go more underground in the 80s) was seen as a sign of “selling out”; a punk band wasn’t expected to put on a pyrotechnic show with massive set pieces, sing-alongs, multi-part rock operas and all the bells and whistles – they were expected to either get on stage and give a disarmingly minimal performance or to stir up some kind of chaos, often antagonizing the audience in the process.
“American Idiot” effectively changed these expectations for an entire generation. Prior to this album, putting a “Bohemian Rhapsody”-style medley on your album would be considered one of the least punk things a band could do. After its release, millions of teenagers would memorize every section of the 9-minute epic “Jesus Of Suburbia”. And if you thought “Waiting” sounded a little over-the-top, you’d be flabbergasted by the dramatic heft of “Are We The Waiting” (hmmm, that title sounds familiar...). With a single hit album, Green Day permanently altered the course of punk rock, and perhaps rock radio as a whole.
***
Let’s rewind just a bit: remember those four pop-punk bands I pulled up as a sort of “state of the union” on second-generation pop-punk in the 2000s? Well, the latter two happened to get their big breaks within a year of the release of “American Idiot”, and it would be hard to believe that’s any kind of coincidence.
Fall Out Boy had released their debut the year before the “American Idiot” rapture and despite having a similar sound to other pop-punk and post-hardcore of the time, it went nowhere. Maybe the songwriting just wasn’t there yet? But it seems entirely possible that even with improved songwriting, the sudden boom in demand for hyper-dramatic arena-sized pop-punk that followed 2004 is at least part of what drove the band’s 2005 follow-up, “From Under The Cork Tree”, to become their best-selling to date. It just so happened to feature a pair of singles that, like several other Fall Out Boy songs a couple years later, would be inescapable on rock radio for a while: the frantic “Dance, Dance” and the jealous-heartbreak-anthem “Sugar, We’re Going Down”.
Panic! At The Disco, meanwhile, formed the year “American Idiot” was released and released their debut the next year after Fall Out Boy themselves helped them sign to their label Fueled By Ramen (this label being to 2000s pop-punk what Merge and Matador were to indie rock). “A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out” was even more naked in its theatrical ambitions than Green Day or Fall Out Boy (if you want to see a snapshot of how much this aggravated tensions between the emo/pop-punk and indie scene at the time, check out Pitchfork’s scathing 1.5/10 review of the album from when it came out – it’s still up on their site as of writing this!). Somehow, the ungainly thing ended up selling even more than “From Under The Cork Tree” and further cemented a fact that was quickly becoming unavoidable: pop-punk was no longer just whiny-voiced guys writing loserly skate-punk songs about hating your parents or grossing out your girlfriend. Pop-punk now demanded people take it seriously; pop-punk was now High Drama.
Or was this pop-punk anymore? Should we start calling it “emo” now? But does this shift in tone really warrant a change of genre name? Is there really that wide of a gulf between “Sugar, We’re Going Down” and anything on “American Idiot”? Personally, I don’t see it. But for the sake of historical veracity of the vocabulary people commonly used at the time, I will henceforth refer to the scene collectively as “emo” (while acknowledging that it would still seem wrong to call Good Charlotte, Avril Lavigne or Green Day emo even if their music wasn’t too far off from it sonically).
***
These last two bands also mark the appearance of some of emo’s most awkward and ugliest features, and I feel the need to highlight these before moving on. First (and less seriously), we have the songwriting factor. When I said I only thought Fall Out Boy’s improved songwriting was partially responsible for their breakthrough, I’m not joking; how else could we explain the popularity of as massive a dud as Panic!’s “I Write Sins Not Tragedies”? Without the context of the new thirst for theatrical emo-flavoured hits, I can only imagine that such a clunker would have absolutely flopped upon release. The chorus is a winding maze of dead-end phrases that virtually ignores rhythmic pulse and stress in favour of piling one overly-enunciated lyric on top of another into utter forgettableness. And this kind of songwriting was no anomaly in the scene; Fall Out Boy is guilty of it too, as were countless other pop-punk bands that followed. Many of these songs irk me in particular because they feel like the worst of both worlds: they’re too incompetently written to be successful as actual pop songs, but too polished in terms of technical skill and production to sound punk in any recognizable form. Often, they sound like a band trying to make the music serve the (usually poorly-written) words and failing. Max Martin must have been tearing his hair out when he first realized they were overtaking his own radio hits.
A more serious matter is the subject of the heightened misogyny. Yes, misogyny had been around in the genre since it was called pop-punk; Blink-182 notably complained about girls that “try too hard” and whined how they’re “such a drag” on some of their biggest albums. But while many of these earlier bands acted like petulant teenage boys who never grew up (Robert Christgau accurately noted that Blink were more “frightened of females” than anything else), the later ones start to sound positively spiteful. Increasingly, the lyrics of this still-mostly-male second generation targeted “evil exes” or objects of desire they seemed eager to put down even as they lusted after them (see also-rans All Time Low’s “Dear Maria, Count Me In” for a prime example of this phenomenon). And it didn’t help that one of the sole female-fronted bands, Paramore, had their biggest hit with a catfight of a song in “Misery Business”, in which Hayley Williams called the other girl a “whore” and “nothing more” (a line she would come to regret deeply later on after the smoke of this era had cleared). Even the women of the scene didn’t seem to like other women much!
***
But even with these two notable failings, the mid-2000s turned out to be emo’s “big moment” – which is precisely why My Chemical Romance couldn’t have picked a better time to release “The Black Parade”. You know the rest: the album summoned a wave of hysteria (both from the fans and the concerned parents who still wouldn’t learn the words “mental health” for another few years), defined the era and spawned countless waves of imitators. Just as “American Idiot” paved the way for the second generation of pop-punk/emo, “The Black Parade” ushered in that new era in full, and now everyone wanted a piece of “the scene”.
Perhaps I should start capitalizing that here: “The Scene”. Or maybe just “Scene”? Because another effect of this era is that something about its terminology and conceptualization of itself coalesced around that word in a nebulous way (approximately as nebulous as the term “hipster” we’ll be seeing a lot of later on in our discussion of indie rock). It wasn’t enough for the kids devoted to these bands to call themselves “punks” anymore, though whether that was because actual older “punks” wanted nothing to do with them or because the kids didn’t even think of themselves as the same group is anyone’s guess. They weren’t “goth” either, though the stereotypical “emo” fashion sense shifted dramatically from its plain nerdiness in the late-90s into something that clearly drew from goths as an inspiration. The term we landed on was “Scene”, as in part of “the scene”, which presumably originally meant one’s local punk “scene” – making this term ironic in the extreme, of course, since the “Scene” at this point was less local than ever now that these blockbuster emo bands could tour internationally and sell multi-platinum albums.
But irony be damned, the term stuck, and thus we have memories of that lost species known as “Scene kids”. If this moniker doesn’t instantly conjure up a very specific image to you, look it up, gaze upon their works and despair. It wasn’t just the fans, either – the newer generations of bands were quick to adopt a new fashion sense and vocabulary, solidifying a particular aesthetic sensibility more homogeneous than the original punk movement.
I can’t help but wonder if the internet was a major factor in this. You can talk all you want about what MTV did for music’s visual aesthetics, but Scene kids were in the interesting position of being one of the first major music/fashion subcultures to begin around the dawn of social media. Now it was more than imitating what they saw on TV; the kids could upload pictures of themselves and adapt to the changing face of what was considered cool in real time. It’s little wonder that among words people tend to associate with Scene kids, “MySpace” is one of the first, possibly even before any genre of music.
Regardless of the specifics of all this, Scene kids represented something particularly fascinating (and/or scary, depending on your feelings about them): they were the new face of youth culture in rock music during the 2000s. Somewhere between 2005 and 2007, they rose from being “a part” of that market to being the lion’s share of it. And the supply responded to the demand: all those My Chemical Romance wannabes flooding the market in the wake of 2006 found their audience, giving a whole truckload of forgettable new bands a few years in the spotlight – that is, before it all came crashing down.
Though the two genres discussed henceforth will be differentiated to extremes (at least to the extent of exaggerations I will deem acceptable to the task at hand – don’t worry, plenty of grey areas will be covered as well), it may not surprise you at all to learn that both the pop-punk/emo movement and the indie rock movement share a common ancestry. It is not, however, a particularly straightforward one, and their origins prior to the split between them must be traced not through a single simple genealogy but rather through a complex network of events that comprise the circumstances they were born in.
The most obvious origin point for both genres can be found by picking up where I left off in my previous rock genealogy, within the “alternative” movement that fundamentally changed the sound of rock in the 90s. Focusing on this movement, I want to highlight a few key points that will contribute to the emergence of later sub-genres: recall that the genesis for this shift lies largely in the “post-punk” period of the 80s. One such important development that occurred involved the movement from “hardcore” punk, a subgenre that developed at the beginning of the 80s and was characterized by hyper-fast tempos and ultra-aggressive riffs and lyrics, to “post-hardcore”.
Defining just what “post-hardcore” is can be a little tricky, as the genre name is still in use today and often used to describe wildly different kinds of music. A general sound, however, can be identified through clusters of commonalities. Most important to this genealogy is the fact that post-hardcore seems to stem largely from a few keys bands at the time that decided to move beyond what they saw as the restrictive limits of hardcore punk, bands that include Husker Du, Dag Nasty, Rites Of Spring and Fugazi. Each of these bands began to move away from the hard/fast/simple structures of hardcore punk after a certain point (or in the case of Fugazi, rising from the ashes of Minor Threat and Rites Of Spring and thus already feeling the “been-there-done-that” right from the start). Just what they moved towards was a variety of sounds by no means unified, but highly influential on a wave of bands to come. Husker Du and Dag Nasty shifted towards more melodic and introspective songwriting, alongside slower tempos – as well as no shortage of tortured-relationship drama in the lyrics, adding an aspect of emotional vulnerability that would have quite an impact on future generations. Rites Of Spring continued to play fast, but the riffs and vocals became increasingly complex and raw, with tempos slowing down just enough to accommodate that complexity; Guy Picciotto’s ragged yowl is something of a blueprint for a non-melodic vocal style that would emerge later in the scene’s development. Fugazi, Picciotto’s next band with Ian MacKaye (formerly of Minor Threat), upped the complexity, bringing decidedly non-rock grooves, tight stop-start structures and alternations between dissonant and anthemic passages to the table.
I would argue that all of these bands (with possible a few more that I missed) form the basis of what would come to be known as “post-hardcore” by some, and “emo” by others, on account of both the will to move beyond the early 80s and the more emotionally vulnerable approach to songwriting, respectively. At a point in the 90s difficult to locate the exact whereabouts of, these two genres merge and a new beast is born. You can see the culmination of this in an album like Refused’s “The Shape Of Punk To Come”. The Swedish Refused had begun the 90s on the more metal-influenced side of hardcore punk, but by the end of the decade, they had branched out into something more experimental, implying they might have been taking cues from the aforementioned Rites Of Spring and Fugazi. The same could be said of the American At The Drive-In, whose 2000 album “Relationship Of Command” could have just as easily shared a title with that Refused album (try to imagine, say, Rise Against or Billy Talent without this album). In this iteration of “post-hardcore”, the vocals took on a kind of standardization with death-metal-derived screaming deployed as a Picciotto-like foil to the more melodic vocals reminiscent of…
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Punk rock was really pop music from the start, but there is a sense worth noting in which the earlier bands hadn’t been actively courting pop success or respectability, at least not in a way anything less than deeply ironically (see: Sid Vicious singing “My Way”). Trying to name the “first pop-punk album” is a fool’s errand because of this tortured entwinement with pop, but the Buzzcocks and Ramones seem like as good a point of departure as any. Both featured significantly more melodic songwriting than their peers; both looked to pop traditions that had fallen out of fashion, but were nevertheless mainstream at some point in the past as reference points; and as with proto-emo bands, both involved a lot of songs about relationship hang-ups.
That being said, it’s even harder to trace a direct line from these early pop-punk bands to the later pop-punk bands of the 90s when the genre “crystalized” than it is to trace the roots of emo and post-hardcore. This is quite simply because the pop-punk bands of the 90s sound virtually nothing like the Ramones or the Buzzcocks (even if some of them cite the two as influences). Why is this? The answer is something of a mystery, but I will do my best to explain it based on a two factors that I think made the biggest impact: first of all, the sound of pop music changed dramatically by the 90s. Second, the technology available to pop musicians, even those playing at an amateur level, also changed.
In terms of the sound, we must remember that the earliest pop-punk bands of the 90s (prominently Green Day and Blink-182, among others) grew up on a mix of pop and alternative sounds of the 80s. Recall that alternative music in the 80s drastically changed the tonality of rock during that era; I cannot doubt that this had an impact on the musicians that would later come to call themselves pop-punk, and so they differ from the Ramones in that they are no longer emulating the sound of 60s girl group/doo-wop, but instead the new tonalities of the 80s pop that took inspiration from the underground, as well as that underground itself. One band that seems to cast a long shadow here is Bad Religion, another group emerging from the hardcore punk scene. Unlike many of their contemporaries who were content to play anything, no matter how ugly and dissonant, as long as it was loud and fast, Bad Religion took a streamlined and melodic approach to songwriting – even moreso than Husker Du or Dag Nasty. Their 1-2-minute ragers seemed calculated to stick in your head with a catchy melody guiding each one. The exact origins of the tonal tendency of these melodies is hard to identify (which could mean Bad Religion were just true originals), but it skews decidedly away from blues-based sounds of the 60s and 70s, and certainly towards a more “clean” songwriting sensibility.
This “clean” sound carried over to the band’s production, which often favoured clarity and precision (you can hear each instrument distinctly!) over the sprawling mess of Black Flag or the proto-shoegaze wall-of-sound on Husker Du albums. Bad Religion might be the best-recorded hardcore punk band from an audio technician’s standpoint, and if they are indeed a key locus point of the origins of pop-punk as I’m guessing they are, this would explain a lot.
That’s because just at the time the melodic tide was rising, recording technology got a whole lot more precise. I can’t tell if this is due to the perfection of technologies that engineers spent the 80s experimenting with, leading to lower capital costs for studios, or whether studios were simply throwing more money around to any rock band that asked for it during the alt-rock gold rush boom, but seemingly every alternative band that wanted it got an opportunity in the 90s to be recorded as cleanly as, say, Guns ‘N’ Roses. The very possibility of a listeners being able to hear punk bands in hi-fi seemingly created an overnight demand for bands that took full advantage of that, leading to the rise of punk bands that did a very un-punk thing: they actually started learning to play their instruments in a technically proficient manner, since (presumably) they knew that any mistakes they made would be extra-obvious in high-definition sound quality.
It's possible not all of this is conscious, or even true of the bands in question. But there’s no denying that something must account for the difference between the griminess of Black Flag and Dead Kennedys recordings and the squeaky-clean sound of Green Day and Blink-182, not to mention the “improved” playing (notice how you rarely hear a “wrong” chord in a pop-punk song), and these are the best explanations I can think of. Soon enough, these factors dovetailed with the bands’ pop-oriented songwriting, making them the most commercially viable rock bands ever to have been labelled “punk” at the time (you may have noticed, but the radio doesn’t tolerate lo-fi or amateur sloppiness, two hurdles that pop-punk bands cleared in the 90s while other more traditional punk bands failed to cross over).
And then there’s that vocal style; you know the one. I can’t fully account for the pop-punk vocal sound and why all the singers sound the same. It could be a production technique. It could be that everyone decided to try and sing like some combination of Billie Joe Armstrong, Tom DeLonge and Mark Hoppus to very limited results in terms of possible variety. Either way, it’s important to note even if I can’t explain it: there’s a very particular style of singing associated with pop-punk, and you hear very little variation within the genre’s singers because of this. I can’t quite describe it other than “nasally” and “whiny”, though this arguably describes some earlier, more traditional punk singers as well, despite the fact that they sound nothing like this style. It’s always melodic, it’s typically bombastic or exaggerated, and it doesn’t vary much even among women in the genre (listen to the similarities between Avril Lavigne and Hayley Williams if you don’t believe me).
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Somewhere along the road, the two distinct styles I’ve detailed here cross paths – maybe it had something to do with the commonality of increased technical proficiency favoured by both emo/post-hardcore and pop-punk bands. The aforementioned Refused seem like a pretty good example of ground zero for this newer sound, but you can also hear some of it on the earlier Sunny Day Real Estate album “Diary”. In the early-to-late 2000s, this sound would quickly splinter into a million different micro-sub-genres depending on which way the tendencies of a given band happened to lean; metalcore bands obviously took more inspiration from metal, while emocore (later just “emo”) bands hearkened more to the dramatic (almost gothic) lyrical stylings of the earlier movement, and so on (one quirk of this scene happens to be dubbing almost every new sub-genre some variation of “x-core”, a dim reminder of its roots in hardcore punk). These micro-genres are not as important as the simple fact that all of the bands that followed shared a common DNA in pop-punk and emo/post-hardcore, leading to a massive homogenization in sound even between radically opposed factions of the scene that were actively hostile to each other. Jimmy Eat World, Panic! At The Disco, Protest The Hero and Alexisonfire (to take a random smattering of some of the bands that followed) might have all thought they were wildly different bands, but the truth is that they sound largely the same to outsiders, or at least more similar than Arcade Fire do to the Strokes (more on this later).
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Which brings us down another winding path in search of the origins of modern rock: where did this “indie rock” sound come from? In fact, the answer is just as complicated as that of the question we asked of pop-punk and emo, if not more so. As previously mentioned, indie and emo do share common roots, and they did both emerge from post-punk factionalization in the 80s. But the roots of indie rock are perhaps even less clear than those of emo, so please be patient while I attempt to tease out some of the finer points of its evolution here.
Let’s start with the more extreme avant-garde edge of post-punk in the 80s. With many New York groups pushing the boundaries of what could credibly be called “rock music” through the so-called “no wave” scene, there came an increasing interest in what would happen if you abandoned the “rock” concept altogether, or at least subordinated it to other musical impulses. A surprising amount of crossover with what might have traditionally been called “classical” composers occurred in this era, and the focal point of the sound we’re trying to trace was likely composer Glenn Branca. Branca wrote what were effectively symphonies of dissonant electric guitar noise, taking the instrumentation and general sound of rock music and transposing it to the setting of classical composition. It should come as no surprise that Sonic Youth (who we’ll get to in a minute) guitarists Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore began their careers as part of Branca’s ensemble.
This particular sound Branca had created would prove more influential than anyone might have guessed; beyond giving Sonic Youth their initial concept for a newer, noisier, more free-form “rock” sound, it opened up the possibilities for a new generation of post-punk-oriented types to start thinking of taking things even further – maybe moving into something that would come to be called “post-rock”. Rock and roll, after all, seemed like the final weight tying post-punk’s experimental and avant-garde impulses down; why not let it go and liberate yourself from the tyranny of traditional pop songform?
Though there are few records I know of indicating the immediate influence of a post-rock scene in the 80s, the concept seemed to take off in the 90s (I can’t explain this, though it’s possible there’s a secret history of bands too underground for me to know about at work here). Most notably, Godspeed You! Black Emperor and the Icelandic Sigur Ros brought the post-rock sound sudden critical acclaim and increased visibility at the end of the decade. It’s worth mentioning that Godspeed You! Black Emperor is Canadian; this might seem trivial, but is a factor that becomes extremely important over the next decade as a scene begins to form around the zeitgeist of the Toronto post-rock movement. One might even call it a… “social” scene (sorry).
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One particular thing that’s important to note about the new post-rock sound is that its proponents went further than Branca in subverting the sound of what might traditionally be thought of as rock, going so far as to incorporate decidedly un-rock (and more commonly “classical”) instruments such as violins into the mix to help create massive, epic-sized soundscapes. This new mix of instrumentation would become very important in the coming years as the scene coalesced into something more pop-oriented than post-rock; bands with more traditional song structures began to form again, but their lineups and arrangements bore little resemblance to the rock combos of yesteryear. These bands often contained a mixture of electric and acoustic, rock and classical, old and new instruments, and the arrangements tended towards a jam-y, fragmentary approach to elements as basic as chord progressions; one acoustic guitar might be playing some chords while a bassist improvised in modal keys and an electric guitarist and violinist pit dueling drones against each other – all this with maybe something as eccentric as an accordion or hurdy-gurdy poking its head out of the mix from time to time!
The most well-known band of this kind from the early days of the scene was the Toronto-based Broken Social Scene. Beginning as a post-rock band (their first, largely instrumental album still carries that sound, albeit more beat-wise and pop-friendly than Godspeed You! Black Emperor), the 10+-musician collective began to bring lyrics (and proper songs) to the forefront by their second album, the now-widely-acknowledged classic “You Forgot It In People”. From a pop standpoint, the album seemed to come from out of nowhere with a fresh sound utterly foreign to the mainstream landscape, but as we now know, that sound had been a couple decades in the making; it just took until 2002 for a band of that kind to write some catchy songs.
Most important in all of this is the size of the collective, which could contain up to 19 members at its peak; this is crucial to establishing the origins of a significant portion (I would roughly estimate 60%) of the subsequent boom in Canadian indie rock. Look at the “associated acts” section of Broken Social Scene’s Wikipedia page and some names might stand out: Metric! Stars! Feist! Do Make Say Think! (OK, I’ll admit that last one is a bit more obscure, but they are a funny example of how the post-post-rock of Broken Social Scene also happened to spawn yet another post-rock band). This band launched more successful side projects than some record labels have successful original groups, and at least two (Metric and Feist) have since eclipsed them in commercial terms. The impact of Broken Social Scene on the sound of what would come to be known by the middle of the 2000s as “indie rock” is hard to overstate.
I should add that while writing this whole last paragraph, I was frantically searching for any connection between Broken Social Scene and that other giant of Canadian indie rock, Arcade Fire – wasn’t the latter another offshoot? Or didn’t they share a member or two or something? To my surprise, neither is apparently the case. So here I note that somehow, independently of Broken Social Scene (but at roughly the same time), another like-minded band was on the rise in Montreal. Like Broken Social Scene, they had a sprawling, unconventional lineup of musicians that played a variety of instruments not commonly associated with rock, and they, too, helped re-write the book on how a pop song could take shape. This band was Arcade Fire, one of the most successful bands to come out of the first wave of the “indie rock” movement, and we will be talking much more about them in later installments of this investigation.
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But was that really the first wave? Arguably, something like this had happened before, somewhere in that alt-rock boom of the 90s. Though much of the gold rush at the time was carried out by major labels and the bands they boosted out of local obscurity, a few independent labels and their surrounding scenes got a major break around the same time. Two of these labels, Matador and Merge (both coincidentally founded in 1989), would come to play a major part in the later 2000s indie rock boom, but each would also arguably play a part in establishing that “genre” before anyone even knew what to call it, as would British indie label 4AD.
Probably the two biggest success stories of what could be called 90s indie rock (at least in North America – we’ll get to the British wave in good time) were those of Pavement and the Pixies. Emerging from what could be considered a “post-punk” context, the bands played noisy and loose, like many coming off of the post-Sonic Youth high of realizing you could embrace your eccentricities and run with them. The bands had “songs”, but the songs were often strangely non-sensical and lacked pop hooks in the traditional sense; they got by more on the sheer weirdness of their sound or the intensity (or sometimes lack thereof, in Pavement’s case) with which they were played.
Pavement’s sound tended to follow a certain line of approach that epitomized 90s alternative youth culture, the path of the “slacker”. Many Pavement songs sounded “slack” in that they often sounded half-finished – like they either forgot to write a chorus or a bridge, or perhaps had made up the lyrics minutes before the recording (unlike a lot of other bands that tried to “clean up” their sound for a major breakthrough moment, this approach would continue through even their more “pop” era by the end of the 90s). Singer Stephen Malkmus often sounded like he was barely trying, or maybe trying really hard to convince you that he was barely trying (this stance of disengaged affect will come back to us shortly in a different context). Nevertheless, the band’s songs did have memorable riffs and textures, and a line repeated often enough could prove to function as a hook even if it had only the barest hint of a melody, as on the iconic “Summer Babe”. This slacker approach to songwriting would help loosen the expectations for what could be considered a song in the first place as Pavement’s influence spread in the 2000s indie rock scene long after their initial break-up.
The Pixies also seemed to take a slapdash attitude towards songwriting, although in their case it seemed to amount to something less about ignoring pop conventions or musicianship (even many early Pixies songs are catchy, if abrupt, and the band was surprisingly tight for how chaotic they sounded) and more about being able to write about whatever the hell you wanted. Hence we get the strange pseudo-mysticism of the band’s most pop-friendly moment “Where Is My Mind?”, with its meditations on Caribbean sea creatures hiding behind rocks and the “coy koi” trying to tell us something, as well as the frantic, impromptu theme song for a made-up superhero on “Tony’s Theme”.
Less influential in sound (and actually closer to pop-punk than either of the aforementioned bands) was Superchunk, a bratty punk-ish band that got their start on Matador, the same label as Pavement. But Superchunk would prove to be influential in a different way altogether through their founding of Merge Records. The label was initially an outlet for Superchunk and their friends’ bands, but by the 2000s it had expanded to release music from the Magnetic Fields, the Mountain Goats and…Arcade Fire! So needless to say, Merge played an extremely important role in the wind-up and follow-through of the indie rock boom of the subsequent decade. (As a side note not relevant to this story but kind of interesting, it has been widely agreed upon that Superchunk released most of their best work as a band in the last decade, and I’d highly recommend listening to everything of theirs from “Majesty Shredding” onwards).
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What else? The Velvet Underground has always been cool, though their popularity and influence seems to wax and wane. In some ways, there are two sides to the band that are most commonly emulated: one is the sweeter, more melodic side that tends towards childlike innocence or playful abstraction – this side’s influence can be heard most clearly on bands like Beat Happening and Pavement. But there’s another side, a darker side that tends towards drones, noise, buzzsaw guitar tones, motor-like drum beats and dry, deadpan delivery. This side certainly had its impact in the 80s (see The Jesus And Mary Chain), but its influence seemed to vanish by the end of the 90s, perhaps because grunge had asserted its primacy as the dominant “heavy alternative music” by that time.
But the dormant period didn’t last long; pretty soon, a bunch of artsy kids chasing Bohemian mythology in New York would drag the sound back out into the light of the mainstream, the biggest of them being the most blatantly retro-leaning in sound. This was the era of the New York indie rock scene as detailed in the book “Meet Me In The Bathroom”, which of course takes its name from a song by that very band just alluded to, The Strokes.
It’s true that the Strokes, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and LCD Soundsystem all occupied the same scene at the same time, but I’d like to set the Strokes apart to talk about their influence because they happen to sound so wildly different from the others. While the former bands mixed elements of other genres into their sound (most notably disco and electronic music), the Strokes were (for at least the first decade of their career) all rock, and I suspect this made all the difference in terms of their influence. The advent of a Velvet Underground-aping band like this one started something of a chain reaction culminating in a tidal wave of similar-sounding groups, especially, oddly enough, from the UK (I can only assume that the band got a massive press boost there compared to in the US).
Perhaps it was because unlike their difficult-to-imitate New York peers, the Strokes’ sound was so simple and bare-bones that they made it seem like anyone could do it, thus re-capturing some of the original appeal of the first wave of punk. The “I-care-even-less-than-Stephen-Malkmus” delivery of Julian Casablancas (who nevertheless had a distinct style no one has quite managed to copy since) and lo-fi production values (this is a band that took their second album to a different studio after being offered a big budget for it because they thought the results sounded “soulless”) probably only contributed to this. By the end of the 2000s, the still-undefinable term “indie rock” could mean any number of things, but one definite possibility for what it could mean to some would have been any of those bands that got caught up in the cooler-than-thou zeitgeist of the Strokes.
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In a similar case of a rather bare-bones rock group causing a stir, a duo (supposedly brother and sister, though later revealed to have been a couple and not related at all) from Detroit made a splash in the early 2000s with the most elemental approach to the genre at the time: using only guitar and drums, the White Stripes pulled off a minor miracle by conjuring the rawness of 60s and 70s rock without any of the nostalgia, bombast, or, to put it plainly, bullshit. Jack and Meg White’s none-the-more-basic sound turned a new generation on to sounds of the past, giving them the lean punk meat of their retro sound with the fat trimmed. Like the Strokes and Arcade Fire, the White Stripes would take off in popularity over the next decade and prove highly influential; they formed yet another archetype of what people thought an “indie” band might be, this time in the incarnation of a “dynamic duo” that broke down rock music to its barest pieces to build something new (see later the Japandroids for where that sound could go, as well as the eventual limits it would run up against).
If it seems like I’m suddenly talking a lot about “rock” in a scene that had seemingly just gotten over that very idea (“post-rock”, remember that?), congratulations, you’ve just identified one of the first major contradictions of the so-called “indie scene”! The truth is that there is even less of a coherent definition for “indie rock” than for, say, “post-hardcore”; it “contains multitudes”. But it is also true that there was a large audience that consumed a lot of this music at the same time; if you didn’t grow up during the movement, it might surprise you to learn that people who were really into the Strokes were also more likely to have listened to Godspeed You! Black Emperor. There was a certain wheelhouse of culture at the time that deemed some things “indie” and other things not – and most confusingly, this doesn’t even entirely stem from the fact that “indie” was never supposed to be a genre in the first place and was just short for “independent”, since many of these bands could hardly be considered independent (especially after the first wave when major labels began marketing bands as “indie” right out of the gate). Certain “hipster”-identified publications like Pitchfork were definitely key in this cultural situation (we’ll talk about “hipsters” later, don’t worry).
But if there’s one thing we can perhaps see that unites these original bands in the scene (further waves are a toss-up, and always more derivative by default anyway), it’s that they were aiming against homogenization towards embodying something decidedly “different”. And if you want to know what they were so “different” from, I need point no further than the state of rock at the time.
Because “the state of rock” was a legitimately concerning topic to many in the early 2000s. As of the 90s, a lot of the most popular rock bands of the moment stopped getting played on pop or “mainstream” radio, potentially due to a lack of big singles or the perceived heaviness and “otherness” of grunge. What’s more, hip-hop began its slow creep into position as the dominant pop genre of choice for a new generation. By the early 2000s, this creep had started to feel threatening to a lot of older rock fans, who reacted in one of two ways: either with a violent (and often racist) negativity that cemented their legacy as defenders of “true rock” (and by their extension, “true music”) or with the “if-you-can’t-beat-‘em-join-‘em” attitude that spawned a lot of attempted rap-rock crossovers and eventually, the dreaded nu-metal.
Along with the post-grunge hangover I described in my original article about the genealogy of modern rock, nu-metal was probably the next most-popular rock subgenre of the early 2000s. Bands like Slipknot and Disturbed shot up the rock charts with an ultra-masculine, ultra-aggressive strain of metal that took cues from hip-hop – including, unfortunately, the cheap shock tactics and violent misogyny of a lot of gangsta rap. Though I have seen some critics try and defend the genre in recent years, I personally believe there’s little to defend; it was a largely irredeemable phenomenon best left in the past. If you want to know just what the “indie” scene was trying to distinguish itself from by finding a different approach to rock or abandoning it entirely, it was most probably something like this (interestingly, there was less of an attempt on the part of many pop-punk and emo bands to differentiate themselves from nu-metal, which is yet another thing that will be discussed later).
What’s kind of funny is that the cultural zeitgeist of that moment of nu-metal and post-grunge dominance is, I believe, precisely one of the uniting factors in the rise of both “indie” and “emo” in the decade to come. This is because it pushed the question of “the fate of rock” to a breaking point for all parties. Almost every band I’ve mentioned so far had a stake in the matter, and in the years to come, they would find their way of confronting the spectre of what was loudly proclaimed the “death of rock and roll” as the genre seemed to be taking a bow for the entrance of hip-hop to replace it. It could be argued that many of these bands in both scenes only found the popularity they did in the first place due to the rock market’s boredom with the homogeneous sound of the genre at the time and demand for something beyond. And with the scene set, the next move would be to develop a rough timeline of events to explain just how it all unfolded.
An introduction to my series of essays, The Big Split.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Loose Ends
God, I've been threatening to do this essay for something like 5 years (possibly longer?) now, and I finally finished it. I don't really have the energy to go back and read it for coherence (given that it was written stop/start over the course of a few years) or edit it, so you'll get it how it currently is and I can amend it/argue about it later. Without further ado, the beginning of a multi-part essay series on the general theme of "What happened to rock music over the last 25-30 years?":
Over a decade ago now, back when I was fresh out of high school (Jesus), I wrote this article about why modern rock radio sounded the way it did at the time and why it had changed so much from rock radio in the 70s and 80s. I didn’t have the vocabulary to explain it at the time, but I now realize that my approach to that article was largely genealogical in its exploration of rock history, attempting to trace the origins of things that had become influential in the popular consciousness to their roots as an explanation for what might appear on a surface level to be unbridgeable gaps in the progression of music.
Rock radio obviously sounds quite different now from how it did in 2013, and as a follow-up, I’d like to take some time to introduce a new genealogy that traces the origins of its new sound. While the previous genealogy of rock radio centered around a narrative of one subculture rising up to displace the dominant culture, then slowly becoming the new status quo, this new genealogy tells a different story, one of parallel paths in different subcultures that emerged in the 90s and 2000s as very distinctly opposed approaches that fought on semi-equal footing for cultural dominance before gradually merging into each other to create the sound of rock radio as it began to shift in the mid-to-late 2010s. In other words, it is the story of a “split” between two different genres, or, since “genre” feels a little misleading given the broadness of what we’re going to address, two different “scenes”. I will refer to this as the “indie/emo split” for shorthand, and much of what follows will be spent defining the boundaries of each side of the split, as well as mapping out my understanding of the cultural contexts that led to their reunification.
Please note the phrase “my understanding”; this account will be, at least in part, subjective, firstly because pop music criticism (and yes, even part of pop music history) is primarily a subjective matter at its core, but also because I am not a real academic and don’t have the time or resources to try and gather interview material from everyone who was “there” at the time of the events I will be examining. I will be relying on a few external sources such as books or articles, but I’m doing this as a hobby, so you have to grant me some room for error here in addition to things you might disagree with. I know I can’t make this thing critic-proof, so I suppose you have every right to complain about my slanting of issues if you want, but just keep what I’ve said in mind as you do. If you’re someone who was “there”, I would be happy to hear from you, but I’d also like to point out that since I’m talking about the radio here, I’m going to be relying on recorded music for my sources, so if you knew what the live scene “was really like” for the artists discussed in the following, I have to tell you in advance that I care significantly less about that for the purposes of this project than about the way the music came out sounding when it was released to the public. Also I should clarify that even “radio” is a term I’m using haphazardly here; back when I wrote the original article, I barely listened to rock radio. I probably listen to it even less now. But I like to think I have a pretty good idea of what the average young person will play or think of when they hear the term “rock music”, and I can at the very least see what various music streaming services and journalists are categorizing as “rock” that they might not have before, so I hope this is a satisfactory explanation of what I will be shorthanding as “radio”. I do note that the old rock radio as it existed in 2011 (when I wrote my original essay) is almost certainly still out there – it didn’t die in the sense of dropping off the face of the earth entirely. But I don’t think it’s too far-fetched to claim that such post-grunge-inflected radio is no longer the dominant cultural force at this moment in time, so it will also not be considered as the “rock radio” that lives in the ears of today’s youth.
Finally, I should be upfront about one more point with regard to my subjectivity: I do have an agenda here. I spent much more time listening to the music from one side of this split than the other and I do think it’s more worthwhile to listen to and I will try and convince readers of that. I also believe that this side of the split has been unfairly slighted in the current cultural memory of each, and part of my project here is to remind readers of its past greatness, as well as to help shatter some nostalgia for the earlier periods of the side of the split I don’t think so highly of. Those who have been following this blog for a long time probably already know which I side with, and those who haven’t (and aren’t interested in digging back through my past ramblings) will find out soon enough.
I'm stealing an idea from someone else on here to help me catch up on a backlog of music I have lying around that I haven't yet listened to. Up above, you'll see 50 albums, 25 in each list. The lists are as follows:
List 1:
Adele - 30
Les Amazones d'Afrique - Amazones Power
The Chills - Brave Words
CMAT - Crazymad, For Me
Courtney Love - America's Sweetheart
Dusty Springfield - The Very Best Of Dusty Springfield
FU-Schnickens - Nervous Breakdown
Generation Bass Presents Transnational Dubstep [compilation]
Gil Scott-Heron - It's Your World
Girls Against Boys - House Of GvsB
Kool AD - 63
Louis Armstrong - Ambassador Satch
Mach-Hommy - Dollar Menu 4
Mase - Harlem World
Meat Puppets - Huevos
Meredith Monk - Dolmen Music
Nirvana - From The Muddy Banks Of The Wishkah
Pylon - Chomp
Stevie Ray Vaughan - In Step
Terry Allen - Bottom Of The World
Thelonious Monk - The Complete London Collection
Tyler Childers - Rustin' In The Rain
UB40 - Labour Of Love
The Velvet Underground - Another View
Willowz - Talk In Circles
List 2:
Bell Orchestre - Recording A Tape The Colour Of The Light
Carly Pearce - Hummingbird
Clem Snide - End Of Love
Earth, Wind & Fire - Open Our Eyes
Elliott Murphy - Aquashow
Gasolin' - Gasolin'
Helen Reddy - Helen Reddy
Kirby Heard - Mama's Biscuits
Lifesavas - Spirit In Stone
Lori McKenna - 1988
Marshal Crenshaw - #447
Muddy Waters - King Bee
New Wave Dance Music From South Africa [compilation]
NRBQ - NRBQ
L'Orchestre National Mauritanien - Ahl Nana
Randy Newman - Randy Newman
Ray Wylie Hubbard - Co-Starring Too
Ruby Braff And Ellis Larkins - Calling Berlin Vol. 1
Sacred Soul Of North Carolina [compilation]
Skip James - Blues From The Delta
Swamp Dogg - Gag A Maggot
Tabu Ley Rochereau - Man From Kinshasa
Unholy Modal Rounders - Unholier Than Thou: 7/7/77
Van Dyke Parks - Song Cycle
Yo-Yo Ma - Classic Yo-Yo
You can help me out here by replying to this post picking one album from each of the lists, which I will then listen to at some point in...hopefully the next month? Maybe two? Sorry, my listening schedule for new stuff is slow recently because of work. But a few notes here:
a) First, obviously you must pick two albums (again, one from each list) and you can't pick something somebody else has already picked.
b) As I listen to these albums (I tend to go in alphabetical order on a running list I have), I will post short impressions of them here (I may or may not add a letter grade, we'll see how I'm feeling by the time I get around to it).
c) Pretty much all of these albums were reviewed (or at least recommended) in some way by the critic Robert Christgau, so part of my impressions will involve noting whether I agree or disagree with him on his assessment.
I'm honestly not sure if I have enough followers here for this to work, so it might get cross-posted to a Facebook group I'm in where people are more likely to respond. I'll reblog after a while with an update on what's chosen, and it will close after I get a lineup of about 10-20 albums (or after like a week or two, if no one's responding).
And yes, I am aware that these are eccentric lists.
OK, reblogging this for one more attempt at getting anyone at all here to interact with it since the people on Facebook were significantly more responsive - chosen so far by that crowd:
Earth, Wind & Fire - Open Our Eyes
Elliott Murphy - Aquashow
FU-Schnickens - Nervous Breakdown
Gil Scott-Heron - It's Your World
Louis Armstrong - Ambassador Satch
Meredith Monk - Dolmen Music
Randy Newman - Randy Newman
Skip James - Blues From The Delta
Stevie Ray Vaughan - In Step
Swamp Dogg - Gag A Maggot
Van Dyke Parks - Song Cycle
The Velvet Underground - Another View
If anyone else wants to tell me two albums (one from each list) to listen to, this is your last chance since I'm closing this soon and then will start on my reports (I've already listened to half of that Louis Armstrong one).
I'm stealing an idea from someone else on here to help me catch up on a backlog of music I have lying around that I haven't yet listened to. Up above, you'll see 50 albums, 25 in each list. The lists are as follows:
List 1:
Adele - 30
Les Amazones d'Afrique - Amazones Power
The Chills - Brave Words
CMAT - Crazymad, For Me
Courtney Love - America's Sweetheart
Dusty Springfield - The Very Best Of Dusty Springfield
FU-Schnickens - Nervous Breakdown
Generation Bass Presents Transnational Dubstep [compilation]
Gil Scott-Heron - It's Your World
Girls Against Boys - House Of GvsB
Kool AD - 63
Louis Armstrong - Ambassador Satch
Mach-Hommy - Dollar Menu 4
Mase - Harlem World
Meat Puppets - Huevos
Meredith Monk - Dolmen Music
Nirvana - From The Muddy Banks Of The Wishkah
Pylon - Chomp
Stevie Ray Vaughan - In Step
Terry Allen - Bottom Of The World
Thelonious Monk - The Complete London Collection
Tyler Childers - Rustin' In The Rain
UB40 - Labour Of Love
The Velvet Underground - Another View
Willowz - Talk In Circles
List 2:
Bell Orchestre - Recording A Tape The Colour Of The Light
Carly Pearce - Hummingbird
Clem Snide - End Of Love
Earth, Wind & Fire - Open Our Eyes
Elliott Murphy - Aquashow
Gasolin' - Gasolin'
Helen Reddy - Helen Reddy
Kirby Heard - Mama's Biscuits
Lifesavas - Spirit In Stone
Lori McKenna - 1988
Marshal Crenshaw - #447
Muddy Waters - King Bee
New Wave Dance Music From South Africa [compilation]
NRBQ - NRBQ
L'Orchestre National Mauritanien - Ahl Nana
Randy Newman - Randy Newman
Ray Wylie Hubbard - Co-Starring Too
Ruby Braff And Ellis Larkins - Calling Berlin Vol. 1
Sacred Soul Of North Carolina [compilation]
Skip James - Blues From The Delta
Swamp Dogg - Gag A Maggot
Tabu Ley Rochereau - Man From Kinshasa
Unholy Modal Rounders - Unholier Than Thou: 7/7/77
Van Dyke Parks - Song Cycle
Yo-Yo Ma - Classic Yo-Yo
You can help me out here by replying to this post picking one album from each of the lists, which I will then listen to at some point in...hopefully the next month? Maybe two? Sorry, my listening schedule for new stuff is slow recently because of work. But a few notes here:
a) First, obviously you must pick two albums (again, one from each list) and you can't pick something somebody else has already picked.
b) As I listen to these albums (I tend to go in alphabetical order on a running list I have), I will post short impressions of them here (I may or may not add a letter grade, we'll see how I'm feeling by the time I get around to it).
c) Pretty much all of these albums were reviewed (or at least recommended) in some way by the critic Robert Christgau, so part of my impressions will involve noting whether I agree or disagree with him on his assessment.
I'm honestly not sure if I have enough followers here for this to work, so it might get cross-posted to a Facebook group I'm in where people are more likely to respond. I'll reblog after a while with an update on what's chosen, and it will close after I get a lineup of about 10-20 albums (or after like a week or two, if no one's responding).
And yes, I am aware that these are eccentric lists.
Everyone's nostalgia is different, "monoculture" is fake, blah blah blah, but I think one reason that the ubiquity of Mr. Brightside pisses me off is because this song exists. To me, this far better captured the emotional highs of being a millennial (sort of?) teenager/young adult, and it just feels like it does everything Mr. Brightside is trying to but better - like, it's just MORE, even to the point that it sounds contradictory: more poetic, more punk, sloppier, but somehow more technically impressive, louder, more intense, more tender, but also more stand-offish. The Killers have always been second-rate Springsteen wannabes (except in those brief moments where they're slightly-more-interesting second-rate new wave wannabes); these guys might have been a flash in the pan, but that flash was truly dazzling for at least those first couple albums and it feels like a cosmic injustice that this song doesn't have the status Mr. Brightside does instead.
How record labels use A&R flaks and impenetrable contracts to screw artists while raking in millions
In honour of his passing, posting Steve Albini's legendary polemic against the music industry.
Whenever I talk to a band who are about to sign with a major label, I always end up thinking of them in a particular context. I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with runny, decaying shit. I imagine these people, some of them good friends, some of them barely acquaintances, at one end of this trench. I also imagine a faceless industry lackey at the other end, holding a fountain pen and a contract waiting to be signed.
Nobody can see what’s printed on the contract. It’s too far away, and besides, the shit stench is making everybody’s eyes water. The lackey shouts to everybody that the first one to swim the trench gets to sign the contract. Everybody dives in the trench and they struggle furiously to get to the other end. Two people arrive simultaneously and begin wrestling furiously, clawing each other and dunking each other under the shit. Eventually, one of them capitulates, and there’s only one contestant left. He reaches for the pen, but the Lackey says, “Actually, I think you need a little more development. Swim it again, please. Backstroke.”
And he does, of course.
[...]
THE BALANCE SHEET
This is how much each player got paid at the end of the game.
Record company: $710,000
Producer: $90,000
Manager: $51,000
Studio: $52,500
Previous label: $50,000
Agent: $7,500
Lawyer: $12,000
Band member net income each: $4,031.25
The band is now 1/4 of the way through its contract, has made the music industry more than 3 million dollars richer, but is in the hole $14,000 on royalties. The band members have each earned about 1/3 as much as they would working at a 7-11, but they got to ride in a tour bus for a month.
The next album will be about the same, except that the record company will insist they spend more time and money on it. Since the previous one never “recouped,” the band will have no leverage, and will oblige.
The next tour will be about the same, except the merchandising advance will have already been paid, and the band, strangely enough, won’t have earned any royalties from their t-shirts yet. Maybe the t-shirt guys have figured out how to count money like record company guys.
Some of your friends are probably already this fucked.
The worst thing is, as bad as it was back in 1993, it's a thousand times worse for musicians in 2024. 1993 was before "Pay-to-Play" venues were as ubiquitous, and before some venues started taking a cut of the merchandise sales. 1993 was before CD sales collapsed, before file sharing, before Spotify ruined things further with its dismal royalty payments, its algorithmically driven discovery mechanism which is biased against the experimental, the daring, and the difficult (and women for that matter), and its proliferation of fake artists. It is not a good time to be a musician.
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