Another Millennial on ‘Millennial Optimism’:
I wanna talk mostly about the music here. Specifically the indie from 2005-2015. The assertion is that the indie music from this time is bright, happy, naive, and stomp-clap. That this constitutes its optimism. I think this is an incomplete reading.
Pop music, mainstream pop music from 2005-2015, was dumb, horny, hot and fast. It was one of the last eras when pop music was truly ubiquitous, the same 50 or so tracks were all over radio, tv, at stores supermarkets everywhere. And it FUCKED. It was deliriously horny and usually focused on first meetings for casual encounters.
The indie artists of that time were in no small part reacting to the state of pop music. Pop at that time was fast and bright and dance-able. So indie artists produced that energy, with some kind of flaw behind it. The folksy-acoustic sheen or some strange rhythmic progression. Something uncanny that destabilizes the completely happy tone. And then the lyrics usually betray some horrible thing under the surface. Something that is breaking or about to break just out of view. MGMT and Foster the People come to mind as bands who found success by sounding bright and chipper with these violent and threatening undertones.
All that to say, the actual ‘Millennial Optimism’ is the pop music from that time. LMFAO, Bruno Mars, Pitbull, David Guetta, Flo Rida, etc. The indie stuff has a complication to it because it is a direct reaction to that optimism. It was, truly, a thoughtless time, and there were people who deeply regretted that thoughtlessness but didn’t understand what they were feeling.
Now, there is naïveté to that indie genre and I believe it is this: it casts love as redemptive. Indie music from that time treats romance as the only bright spot in an otherwise empty and crumbling world. Love has no such credit in 2026. A cynic would point out love isn’t real and was just a smokescreen to cover the rape culture that was alive and WELL in indie spaces in 2005-2015. And I understand that criticism.
But now, as a single commie trans woman whose changed a lot since those days. I miss love sometimes. The gooey, stupid kind. The toxic kind sometimes. Idk. Call me naive, I guess. I’m still not convinced the babies in skinny jeans did not have a point
