Everything Looks Perfect From Far Away
An essay on "Peak Indie," inspired by Chris DeVille's book Such Great Heights
It was 2010, and Bethany Cosentino was suddenly everywhere. The leader of the dreamy lo-fi L.A. band Best Coast had just received the coveted Best New Music designation from Pitchfork, and the lede cemented her as more than a hooky, lo-fi singer-songwriter, but as the moment’s most entertainingly online musician. For seemingly every second she wasn’t recording or performing, Cosentino was on the still-new Twitter platform, chronicling how much her throat literally hurt from how much weed she smoked yesterday, assailing Katy Perry for her insufficient L.A.-ness, cosplaying as Snooki, and building an online brand for her cat Snacks. All this while publicly chatting with her then-boyfriend Nathan Williams, when he wasn’t otherwise spending his 2010 summer doing more drugs than his girlfriend, melting down onstage, apologizing for it on his blog, and canceling an entire tour before most people had heard anything but the incredible hype surrounding his San Diego noise-rock band called Wavves.
As Chris DeVille writes in Such Great Heights, his newly published chronicle of 2000s indie music, no single person—nor staffed publication—followed Bethany (and Nathan) more than Carles, the proprietor of the Hipster Runoff blog, who trailed the duo like they were Ben and J.Lo. “WAVVES is house sitting for Best Coast, buys massive amounts of weed 2 hotbox her apt,” Carles exclaimed on June 4. Two weeks later, Carles broke the news that “WAVVES makes mix CD for Best Coast, tells her that he loves her”—sourced, of course, from the duo’s public social media accounts. Carles’ obsession with Cosentino, DeVille explains, was often plainly sexist in that annoyingly self-aware style of the moment, but her responses (“hipster runoff can eat a dick,” she tweeted) showed that she was ready to play the new publicity game. “Her knack for personal branding further elevated her indie celebrity stature,” DeVille observes.
Carles’ entire vibe evaded Gen X’s communicative paradox of “are you being sarcastic, dude? I don’t even know anymore” with a robotic (and deeply self-aware) form of “cool” corporate-speak (“is your personal brand compromised when you attend a relevant alternative event with your partner?”). He especially enjoyed poking at artistic independence in a brand-heavy music landscape, like approving Williams releasing a Wavves single under Mountain Dew’s aegis using deductive logic: “Instead of taking out billboards for the Mountain Dew brand, the spinoff brand is meant to appeal to alts like u and me. Every fan who likes WAVVES will now become a chill Mountain Dew fan.” After Cosentino shot a (quickly deleted) video for Pitchfork.tv where she got uncomfortably high with rising street rapper Freddie Gibbs, Carles wondered if “Best Coast’s stoner personal brand will limit her critical & commercial upside.” Gibbs had been cast aside by the rap industry, but was welcome under Pitchfork’s big tent. The video was incredibly cringe, and the whole scene felt odd. Critic Jayson Greene summarized it thusly: “these are Gibbs’s people now, whether he wants them or not, and whether or not they want him.”1
For DeVille, Cosentino’s Very Online persona “helped to map out the future of music celebrity,” though we might amend that to note that she and her contemporaries were adapting what rappers themselves had perfected: a stream-of-consciousness stardom where collaborations–with other musicians or brands–was assumed. Like Pitchfork itself, Cosentino loved Gucci Mane, Lil Wayne and Drake. In summer 2010, she recorded a one-off single with Kid Cudi and Vampire Weekend guitarist Rostam Batmanglij, sponsored by Converse and released by the Brooklyn-based club-rap label Fools’ Gold. Like everyone else in 2010, she obsessed over Kanye West—who barely outranked her at the top of NME’s “Cool List” that year.
That July, West had used the lengthy runway to the eventual release of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by coronating Music Twitter, releasing a firehose of filterless, behind-the-scenes 140-character updates that kept critics and fans stuck to their phones. That October, Pitchfork feted Fools’ Gold for the third night of its #Offline festival (brought to you by Scion, Toyota’s stab at hipster capitalism), and because the label was co-founded by Kanye’s collaborator A-Trak, rumors flooded Twitter in that West himself would make an appearance. He did, around 2 a.m., during his protegé Cyhi the Prince’s set. The music internet duly exploded: the most famous and ostentatious rapper in the world had crashed the party of music’s hipster tastemaker at a 600-cap venue in Brooklyn.
The #Offline fest was counter-programming to the annual Music Marathon sponsored by the College Music Journal, which had served as indie/college rock’s own Billboard through the 1980s and 1990s. But faced with a rapidly mutating digital landscape, CMJ had ceased print publication the year before, and would limp along a bit longer before closing up shop. Meanwhile, Pitchfork—five or so years into its reign as indie rock’s newest tastemaker—bestowed an ultra-rare 10.0 on MBDTF, the album where Kanye West’s grotesque and self-lacerating self-image fully blossomed into what he sold as the reincarnated Michael Jackson. It felt seismic: the belligerent, charismatic new king of hip hop had just received the crown from an indie rock establishment then personified by Cosentino, whose lo-fi debut album was rubbing digital elbows with pop’s A-list. Fifteen years later, it seems evident: we’d reached Peak Indie.
Or, as critic Zach Baron put it in a year-end Village Voice wrap-up: “2010 was indeed the year when important, seismic shifts took place vis-a-vis the relationship between indie culture and the so-called mainstream.” A short recap: Vampire Weekend and Arcade Fire released statement albums about capitalist alienation that made Billboard’s top ten, as did LPs from Pitchfork favorites The National, LCD Soundsystem, MGMT, and Sufjan Stevens. At the other end of the indie-fame scale, Pitchfork launched an aggregator called Altered Zones that year to keep up with the glut of VHS-quality indie pop experimentalism circulating on mp3 blogs the year after the retro-psychedelic, Carles-dubbed genre known as “chillwave” broke. The site’s Song of the Year was chillwave pioneer Ariel Pink’s lo-fi AM Gold phantasmagoria “Round and Round,” snatching the crown from Kanye’s “Runaway” and “Power.” Speaking of Ye: 2010 was when Tyler, the Creator’s Bastard; Das Racist’s Sit Down, Man; and M.I.A.’s MAYA joined him in asking “what if the internet, but rap,” and no less than the liner notes of Drake’s studio debut Thank Me Later enumerated a Coachella poster’s worth of highly marketable indie luminaries: Solange, Diplo, Santigold, Lykke Li, Feist, Grizzly Bear, the xx, MGMT, Neon Indian, and Passion Pit (I assume Sleigh Bells and Hot Chip were honest omissions.) Truly, what the indie rock movement was doing right then was very inspiring.
But did it all add up to anything? Moreover: what even was indie at this point? Independent of what? Such Great Heights doesn’t provide many answers to one of music nerds’ favorite parlor games, opting instead for a roughly chronological spin through seemingly every musical micro-trend (or at least the ones marketable enough to garner advertiser interest) of indie rock’s digital era. An editor at the terrific independent music site Stereogum, DeVille spins through his story from a blogger’s-eye view, covering a lot of ground in a short amount of space—from the Postal Service’s 2003 fusion of vulnerable indie pop and skittering programmed drums that gives the book its title, to the world’s most famous pop star releasing an album of strummy, diaristic arena pop co-written by the guitarist from the milquetoasty millennial indie icons the National (one thing I realized while reading his book is that those two albums sound a lot more alike than different).
As a music writer during this era2, I read Such Great Heights like an alum at his high school reunion: squinting at nametags, remembering old acquaintances, and experiencing a complex admixture of nostalgia, anxiety, and mild shame. As I read, I often found myself wanting DeVille to pause for a bit more distanced analysis, befitting a “complete cultural history,” before rolling out the next band or sub-genre. Instead, the book engagingly recaps the received wisdom of the critics and bloggers who chronicled these moments—including occasional biographical flourishes from DeVille himself. Such Great Heights doesn’t seek plumb the dialectical depths of subculture and mainstream in the streaming age, but as the first soup-to-nuts story of millennial indie, it more than lays the groundwork for the next attempt, while standing on its own as a fun, low-stakes chronicle of a musical cohort for whom the battle lines between underground buzz and massive fame were more or less dissolved.
The release of Such Great Heights comes as the tangled, ideologically heated back-and-forth between post-punk indie rock and the mainstream is itself hitting middle age. In his epochal history of 80s U.S. hardcore Our Band Could Be Your Life, Michael Azerrad characterizes the 1985 major label jump by melodic SST punk-thrashers Hüsker Dü as the moment when “indie labels were perceived…not as a miniature parallel universe to the majors, but as farm teams for the mainstream.” At the same time on the other side of the Atlantic, the same trend emerged among the jangly, janky UK post-punks. Nitsuh Abebe observed: “British indie became what American indie is today—the fashionable music-of-choice for a certain sort of mostly-white, mostly-educated, mostly-middle-class young people.” Kaya Oakes’ 2008 zines-and-scenes history Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture covers the community-driven ethos of indie music, publishing, and crafting during the 80s and 90s, and she ends with a resigned sigh where DeVille’s book opens: as Urban Outfitters, Converse, Scion, and Red Bull swooped in to reappropriate subterranean cultural expression for corporate profits. At the start of millennial indie’s 2010 annus mirabilis, the critic Rachael Maddux asked “Is Indie Dead?” in Paste, complete with a clever, Time-nodding cover. “If the movement’s earliest adopters had skipped forward 25 or 30 years to see what they’d indirectly wrought, they might’ve hung themselves by their guitar strings,” Maddux observed—her Gen-X sarcasm barely in check.
Needless to say, DeVille disagrees. In Such Great Heights, indie is not only alive, but it’s a thriving, churning musical fashion system with mainstream crossover not as a source of ethical apprehension, but quite often the goal (you know, like most other music genres). No bohemian DeVille came of age in late-1990s Columbus, Ohio listening to Incubus, then diving into indie rock and working in college radio, before an alt-weekly stint and his current Stereogum gig. He’s quick (and correct) to tsk-tsk those who would gatekeep Death Cab and The Shins from The O.C. and Garden State viewers, but DeVille’s understanding of indie does remain guided by cultural capital—redeeming esoteric musical knowledge and experience for a fleeting, ever-morphing sense of cool. “For me, indie wasn’t about DIY ethics, avant-garde disruption, or any kind of radical worldview,” he says. “It was about albums I could spin incessantly and organize into lists in place of a personality, songs I could burn onto mix CDs for my friends and family to show off my good taste, and bands that doubled as a secret handshake with people cooler than me.” DeVille’s indie journey and breathless synthesis at times conjures William Miller, Almost Famous’ earnest cub reporter, building his identity—and his career—out of the music he loves. “Life would never be the same again. I had discovered indie rock,” DeVille writes in the introduction, with the succinct, suggestive, and sincere phrasing of a tagline from a Michael Cera movie poster.
DeVille, in other words, strikes the opposite tone of Hipster Runoff’s deep-cover irony-shield, not to mention the declensionist old-punk “name three albums” litmus-test discourse that O.G. zine publisher Henry Owings’ satirized in his virtuosically sarcastic 2011 book Indie Cred Test. The optimistic, individualistic tone of millennial indie discourse certainly fit the ethic of one of the formative moments DeVille covers. As file-sharing was upending decades of record business received wisdom, online indie kids tried to piece it back together again through sheer enthusiasm, one mp3 at a time. This was Web 2.0 indie, the optimistic moment from 2005 to about 2009 when Blogspot and Pitchfork attracted music fans with the siren song of self-entrepreneurship, after Rolling Stone, the New York Times and Spin had crowned the first wave of mp3 bloggers (including Stereogum) as the new generation of DJs, record store clerks, and critics. Most of the second wave of music bloggers didn’t want to be critics, though—some of them wanted to get Google ad revenue, others wanted to angle into the industry, still others were bored at work with a hard drive full of Bests New Music. The files posted by this ascendant tastemaking class were aggregated and ranked by a site called The Hype Machine, the popularity of which underscored the reality that the glut of mp3 blogs were far more valuable in aggregate than individually.3
Such Great Heights is also a tech story, because it has to be. Between the rise and fall of MySpace, Apple’s takeover of the record industry’s retail sector, and the cacophony of social media discourse, Silicon Valley shaped millennial indie as much as any record label. At times, DeVille’s dizzying pace in Such Great Heights feels like what writer Bill Wasik called “nanostories” in his 2009 book on the rise of viral culture, And Then There’s This: “a churning constellation of ‘important’ new bands and ideas and fashions that literally hundreds if not thousands of writers, in print and online, devoted themselves to building up and then dismantling with alacrity.” Indeed, one commonality shared by the heterogenous music filed under “indie rock” over the past few decades—from tabloid-taunting punks to cardigan-wearing indiepoppers and chin-stroking art-rockers—is that the music generates far more discourse than revenue. And the superstructure supporting the Such Great Heights era—from music blogs to YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, and TikTok—is the most significant all-access discourse machine ever imagined. Digital platforms circulate trendy underground music while other, related platforms circulate discourse about that music, transcoding subcultural knowledge about bands, singles, albums, genres, trends, and controversies into the language of metadata and, for trendspotting fans, the practices of high-frequency trading. Such Great Heights, in other words, chronicles indie’s fast-fashion era, in which new trends were scooped up, replicated, sold cheaply (or freely downloaded), and often forgotten—with the unlucky forgotten bands accumulating in the landfill.
Though indie’s digital transformation shifted the axis of DIY culture from space to time, plenty of the old IRL institutions held up: the local record store that sold a 19-year-old their first Panda Bear vinyl in 2007 and the college-town club where Lucy Dacus played before she was indie-famous were brick-and-mortar pipelines to a pre-internet past, part of a still-crucial indie infrastructure that was being constantly threatened by free digital music and the scourge of rent spikes and gentrification. The video for “The Start of Something” by blog-favorite Voxtrot is indicative of the cultural wormhole bands were opening from 1985 to 2005. At the outset, a MiniDV tape (the DIY format du jour) is pulled from a pile of similar cassettes and inserted into a camera, giving way to a rapid montage of the well-rutted routes of 1980s indie culture: packed vans, crowded nightclubs, record stores, convenience stores, sleeping bags cheek by jowl on borrowed living-room floors.
Second-wave indie bloggers loved Voxtrot and their cohort, described by DeVille as “a cloying sort of indie band with fleeting success manufactured online, apart from real-world communities and institutions”: Bishop Allen, Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, We Are Scientists, Spinto Band, and I’m From Barcelona among them. But bloggers were mere satellites, orbiting the Saturn of the indie galaxy: Pitchfork. A couple years after the site hired its first full-time employee and helped launch Arcade Fire and Broken Social Scene, Pitchfork’s star-making reputation preceded it, to the degree that Aziz Ansari could send-up an “indie marketing guru” who intimidates bloggers into generating online hype for a new band (concluding with a shot of the actual album’s actual Best New Music review). Pitchfork loved the first two Voxtrot EPs of “turbocharged twee,” and the band scored a daytime slot at the site’s annual Chicago music festival. But before Voxtrot could reach the proverbial great heights, a second Pitchfork reviewer (fine, it was me) dismissed the band’s attempt to scale up to an LP. The band broke up in 2010. Sorry guys.
Pitchfork isn’t the entirety of Such Great Heights, but when it takes over the narrative, it really takes over. The first critical broker between the indie underground and a generation learning to read about, collect, and listen to music on their computers, Pitchfork translated its 101-point ratings system and voicey criticism into “marching orders for a legion of loyal readers” like DeVille. Pitchfork was a key part of the simultaneous digitization of music recordings and music discourse, a tumultuous few years that upended long-held assumptions about the value of music, who could be a critic, how fans interacted with their heroes, and vice-versa. Pitchfork’s rise corresponded with the rapid professionalization of politics and culture blogging, which, as Ben Smith recently chronicled, transformed publishing from “the old standards of journalism: power, relevance, impact” toward a drive for web traffic at any cost. Every site was striking a conversational tone and constantly posting new “content,” to attract desk-job readers, Smith recalls, “who woke up in the morning, went to the website, and kept visiting throughout the day.” We posted pics of our lunch while monitoring the situation in Cairo and tabbing between Gawker and Buzzfeed and Pitchfork and Stereogum.4
The mid-2000s was the moment when a reasonably well-defined music genre (indie rock) metamorphosed into an eclectic, genre-agnostic lifestyle trend called “indie.” As a widely cited 1996 study argued, the combined factors of increased class mobility, cosmopolitanism, capitalist acceleration and mass-media penetration had gradually eroded the primeval form of music snobbery rooted in Western classical music, opera, jazz—the music you studied in music school. Good taste was now eclectic taste, no matter how mainstream. Or, in DeVille’s words: “in the MP3 era, eclecticism was the wave.” But this kind of eclecticism didn’t just mean you listened to basement-bred noise rock and twee indiepop and Kompakt microhouse, but that your tastes soared to the great heights of the pop charts. Pitchfork took the lead. “For the first time this year, the effects of file-sharing on personal taste became unmistakably clear,” the editors wrote to introduce the site’s list of 2003’s best songs, the top 10 of which featured OutKast, Justin Timberlake, Beyonce, and 50 Cent. “The indie community’s palettes—and everyone else’s—have broadly diversified.”
Pitchfork pulling pop stars under its umbrella was the first step toward remaking Alternative Nation into Peak Indie. In the 1990s, alternative music existed simultaneously as a genre and format: on the post-Nirvana FM airwaves, alternative meant growly men playing music derived from 80s punk and/or 70s classic rock. While MTV took a broader and more women-friendly approach with the more heterogenous programming of “120 Minutes,” it was Spin’s 1995 Alternative Record Guide that historicized alternative music as a big-tent discursive space for all kinds of weird music, lassoing the prior few decades of left-of-the-dial noise into a chaotic corral of 50s free-jazz, 60s proto-punk, 70s psych, 80s DIY, and 90s gangsta rap. Like DeVille’s “indie,” Spin editor Eric Weisbard described the Guide as “cool’s road map,” the preferred music of “bohemia, social marginals of sundry kind, and the avant-garde.” Crucially, this canon also included pop icons Duran Duran (“British dolly boys who dress up as Ann-Margaret”), Madonna (“a true rebel-rock icon”), and ABBA, the Guide’s first entry (“Pop music can be attractively ordinary. It can also be perversely weird…ABBA was both, often at the same time”). In Spin’s world, alternative—like millennial indie or rock for that matter—contained multitudes.
But for a shrinking but still loud cohort of fans and critics, all of this eclecticism was too much. Rock, to these folks, was not just one form of popular music among many, but its gritty authenticity and Romantic poetry was the norm for all music. Out of the discursive ferment of early-80s UK rock mag culture came the tongue-in-cheek slur “rockism” to name the pervasive ideology that only music sounding like The Stooges or Bruce Springsteen was worthy of critique. As anti-rockist ideologues gathered steam online in the early 2000s, the hilarious, apt, and trollish portmanteau “poptimism” gave a new cohort of smart, inclusive, and witty pop critics a playful rallying cry. Sides were chosen, debates grew tangled, and terms were misappropriated for debate points, such that today, many critics still argue that “poptimism” means “carrying water for anything popular” instead of “giving Sabrina Carpenter the same level of critical attention as Arcade Fire.”5
After Kelefa Sanneh’s recent New Yorker article lamenting the decline of negative criticism, the poptimism debate re-launched for the millionth time, spurring many new and interesting thoughts on the matter from many great critics (Carl Wilson’s long piece at Slate is the best recap and historicization). A personal favorite predictably came from Tom Ewing, who was there, man (his brilliant former Pitchfork column was branded with the ever-shifting term). Ewing explains that, when he used the term in the early 2000s, poptimism was merely the critical position that “there’s always something exciting happening somewhere. If you don’t believe there is, widen your field of vision.” It’s not that pop is always inherently good, in other words (which Wilson rightly labels as a strawman argument), but that there’s always something good somewhere. As Ewing notes, that position has theoretically always been possible to hold though impossible to actually execute, save for the impossibly well-connected person with unlimited financial resources and time. But the filesharing and blog age made it possible. “We’d flipped, very suddenly, from a context of scarcity and specialist knowledge to a context of abundance and immediate access, and this was going to change how people thought and wrote about music,” Ewing wrote.6 From this perspective, poptimism isn’t reflexively loving Carly Rae Jepsen as much as it’s the predecessor to what streaming platforms now brand as “Discovery.”
DeVille is very good at chronicling his own gradual, then all-at-once embrace of pop and dance music—a transformation which mirrors, I assume, many of his book’s most eager readers. Putative pop stars like Jepsen and Haim were lumped in with indie, he writes, “not because of any sonic connection but because it was championed by the same gatekeepers and celebrated by the same audience.” Like alternative and rock before it, indie had outgrown its formative semantic boundaries to become “less a defined musical style than a container for a particular audience’s evolving tastes.” As with much genre discussion, we’re tiptoeing precariously close to “I know it when I see it” reductions or question-begging—this band is indie because it has indie characteristics. It’s illogical, but of course, that’s also part of the fun. While reading, I remembered one of my personal Peak Indie moments: the 2010 Pitchfork Music Festival, where my Gen X icons Modest Mouse, Pavement, Raekwon and Big Boi shared Chicago’s Union Park for three days with the Peak Indie All-Stars: LCD Soundsystem, St. Vincent, Beach House, Robyn, Sleigh Bells, Neon Indian, Best Coast and Freddie Gibbs. I stood agape when Diplo dropped a snippet of Ace of Base’s “All That She Wants” during Major Lazer’s steamy Sunday set, noting that for a moment the primary music audible to thousands of music nerds was a 1992 global reggae-pop smash that many attendees might have reflexively switched off if they heard it on the radio. In this context, though, it sounded pretty much like Haim and Carly Rae Jepsen.
DeVille doesn’t dwell on festivals much, but the period covered in Such Great Heights bore witness to their explosion as a key element of indie (and all) music culture. Coachella, Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza, Pitchfork, South by Southwest, and dozens of others funneled buzzy bands and established stars onto ad-hoc stages in giant fields and city parks, blurring eras, genre boundaries and star trajectories into ad-hoc indie coalitions, brought to you by Tito’s Vodka and Chipotle. But one musical icon in vanishing supply at millennial indie music festivals, was the rock star. Defined by David Hepworth as the 20th century musical icon of reckless machismo and poetic authenticity, the dude-centric archetype died with Kurt Cobain (who never wanted the title anyway) and had a mountain of dirt piled on its grave by what Hepworth dubbed “the advent of the mystique-destroying internet,” the center of which was Pitchfork. Sure, there was still plenty of rock music made by indie strivers seeking a taste of the frenzy of renown, but the new generation sought less to replicate the archetype than to queer it: see St. Vincent shredding “Lithium” at Nirvana’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, and Boygenius redefining the band’s ironic iconography for a Rolling Stone cover a decade later. “One year, Obama’s like, ‘It’s okay to be gay’ and the next year, there are like, lesbian tees at Target,” Phoebe Bridgers said in 2023. “We’ve benefitted from growing up in a different world.”
Bridgers’ tongue-in-cheek exaggeration notwithstanding, she nails the defining ethos of Such Great Heights-style millennial indie: a potent form of hip-capitalist identity politics infused (ironically enough) with earnest hope for a better world. Or, as Vulture recently dubbed it, Obamacore: “a time of bubbling optimism, unthreatening politics, and the first shoots of a distinctly millennial online culture.” This was the age of Glee, “Party in the USA,” “Fight Song,” Lady Gaga, Buzzfeed lists, and an online trend in which people danced like the Breakfast Club kids to Phoenix’s giddy “Lisztomania,” including a BU undergrad named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Above all of it was Beyoncé, whose 2009 viral ode to heterosexual marriage “Single Ladies” made her Obamacore’s first musical icon. And she kept growing in stature, to the point that, as Sanneh recently put it, she became “a cross between a folk hero, a cult leader, and a royal eminence.” Three years after her 2013 surprise album drop and Sheryl Sandberg-affiliated feminist rebrand, the more scholarly contingent of the Beyhive appended the one-of-a-kind album/film experience Lemonade with an extensive syllabus on Black womanhood. Ever since, Beyoncé has followed suit, using her pop-diplomatic powers for good, and framing Renaissance and Cowboy Carter as what could be called bibliographic pop: danceable pedagogy designed to teach the world about female and queer Black contributions to dance and country culture.
Wait, are we still talking about indie? Well, if the term was gradually transposed in the 00s to an index of progressive values and eclectic tastes, then Beyoncé’s genre-jumping makes her as worthy of inclusion as Madonna was for Spin’s definition of Alternative. And it would certainly include the post-Beyoncé deluge of dark, sometimes experimental R&B fusion: The Weeknd, Frank Ocean, Dev Hynes, Solange, How to Dress Well, Grimes, and, at times, Lana Del Rey, who are crammed into Such Great Heights’ most overstuff chapter. When DeVille frames this deeply influential influx as “indie-rock poptimism reach(ing) its peak,” I feel like he doesn’t nearly do justice to the cultural dimensions of this particular evolutionary strand of hip Black pop. What if we left “indie” and “poptimism” out of the discussion? On one hand, you have Black artists tapping into fashionable white trends (The Weeknd flipping Beach House, Frank Ocean recalling Coachella, Dev Hynes leading punk bands Test Icicles and Lightspeed Champion, Solange taking her sister and brother-in-law to see Grizzly Bear). On the other, you have white artists using Black music as an exploratory stage before moving on (Lana describing herself in 2011 as “Lolita…lost in the hood,” Grimes and HTDW ditching their attention-grabbing R&B fixations for careers in exploratory dance music). Sound familiar? Isn’t cross-cultural exchange transacted on an uneven racial playing field the very story of American popular music? That seems to be the starting point for analysis here, not fucking poptimism again. But that’s for the next author.
More attention to the history of racial and cultural crossover might have improved Such Great Heights’ take on the putative indie-fication of hip hop, as well. DeVille enumerates the rap acts who benefitted most from online indie fandom–the Clipse, Run the Jewels, Odd Future, Danny Brown, Freddie Gibbs–and dates indie kids caring about rap to the rise of the Native Tongues collective led by A Tribe Called Quest, and late 90s’ underground rap labels like Rawkus and Anticon. Okay, sure. But there is another, more comprehensive and revealing way to tell this story, that tracks the hipster/hip hop fusion to the very multimedia spectacle created by Black kids in the 1970s Bronx. Itself an eclectic “indie” scene full of fashionable hipsters, hip hop inspired a crop of white downtown new wavers, eager to siphon some uptown credibility while ushering hip hop to the mainstream. The dam broke in 1981, with Blondie’s #1 pop hit “Rapture” featuring Debbie Harry rapping (poorly, but with good intentions) about Fab Five Freddy and Grandmaster Flash, the latter of whom opened for The Clash, whose 3xLP Sandanista! opened with Joe Strummer’s white-boy bars on “Magnificent Seven.” The same year came the first album from the Tom Tom Club, Talking Heads’ rhythm section, who rocked uptown clubs with “Genius of Love” and “Wordy Rappinghood.” A few years later, Sex Pistols impresario Malcolm McLaren collaborated with rap radio stars The World’s Famous Supreme Team on “Buffalo Gals,” and the Beastie Boys switched from hardcore punk to hip hop, releasing the first-ever #1 rap album, full of Led Zeppelin and AC/DC samples. The dialogue between hipsters and hip hop never really stopped, either, such that when DeVille compares the broad variety of late 90s underground rap to the wealth of music “that didn’t fit into ‘indie rock’ as defined by Pavement and Sonic Youth,” it’s worth recalling that Sonic Youth themselves weren’t rock purists in the least: they collaborated with Chuck D and Cypress Hill.
By the time we get to Haim and Carly, Robyn, Chvrches, and MASSEDUCTION-era St. Vincent—all of whom would’ve sounded great in an early ‘90s afternoon MTV block amid Depeche Mode and “Vogue”—DeVille confesses that “the increasingly mainstream-adjacent indie world” had stretched the term beyond its semantic utility. Indeed, a lot of the poppier post-Peak Indie acts were probably better classifiable with a phrase coined by pop critic Robert Christgau in 1969: “semipopular music.” Putting together his year-end list, Christgau noted records he liked a lot—The Flying Burrito Brothers, Randy Newman, Terry Riley, The Stooges, and Captain Beefheart—but that didn’t nearly trouble the pop charts. To accommodate this growing peer group that emerged from the post Beatles/Stones/Dylan transition from “rock and roll” to “rock,” Christgau started his Consumer Guide, packed with smart capsule reviews and letter grades that could be called poptimism avant la lettre. Christgau covered a lot of ground, in order “to share my findings even if only a few dozen or a few hundred buyers would do something as a result.” Christgau realized long before anyone else that—like Pitchfork, mp3 blogs and festival lineups decades hence—music-for-music-lovers-who-read-music-criticism wasn’t the stuff of magazine covers, but could be aptly celebrated, in the aggregate. That’s another definition of “indie,” I suppose.
If we updated “semipopular” for the Such Great Heights moment, LCD Soundsystem, the era’s ultimate critical darling, would more than fit the bill. The band’s 2011 final show sold out Madison Square Garden in minutes and they filmed a theatrically released documentary about it, but good luck getting the average radio listener to name one of their tunes. “Semipopular music,” Christgau wrote, “had the power to pull people together. Not to inspire a mass movement…but to gather a sort of electronic bohemia, a conceptual community in which rock journalism played a crucial role.” Fittingly, DeVille, sees LCD’s MSG send-off as more than an Irish wake for a great New York City band, but a testament to “how far indie music had come.”
Indie music criticism still hadn’t come nearly far enough, though. Until fairly late in DeVille’s narrative, the public sphere of indie coverage was a monoculture of overeducated white dudes, like he and I. Pitchfork writers were progressive and well-intentioned, but also knew at some level that we were approaching a lot of music and culture from a significant distance, and taking up far more space than we needed to. By the mid-2010s, mastheads started mirroring more closely the audiences they served, and the musicians they covered, due to a variety of factors: the ongoing diversification of younger generations, new waves of editorial leadership, the pluralization of worldviews emerging from social media, and the (oft-overlooked) fact that neoliberal capitalism had long evolved to mine diverse, cosmopolitan identity expressions. Whatever you wanted to call it, capital understands indie as eclectic lifestyle marketing you can nod your head to. Music journalism finally received a long-overdue diversification—one that unfortunately happened right as the entire enterprise teetered on the brink of extinction.7
DeVille acknowledges the evolution in Such Great Heights, but his ambit is too broad, his approach too deep in the blog game, to address such long-running power struggles as more than quick contextual bullet-points, or online cannon fodder. “Leaning into sounds traditionally beloved by women, minorities, and queer people became a way not only to push stuffy rock fans’ buttons, but to show off your progressive credentials,” he writes in the book’s waning pages. Wait…for whom? Like leaning on poptimism as a catchall explanation for the interplay of Black and white musicians and forms, DeVille’s approach to deeper questions of identity and power is a bit too cloistered in a working male critic’s mindset to explain much past that perspective. He’s good for an occasional “yikes, guys” when recounting a distasteful turn of critical phrase (usually at Pitchfork) from the pre-woke aughts, but DeVille still leaves a lot of analytical meat on the bone here, especially for a book subtitled (not necessarily by him, to be fair) a “complete cultural history.”
DeVille might not be into indie for its liberatory potential, but he can’t deny that the music under review in Such Great Heights was consumed in its time very inexpensively, if not for free. Between peer-to-peer downloads, YouTube uploads, blogs and ad-supported online criticism, streams of volunteered social media opinion, and the free tiers of streaming platforms, enjoying recorded music and its accompanying discourse in the 21st century has far from cost-prohibitive for fans. Those costs, of course, have been passed on to the musicians themselves, compelled to opt in to Silicon Valley’s landscape of streaming music and streaming discourse, lest they risk cultural invisibility. The Stream, as I call it, launders the infinite landscape of filesharing and open-web blogging—and the promise of Ewing-style “there’s always something” poptimism—into a relentlessly surveilled, interlocking set of locked-down platforms. “As the 2010s rolled on, the options (to discover new music) became depressingly limited–and many of the most effective were controlled by Silicon Valley execs, not people with their ear to the ground,” DeVille mordantly observes in his conclusion.
If DeVille is correct that the biggest beneficiaries of millennial indie are the one-percenters like Taylor Swift siphoning sounds for their newest Era, then Spotify and its ilk has a lot to do with it. The supposed benefits of the “Long Tail” have been thoroughly debunked for more than a decade now, replaced with the ultra-obvious realization that the populace prefers the most-advertised, most-popular stuff. The gap between the coolest underground bands and what critic Chris Richards calls pop’s “permanent A-List” is bigger than ever, and most artists are scraping together penny fractions while the three remaining major labels are swimming in profits. A recent Billboard article about Spotify’s top playlist editors spoke loudly about the priorities of the streaming music industry. Sure, they’re “not A.I.,” but what are they? Spotify’s global head of editorial worked for Live Nation and Sony BMG Music. Its head of dance and electronic editorial came from investment banking and business development. The editorial lead of indie/alternative was an agent’s assistant and Spotify executive assistant. Streaming platforms were pitched to musicians and their listeners as a counter-piracy measure—fractions of pennies are better than zero pennies—but it’s long been clear that the actual impetus was to re-establish the 20th-century power structure and corporate pipelines that file-sharing had temporarily felled.
The streaming platforms powering millennial indie can feel like the telos of music recordings’ century-long trajectory as raw material for technological development. It starts with the phonograph itself, initially intended for business dictation until, as historian David Suisman has shown, companies like Victor saw music as its killer app. Army General and Johns Hopkins-trained engineer George Owen Squier innovated the practice of sending sound recordings over electrical lines during the early days of radio, later combining the word “music” with the push-button photography brand Kodak into the trade name “Muzak.” By the 1940s and 50s, writes Joseph Lanza, Muzak was the sound of America, deployed not for aesthetic purposes but to soothe moods in elevators, doctor’s offices, and increase productivity on factory floors. In the postwar era, Bell Labs’ research into the transistor—the first killer app for which was the handheld radio—led to the establishment of Silicon Valley, while the engineers at military manufacturer Ampex relied on Bing Crosby for their pivot to reel-to-reel magnetic tape recorders, because the celebrity radio crooner wanted to broadcast pre-recorded episodes of his incredibly popular show. More recently, Steve Jobs relaunched his fledgling Apple Computers as the fledgling record industry’s de facto hardware and software provider, addressing its digital crisis by transforming it into an arm of the personal computing industry. In his recent book on the political economy of streaming, Eric Drott asks, “if music is believed to plumb the depths of our souls, then what better resource is there for surveillance capitalists to exploit in their drive to know everything they can about us?” In the Such Great Heights era, as Liz Pelly unpacked in her recent Spotify book, platforms and major labels seek to define all music as what Lanza called “moodsong.”
One truism solidified by Big Tech’s takeover is that the fundamental unit of music culture is not the community—as was the case for 80s and 90s indie—but the taste-bearing, mood-having individual. While DeVille acknowledges Spotify’s evil, he shares Silicon Valley’s perspective of indie-as-individualism, with his personal journey-to-cool standing in for his imagined reader’s. He shares the idea with Peak Indie icon Bethany Cosentino: “That’s something that I love about being an indie artist,” Cosentino said in 2010. “I would never want to be in a position where people tell me, ‘This is what your music has to sound like’ or ‘This is what your image has to be’...‘I’m just about being myself.” The refrain is common enough for the past couple decades that it’s easy to assume it’s a social fact, and not the work of ideology. In her new book on the beloved Cincinnati modern rock station WOXY, music scholar Robin James attempts to reframe the discussion. Feminist philosophy, James explains, offers a community-based counterweight to indie individualism, in which “human freedom is a fundamentally collective project: other people’s work, effort, care, and ideas are the ground that gives me the resources and skills I need to create my own independence.” In creating what James deems a truly independent music culture, WOXY wasn’t troubled by the major/indie label divide, nor a desire to use the airwaves to break local bands. What WOXY’s listener community wanted was musical eclecticism without the mind-numbing repetition of pop and rock radio. Musical independence, in other words, doesn’t have to result from trend-chasing hipsterdom or end with commercial obsolescence, but instead can derive from the complicated but rewarding processes of dispersed, community-driven decision-making.
Community. Now there’s a word, even more than indie, that can subtly shift its meaning based on its context. It doesn’t show up much at all in Such Great Heights. For brands, social platforms, and big music festivals, community is “a condition beyond politics where a collectivity automatically shares values and agrees on how to realize them,” as David A. Banks and Britney Gil explain. But they stress that actually existing communities are the opposite—comprising the far messier work of getting people with common values to air out differences and achieve their shared goals in good faith. There were and are still many vibrant subcultural indie networks doing the hard work of community building and facilitating mutual aid: countless bands still van it from club to club, crashing on floors, working merch tables, and volunteering their labor for progressive causes. At the band level, the work of community can be grueling but rewarding, as Greg Saunier, the drummer and spokesperson for the beloved experimental indie rock band Deerhoof, explained:
There’s no hierarchy, there’s no central leadership, everything is pure horizontal consensus and just having to potentially discuss every possible decision with every person involved and sign off on every little thing that might get done…[W]e can’t pass the buck and we can’t, you know, complain that word came down from the guys up top. We all share a responsibility for the outcome, so everybody’s got to deal with the nuts and bolts of it.”
Despite critics like me (and, I’m pretty sure, DeVille) absolutely loving Deerhoof, the band doesn’t merit mention in Such Great Heights. But this is not an oversight on DeVille’s part as it as a definition-by-absence. This isn’t Our Band Could Be Your Life: the indie that DeVille covers, evident in the title and the list of bands below it on the book’s cover, is the top sliver of approachably eclectic musicians who’ve been lucky enough to launch into the wider cultural marketplace. Countless putatively “indie” bands like Deerhoof are out there right now, their music too abrasive for ad synchs or their group ideology resistant to selling out to make it to Indie™ status. Deerhoof led many of them to remove their music from Spotify, as the company becomes more and more explicitly villainous, with many more bands (who, not coincidentally, rely on real communities for their livelihoods) likely to follow.
Undeterred by Silicon Valley’s pernicious influence, DeVille ends his book like he started it. “It’s harder than ever to make a living in independent music, but you don’t have to poke around long to find flurries of exciting creative activity everywhere,” he concludes. “It will be fascinating to see who achieves escape velocity and what heights they reach.” DeVille has reason for optimism: as an editor for Stereogum, he’s got one of the few great independent music journalism gigs left, at a site whose founder resisted a private equity takeover by raising funds from its avid readership (including yours truly, who proudly wears a Stereogum t-shirt) and relaunching it as an independent outlet that covers the gamut of popular music, from weird indie stuff to billionaire-produced pop. At Stereogum, “indie” isn’t a genre, but the sort of independent ideology that dates back decades. Though DeVille sees indie primarily as a form of individual cultural expression, his current workplace is discursively and economically supported by an active community of readers and contributors.
Stereogum’s current sphere of activity involves covering Bethany Cosentino’s ongoing music career, a decade and a half after her big Peak Indie break. The site published a wide-ranging and honest interview ahead of the 2023 LP she released under her own name, and, a few months later, transcribed her anguished TikTok video about that album’s failure to achieve escape velocity. Cosentino didn’t blame anyone for her album’s perceived commercial fizzling, or express a desire to return to Peak Indie—like a lot of musicians who debuted during the sunny early ‘10s, Cosentino now hears the music she made then as cringe. She recently explained as much—not on Twitter, but her recently launched Substack, which she’s named “Oversharing with Bethany Cosentino.” Pitching itself as a “new economic engine for culture” and a “home for independent voices,” Substack is Silicon Valley’s latest attempt to convince creative people (ahem) that the path to the great heights of independence is the newest form of online entrepreneurial individualism. Perhaps the next book about millennial indie should start here and work backwards.
Gibbs, who’s nothing if not a hip hop traditionalist, emerged at an interesting time for rap. The year prior, two writers who’d been covering hip hop for decades (Sasha Frere-Jones and Simon Reynolds) opined about the genre’s long-ish transition into…something else (variations on the word “dead” in the headlines generated no shortage of social media uproar). Clearly rap hadn’t “died,” per se, but Kanye West, Kid Cudi, Drake, and their successors were certainly guiding it toward a form of moody, druggy, occasionally danceable R&B. At the same time, hip hop was making its way into the academy as a field of study, like jazz had during hip hop’s 1980s/1990s ascendance. The crop of new rappers to emerge over the next several years seemed to split the difference: J. Cole and Kendrick Lamar held it down for the traditionalists, while Young Thug and Future paved a new, rap-adjacent lane.
Disclosures: While a grad student studying online music cultures, I started an mp3 blog in 2005, which got me a gig writing for Pitchfork in 2007, a tenure that included a piece mentioned in DeVille’s book. DeVille also once commissioned a Stereogum essay from me, and I’ve hung out with him at numerous Pitchfork festivals. He’s a good guy and a solid critic and I’m sorry this review had to be published on my Substack instead of a locale with far more readers.
The best of the first wave of indie-centric mp3 critic-bloggers (Fluxblog and Said the Gramophone), are both still going (Sean from StG has slowed down because he’s also now an acclaimed novelist). Many of the second wavers, who were less about criticism than curation, have also stuck around—Aquarium Drunkard and Gorilla vs. Bear are both labels now, and Craig from My Old Kentucky Blog isn’t blogging anymore because he co-owns the best indie venue in Indianapolis (my hometown).
One of the pioneers of this new, bite-sized, voicey cultural journalism was web developer and internet sleuth Peggy Wang, the third employee hired at Buzzfeed who also happened to play keyboards for the blogger-beloved band Pains of Being Pure at Heart, whose 2009 debut album–released on the archetypal indie pop label Slumberland–received Best New Music honors from Pitchfork.
Even a careful observer like DeVille can get things twisted, using preppy pop-punkers Vampire Weekend’s ascent as an example of the poptimism debate in Such Great Heights. The band of Columbia University grads playing Congolese-inspired indie rock and weighing in on Oxford comma usage did stir up quite a bit of controversy online, but it was less a debate about Rock v. Pop than the far thornier issues of race, class, and appropriation. But as a critic who lived and wrote through these wars, I can’t resist cracking my knuckles and diving in: Vampire Weekend were loved by rockists because of Ezra Koenig’s elliptical lyric poetry and the band’s post-punk edge, and by poptimists not because they name-dropped Lil Jon, as DeVille surmises, but because they wrote catchy, smartly arranged songs with hooks (and, for a not-insignificant audience, because they were also four cute boys).
Substack needs more music writing this thoughtful and, frankly, excellent.
This is the best piece of music writing I’ve read in I don’t know how long.