Hey! Good to see you all again. I’d like to preface this word vomit by making it clear that I am a diagnosed type 2 diabetic who collects old Goosebumps books in their spare time, so my shit is definitely not together and you should take this all with a grain of salt. Regardless, I think I used my platform here to say some interesting and useful things. If you agree, and you like what I have written here and want to support me, please do not hesitate to subscribe to my Patreon (where you can access exclusive posts that I do not share with my Substack subscribers, including a recent post about the history of powerviolence). If you’d prefer to show your support with a one-time donation, my Venmo is xyoudontneedmapsx.
Seeing as how I’ve been set adrift on a seemingly endless sea of health issues, you might be forgiven for assuming that nothing could rouse me into my old, essayistic ways. (Un)fortunately for everyone, I’ve spent a little bit too much time scrolling through my godforsaken Twitter feed, which has inevitably resulted in another small observation that I’ve chosen to throw through the ol’ molehill-mountain filter.
For the most part, I genuinely feel very blessed whenever someone considers me to be (albeit a less-successful) part of the same wave of hyper-talented and effortlessly witty music writers as people like Mia Hughes, Danielle Chelosky, Eli Enis, Miranda Reinert (though I’m not sure how much she likes the term “music writer” applied to her, she’s definitely part of the community and one of my personal favorites), and so on. Those are all people I greatly look up to and admire, and I am proud to say that I’m friends with everyone I’ve listed; we all came up enamored with the outsider music journalists at major publications like Ian Cohen (Pitchfork), David Anthony (AV Club), Leor Galil (Chicago Reader), and Dan Ozzi (VICE), all of whom I think of as broadly presaging the writing quirks and sensibilities of our collective unit, as it were. Are we vanguards of the New Wave of Music Journalists? Should we come up with a self-consciously cliquey, Wild Hogs-esque nickname for ourselves (Miranda suggests the brutally efficient “Underpaid,” while Eli contributes the brilliant “Revolution Bummer”)? I don’t really give a shit, but I’m definitely stoked to see a lot more high-quality music writing coming out of publications both large and home-brewed.
But I’m also friends with Keegan Bradford, editor of the Alternative and guitarist for emo-pop upstarts Camp Trash. Keegan is unquestionably a talented writer and musician, but holy shit, does he have a talent for laying down some of the most infuriating takes I’ve ever seen in a tweet. I’ll save his baffling New Found Glory > blink-182 take for another essay and instead zero in on something he said that reflects a growing sentiment among the DIY scene, which I find troubling on less of a sonic level and more of an ideological one.
At 11:31 AM CST on March 18th, 2021, Keegan Bradford tweeted the following: “The new Foxing, which is good, is the moment that officially marks emo entering its indie rock era, which is also very good.” He then followed these assertions by comparing Home Is Where to Neutral Milk Hotel, as well as by comparing Weatherday and Glass Beach to Jens Lekman. On a sonic level, there is little to quibble with here; Home Is Where’s I Became Birds, aside from being a landmark emo album that I suggest everyone go buy immediately, definitely sounds like Neutral Milk Hotel insofar as it refracts frontperson Brandon McDonald’s Dylan-esque eccentricities through the lens of DIY’s restless desperation, while Weatherday and Glass Beach both luxuriate in the kind of perfectionist, maximalist compositions and arrangements that define the peaks of Lekman’s work.
But it’s not so much what’s being said explicitly here as what’s being implied that bothers me. The era of indie rock that Keegan is comparing the new Foxing jawn to is one that I and many others have a conflicted relationship with— to be pithy without being dismissive, the easiest description for it would be the “arena indie” era. If you’re closer to the zoomer than the millennial end of the spectrum, the replies elucidate this quite well with comparisons to bands like the Killers, Arcade Fire, and Broken Social Scene. For the sake of clarity (and to avoid claims that my objections come from a place of salt), all three of those bands have some all-time great albums (Hot Fuss and Sam’s Town are must-listens for anyone from Vegas, Funeral sounds like a hangover in 2004 in the best way possible, and aside from it being my favorite album of this style, I’d argue that You Forgot It In People is a contender for the greatest indie rock album of the aughts).
Make no mistake, there was a wealth of high-quality music produced during this era— Ra Ra Riot’s cover of Kate Bush’s “Suspended In Gaffa” is one of the most sublime pieces of music ever produced, for example, and the New Pornographers’ Twin Cinema was and is rightly regarded as a power pop masterpiece, just to name two of the brightest moments— and there is no shame in modern bands taking influence from it. But as I’ve alluded to before in some of my other essays (particularly in my Bands You Weren’t Supposed to Like series), there were some poisonous elements of that time and place on the bands’ end, the fans’ end, and the industry’s end.
In the case of the fans and the critics, one of the central issues of aughts arena indie was the deep, deep classism that ran like wolfsbane in much of the writing of the era. Not only did this classism go unexamined, it mingled with the scene’s blinding whiteness and the rebranding of geek culture as it moved from 90s marginalization to aughts mainstream without losing any of it’s self-martyring and elitist trappings. When you go back to read through old reviews on, say, Buddyhead, or trawl through old Something Awful forum posts, the disdain for “trash” culture bleeds through with reckless abandon, whether it was the easy dismissal of Juggalos or nu metal fans as white trash losers or the “pull your pants up” condescension towards the entirety of hip-hop (outside of the pre-approved oldhead and backpacker material), music that held broad appeal to people across the socioeconomic strata was ignored, mocked, or appreciated only in the most ironic of tones. If you weren’t a trust-fund bohemian with a Library Science major and/or a weekly Ikea customer with a vague appreciation for modern art, the message seemed clear: this music wasn’t for you, and the music that was “for” you was bullshit, a symbol of rot deep within American culture that indie fans would never deign to link to capitalism. They hated George W. Bush not because he was a racist war criminal but because he talked funny. And they sure hated you too.
While there were (and are) exceptions to this characterization (the commentariat on the AV Club always seemed to be a war between this faction and a slightly more empathetic, proto-dirtbag left contingent), I feel comfortable saying that this attitude is a huge part of what alienated me from the codification of Indie Rock in the aughts, as it slowly began to curdle into vague aesthetic signifiers that became just as meaningless as “alternative rock” had become by 1996. By the time I was a freshman in high school I was hearing Mumford & Sons and Imagine Dragons described as indie, which should tell you all you need to know.
The rise of bands like M&S and ID also signified one of the biggest problems on the end of the bands and the industry— blatant, naked careerism of the sort that Pavement cuttingly predicted in “Cut Your Hair.” A lot of people forget about the large-scale bidding war that erupted around the Strokes in 2001, but that was but a quiet precursor to the manufactured, massaged sound of bands like the Lumineers or Vampire Weekend’s instantaneous, meteoric rise to fame mere months after they began recording music (Ezra Koenig’s shittiness aside). The latter has always been one of those whose success hung in my mouth with the comfort of a mothball— how could a band who signed to a world-famous label (the question of whether or not XL is “independent” by any meaningful measure is about as laughable as the same debate with regards to, say, Epitaph) within a year of forming, and who on that label’s back sold 27,000 copies of their debut the week of its release and almost immediately after played on Letterman, be called “indie” in any sense of the word?
Which brings me to where I was at during the aughts arena indie boom, and what I think of as an essential dividing line in DIY music. By 2005 or 2006, I was already addicted to the online world of places like PunkNews and the AbsolutePunk forums, and if you were also around back then, then I’m sure you remember that the entire world of punk seemed to emanate in concentric circles from the molten hot core that was New York’s Bomb the Music Industry!.
I’m sure everyone reading this is familiar with Jeff Rosenstock’s longest-lasting project, but if you need a refresher, they were formed in the aftermath of the dissolution of the ska/hardcore outfit Arrogant Sons of Bitches (whose posthumous swan song Three Cheers for Disappointment is near-peerlessly the best ska album of the aughts), and began as a chaotic assemblage of caffeinated synth sputters, drunkenly golden pop hooks, mutated ska upstrokes, and ADHD-derived hardcore-indebted spazzy song structures that fell out of Jeff Rosenstock’s bedroom as fully-formed as they were haphazard (hence the title of their debut record, Album Minus Band). In many ways, their adventurous, postmodern, self-referential ouroboros (see song titles like “Bomb the Music Industry! (and Action Action) (and Refused) (and Born Against) Are Fucking Dead”) was a direct precursor to the Brave Little Abacus and consequently the entirety of the post-emo scene, but at the time Bomb the Music Industry! were a fascinating contradiction of ideas: there was nothing like them at the time, but the entire punk/adjacent scene surrounding them seemed to be built out of small bits of their sound blown to widescreen— I’m thinking of how the folk-punk boom of the time was so tightly woven around BTMI associates Andrew Jackson Jihad, for example, or how the metalcore scene that exploded in the early 2000s was borne of Rosenstock and co’s frenemies in bands like Anterrabae and Every Time I Die.
Within two years, Bomb the Music Industry had produced four of the best, most cinematic, and most sonically voracious punk albums of all time (seriously— Album Minus Band, To Leave Or Die In Long Island, Goodbye Cool World, and Get Warmer in retrospect seem like an impossible explosion of songwriting talent), and by 2007 had become the darlings of the underground punk scene. Everyone in scenes ranging from hardcore to pop-punk to the burgeoning twinklecore subset admired Bomb, and it became a cliche to acknowledge them as the modern equivalent of Fugazi. In many ways, they were more egalitarian than Fugazi, in that every single one of their albums was free for download via Jeff’s donation-supported label Quote Unquote. They embodied the spirit of DIY in everything they did, from their homemade recordings to their shows, where people were encouraged to come up and join the band (whether or not they knew how to play the songs) and spraypaint their own merch right there with blank shirts and stencils.
And if Bomb the Music Industry were defined in opposition to anything, it was “corporate rock.” This quote comes from an Arrogant Sons of Bitches song, but it carries through to Bomb’s ethos quite well: “Quit claiming to be indie rock/you aren’t independent, and your rock’n’roll’s fucked.” Hell, Goodbye Cool World was set to be titled Clap Your Hands Say Shut the Fuck Up in response to hype band Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and the success of their self-titled, self-released debut album. Of course, game recognizes game, and Jeff changed the title because, in his words, “A band selling 50,000 records without a label, regardless of hype or bad music, is kinda dope.” (Ironically, a huge boost to Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s career was the fact that their music was featured in The Office, and six years later, The Office would also feature Bomb’s song “Can’t Complain” in an episode.)
In a macro sense, though, the divides are still there. Your average 2009 indie band, with a rider and an exorbitant guarantee, wouldn’t be caught dead playing some of the venues that Bomb the Music Industry! often played at for a loss. If one were to write a comprehensive history of indie rock, it makes vastly more sense for Bomb the Music Industry! to occupy the space as descendants of those bands featured in Our Band Could Be Your Life or the likes of Archers of Loaf than, say, the White Stripes.
I talk about Bomb the Music Industry! in such reverent terms not only because their music and ethos demands it, but also because Jeff Rosenstock’s solo material (which, for clarity’s sake, I would die for) is salivated over by the same normie-core outlets who would have written it off as music for beer-swilling losers just 15-odd years before (the same can be said for other great bands with indie rock crossover appeal, a la PUP). It should be clear here that my disdain is for neither Jeff nor PUP, both of whom have written some of the most authentic and achingly beautiful punk songs of the last decade, and for the disingenuous practices of industry gatekeepers who would sell their grandmother for a few thousand more clicks.
And of course, the fickleness of many of these publications is only half the story— another reason these bands are getting press is because of the influx of younger writers who grew up on equal diets of punk and indie, as well as the insightful, genuine and dedicated work of editors like Stereogum’s Tom Breihan and Chris DeVille or Jes Skolnik and Zoe Camp at Bandcamp. Credit is also due to an audience who sees themselves more accurately reflected in the world of shows like the pop-culture-minutiae-addicted You’re the Worst than, I don’t know, How I Met Your Mother. I’m self-aware enough to realize that the popularity and visibility of artists in the modern day has just as much to do with audiences making their specific demands heard as it does with market manipulation. Nina Corcoran is a fantastic writer and I’m sure has been wanting to review a hardcore band like Thirdface on Pitchfork since 2015— it’s truly stunning that it’s become a reality, and more stunning still that the music covered on major outlets isn’t uniformly required to bend to the whims of aging hipsters who propagate narratives lionizing invertebrate post-punk bands like IDLES and Iceage and pretend to give a shit about colonialism while ignoring the global devastation caused by their coke habit.
And yet, I still find myself coming back to that phrase, “emo entering its indie rock era.” Part of myself asks, did indie rock not already co-opt emo almost a decade ago? The World Is A Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die achieved new heights of industry coverage with the post-rock beauty of 2013’s Whenever, If Ever, and by 2014, The Hotelier’s “Housebroken” and Modern Baseball’s “Your Graduation” were getting glowing AV Club write-ups while their corresponding albums were getting rave reviews (albeit with their scores artificially lowered— shout out the Ian Cohenficient) in Pitchfork. By no means am I implying that any of these three bands were industry plants— all made their bones in the DIY scene and all wrote songs with little concern for “user engagement” or whatever terms a major label statistician would be obsessed with. But, it could be argued, did they not beget a cohort of bands that fussed over their promo pics more than their songs? Were there not bands that simply copy-pasted sophomoric, Adam-Ellis-Relatable™ lyrics on top of Modern Baseball songs? (Said bands will remain nameless, of course.)
That kind of fixation on the Front-Bottom-line is something that every generation of independent rock coalesced against, and I’m overjoyed to discover that the current DIY-as-genre bands seem more concerned with writing songs for themselves than for the bands they might end up opening for. And by the way, I’m not slighting bands for making career moves or thinking about their music as a path to a sustainable life— that’s a fantastic goal that everyone should feel empowered to reach for, and as long as I breathe, I will contend that accusations of “selling out” are more often than not a sign that the accuser is a crab in a bucket than any sort of meaningful epithet. But, by the same token, there’s nothing wrong with rejecting the concept of art as a commodity, and there’s nothing wrong with the belief that writing songs with the explicit purpose of being used in an Apple commercial is bullshit that should rightly be locked out of participation in any scene that defines itself in opposition to capitalistic hegemony. Living under the inescapable maw of neoliberalism might sometimes mean a band ends up playing an Amazon festival, but it should never mean that band should feel comfortable taking notes from Amazon about their lyrics.
More than that, the current generation of bands seems to avoid a lot of the self-mythologizing of the arena indie era; if the wizardly technical chops displayed on Guitar Fight from Fooly Cooly’s Soak or the compositional sophistication and ambition of Origami Angel’s Ryland Heagy are canonized by anyone, it’s their peers and not 45-year-old white men desperately clinging to relevance, as it should be. Record labels like Knifepunch and Twelve Gauge sign bands because they deeply love and believe in them, and if For Your Health’s In Spite Of or World Peace’s Come & See get broad attention, it’s because they’re fucking good, not because someone slipped a sleepy editor a couple hundred bucks to cover them.
I have no idea if Jeff Mangum is punk, but I sure as fuck know Mike Watt is, and even if Home Is Where sound like Neutral Milk Hotel, they have infinitely more in common with the Minutemen, down to their slogan “Our band could be your neighborhood.” I saw a recent Twitter thread by Ogbert the Nerd celebrating the virtues of DIY’s evolution into DIT— Do It Together. This concept has been in play in underground music since at least the 90s, and it’s always been squashed by community infighting and selfishness. Time will tell if today’s scene will fall victim to the same problems, and I’m sure those strains will always be there, but I do see in 5th wave emo or 9th wave glittermommies or 20th wave hyperpop-powerviolence fusion or whatever you wanna call the scene today the strongest community I’ve seen since the days of Bomb the Music Industry!, and whether that’s down to youthful naivete or simply learning from the errors of those who came before, it’s the most optimistic I’ve felt in years. Today’s DIY scene is the most diverse it’s ever been— loathe as I may be to use buzzwords like “heteronormativity,” DIY now is full of bands with LGBT members challenging the orthodoxy of sad boys singing about the girls they think wronged them, and it’s inarguable that there are more people of color involved in the scene than ever before.
Today’s DIY scene might not be perfect— lack of class-consciousness, crassly performative white “allyship,” and cynical weaponization of The Right Politics as a punitive measure are all still deeply endemic, and it’s going to take more work than we know to eradicate it. But it sure doesn’t feel anything like the monolithic indie-industrial complex that’s dominated guitar music over the last decade and change, and its increasingly-less-sporadic coverage in major outlets has me thinking that within the next couple years, we might get a second chance at the great hardcore/pop-punk/emo crossover of the early 2000s (which, if you’ll recall, occasionally overlapped with and was eventually usurped by the Great Indie Boom), and we’ll be able to do it right this time. I always longed to live in a world where Thursday became the voice of the post-Nirvana generation, and goddammit, the 2020s might be the decade where we see Soul Glo succeed where prior bands failed. A few years ago, I wrote about hardcore’s mainstream moment coming off the heels of smash-hit records by bands like Code Orange and Vein, and that momentum is poised to push the DIY scene as a whole over the edge (even if it ends up looking more like 100 Gecs than some would prefer).
Again, there might be some snags to work out, but we’re living in a critical time in the history of the music industry, where the power could sway away entirely from the corporate to grassroots populism, and if there’s any lesson to be learned from arena indie’s kowtowing to industry standards and gatekeepers, it’s that we can assert that power. We’ve lived through countless generations of electric white-boy blues; now’s our chance to bomb the music industry.
-xoxo, Ellie
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