The Music of Millennial Idealism

So far as rock stardom goes, Grizzly Bear was by no means an apparent candidate. A Brooklyn-based band that fashioned in 2002, it specialised in subtlety—delicate riffs, choir-like singing, meandering melodies. Some musicians ask their crowds to “make some noise”; within the new e-book Such Nice Heights: The Full Historical past of the Indie Rock Explosion, the music journalist Chris DeVille remembers seeing Grizzly Bear’s lead singer reward an viewers for being “so quiet and attentive.”But by 2009, Grizzly Bear was a scorching ticket. The band’s album Veckatimest debuted within the high 10 of the Billboard Sizzling 200—and would ultimately promote 1.1 million copies worldwide, buoyed by its single “Two Weeks” showing in a Tremendous Bowl business for Volkswagen. When Jay-Z and Beyoncé attended one of many band’s live shows, it appeared an indication that the tectonic plates of tradition had been shifting. Grizzly Bear was indie; Jay-Z and Beyoncé represented what indie was supposedly impartial from: the mainstream. However the separation between the 2 worlds was changing into blurrier day-after-day. Reacting to observers who’d been stunned to see him on the present, Jay-Z informed MTV Information, “What the indie rock motion is doing proper now could be very inspiring.”The phrase indie rock originated within the late ’70s to confer with area of interest, punk-influenced bands—Buzzcocks, Hüsker Dü, R.E.M.—that bought their begin distributing their very own data and reserving their very own reveals. However throughout the 2000s, it got here to confer with all kinds of artwork and product united by a obscure desire for scruffiness over polish. Indie included songs on the Billboard Sizzling 100, resembling Modest Mouse’s “Float On.” It encompassed the music on The O.C., a present watched by thousands and thousands. It was a shopper economic system that made classic clothes and microbrewed beer into company endeavors (pour one out for American Attire). And ultimately, the time period appeared to lose any that means. Twenty-first-century indie formed the identities of many Millennials, however it’s now usually talked about with pitying nostalgia—because the bygone model of hipsters with handlebar mustaches pretending to be countercultural whereas making easy-listening music for lodge lobbies.DeVille’s e-book is a meticulous recounting of that twee and heady period. A author and editor for the stalwart music weblog Stereogum, DeVille catalogs indie’s permutations with the passion of a baseball-card collector, astutely sorting small developments amid bigger traits. (For instance: I’d by no means earlier than thought of how the provision of Wi-Fi web drove demand for coffee-shop-friendly music.) However as to what indie meant—whether or not it was understood greatest as an inventive renaissance, a advertising fad, a by-product of technological change—he presents a shrug: “A number of interpretations are legitimate.” The e-book additionally has a little bit of an elegiac really feel, suggesting that no matter indie was, it’s definitively over. But in some ways, indie nonetheless lives—and represents an idealistic method to artwork and tradition that’s nicely price preserving.Such Nice Heights – The Full Cultural Historical past Of The Indie Rock ExplosionBy Chris DeVilleThe e-book opens with a memory from DeVille’s adolescence within the late ’90s. Whereas the women at his highschool listened to MTV stars like Britney Spears, the boys adopted nu metallic bands resembling Korn—although DeVille by no means totally related with that music’s rageful essence. Ultimately, he bought into the artier angst of Deftones, which led him to Radiohead, which led him to full-blown music geekdom. “For me, indie wasn’t about DIY ethics, avant-garde disruption, or any type of radical worldview,” he writes. “It was about albums I might spin incessantly and set up into lists instead of a character, songs I might burn onto combine CDs for my family and friends to indicate off my good style, and bands that doubled as a secret handshake with folks cooler than me.”His trajectory mirrors my very own journey from Incubus-loving tween to Shins-loving teen, however I discovered the reason of his personal motives a bit miserable. Smug posturing and insularity had been actually a part of the subculture, however so—a minimum of we informed ourselves—was severe musical appreciation. Mainstream musical choices of the time tended towards the overly macho or overly female, overly loud or overly slick—however indie appeared to worth complexity and smarts. Albums resembling Modest Mouse’s The Moon & Antarctica and Wilco’s Yankee Resort Foxtrot didn’t look like they had been created to carry out an identification or please a constituency; they had been, as a substitute, exploring summary musical and lyrical concepts.After all, believing you’re too delicate and genuine to care about identification classes is an identification itself—as indie’s transformation right into a lifestyle-branding buzzword would come to exhibit. Lots of the scene’s outstanding artists had been white and male, and the scene was brimming with naivete and privilege (making bizarre music for no cash is so much simpler when you will have a belief fund, as some artists did). However there’s a motive that, as DeVille rigorously tracks, the time period indie advanced past the white-dudes-with-guitars stereotype to embody quite a lot of rappers, R&B singers, and even low-wattage pop divas. Indie is, at base, an aesthetic sensibility: a perception about what music is for. It stakes out a zone between the avant-garde notion of music as pure sound and the pop notion of music as pure pleasure. Indie says it’s good to listen to somebody do one thing completely different.Learn: What’s the attraction of indie rock’s new golden boy?What helped early-2000s indie blow up was the brand new means music was capable of journey. The web—listening platforms resembling Napster and iTunes, emergent media resembling music blogs—gave a scattered constellation of scrappy bands new attain. Indie’s predecessor scenes, resembling ’90s grunge or ’70s post-punk, had been all rooted in real-life neighborhood venues the place bands, listeners, and journalists mingled. Indie’s bands arose from particular native situations too. However we followers, largely, bought invested nearly. Children scattered everywhere in the world had been listening deeply and solitarily in headphones—and swapping songs and opinions about these songs on-line.Maybe that is additionally why, regardless of the connotations of the phrase indie, followers didn’t are inclined to accuse their faves of promoting out once they bought well-liked. When music is a purely aesthetic endeavor, severed from any explicit materials or geographical context, what does it matter if Purple Bull is sponsoring a tour? Actually, when my beloved Modest Mouse began to achieve mainstream traction, I don’t recall feeling defensive of the band’s purity. I wasn’t a follower who’d seen the band gigging in bars for years; I’d simply found it in some on-line listicle. I favored the music it made, and I used to be glad I’d have extra folks to speak about it with.Being the primary mass musical motion to flourish on-line additionally explains 2000s indie’s comparatively dangerless aura. Earlier books chronicling rock scenes, resembling Michael Azerrad’s Our Band May Be Your Life or Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s Please Kill Me, had been filled with juicy anecdotes set in tour buses and rock golf equipment. Indie bands, little doubt, have loads of these kinds of tales to share. However DeVille has no dishy scoops to impart. Such Nice Heights tells the story of indie because it was skilled by its customers: largely by means of a succession of Pitchfork critiques. The publication—based in 1996 and well-known for the decimal-point precision with which it charges albums—is talked about greater than 100 occasions within the e-book, elevating the query of whether or not the story of indie is de facto the story of 1 web site’s affect.Pitchfork has lengthy gotten a foul rap for snottiness and tortured writing, however it’s an vital establishment for a motive. By the early 2000s, Rolling Stone appeared overly preoccupied with Boomer artists of fading vitality; Spin, whereas containing punchy criticism, was a shiny shopper journal inflected by superstar and style. Pitchfork, in contrast, had a close to monastic devotion to speaking about music as music. In 2024, the location’s founder, Ryan Schreiber, informed The New York Instances that he needed to create one thing “that was very powerful from a crucial standpoint,” and that was guided by a query: “Who’s making music that’s really modern and progressive?”Learn: A darkish omen for the way forward for musicThe credibility of that description is nicely supported by Pitchfork’s historical past of trashing once-praised bands every time their new work sounded repetitive or unadventurous. And the location actually does have a document of championing albums that had an evolutionary impression on the way in which music sounds. Within the early 2000s, a vein of innovation was being mined by artists twisting folks traditions into new shapes (Sufjan Stevens’s whimsical orchestration, Animal Collective’s ghostly harmonizing, Joanna Newsom’s harp epics). Different bands, resembling Arcade Fireplace and the Postal Service, had been turning away from the disaffection that characterised Gen X rock to specific bighearted emotions in bespoke methods.After all, not all—and even most—indie bands had been groundbreaking. DeVille traces the knockoff impact that occurred over time, like when the unpredictable pop experimentalists of MGMT had been succeeded—and commercially eclipsed—by bands with blander takes on their concepts (Capital Cities, Foster the Folks, Empire of the Solar). Because the homespun sounds of early-2000s indie rock turned mall-soundtrack fare, tastemakers took a brand new curiosity in rap, R&B, pop, and digital music. This flip stays controversial—no matter’s flawed with tradition as we speak, you’ll find somebody tracing the issue again to the rise of so-called poptimism, the idea that mainstream entertainers had been worthy of crucial appraisal, not instinctive disdain. DeVille suggests—fairly pretty—that indie’s poptimist flip was sneaky snobbery, reactions towards the recognition of teams like Mumford & Sons. However the underlying fact is that, by the mid-2010s, a number of “really modern and progressive” music wasn’t originating from bands. It was coming from genre-agnostic web natives wielding software program and a mic, like Frank Ocean.The actual motive that indie began to die, or a minimum of felt as if it did, is Spotify. As streaming supplanted downloads and album gross sales, it automated music discovery. As a substitute of studying Pitchfork or asking a record-store clerk for suggestions, increasingly folks started to let algorithms recommend their subsequent obsession. This had quite a lot of penalties. One is that it’s grow to be more durable than ever for difficult music—music that it is advisable to hear to some occasions with the intention to love—to achieve a foothold. The status related to doing one thing completely different has began to fade.Streaming, with its paltry pay charges, additionally made dwelling off small and passionate fan bases more durable for artists to maintain. However the economics of indie had been all the time tenuous. DeVille notes that the scene’s increase synced up with the temporary few years when iTunes downloads drove music consumption—thereby permitting small labels to increase margins by focusing much less on bodily merchandise. Company patronage, pushed by the hype surrounding indie, additionally rained paydays on off-beat artists. However in a 2012 New York journal characteristic, Grizzly Bear revealed that—for the entire band’s outward success—its members weren’t even making a middle-class revenue. The band’s music remained too outré to get performed on business radio stations, which had been nonetheless vital drivers of mainstream success. A decade later, the band’s lead singer, Ed Droste, launched a brand new profession as a therapist.Nonetheless, Jay-Z’s quote about Grizzly Bear proved prophetic: Pop actually did take inspiration from indie. Beyoncé’s rapturously acclaimed 2013 self-titled album was moody, adventuresome, dripping with hipster rhetoric: “Soul not on the market,” she sang. “In all probability received’t make no cash off this, oh nicely.” Indie veterans resembling Jack Antonoff, Aaron Dessner, and Dan Nigro turned era-defining pop producers by serving to Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo, and different celebrities make introspective, quirky, rock-adjacent anthems. Pop didn’t quit the prerogative to broad attraction. However indie’s values—valorizing genuine self-expression and sonic exploration—most likely did form the wishes of a era of listeners.As for indie music itself, it’s nonetheless right here. It simply went again to being what it was within the first place: a distinct segment, an underground, a stressed inventive philosophy. Daily, Pitchfork nonetheless champions some artist—in rock or rap or some fully new style—whom I haven’t heard of and who challenges my ears. Music nerds are, for instance, at the moment digging into weirdos resembling Geese (a Gen Z band whose songs have a polyrhythmic, semi-comic depth) and Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band (think about Jimmy Buffett doing eight-minute, science-fiction-inflected sermons). On Wednesday, Pitchfork even spotlighted a baffling hip-hop offshoot that refers to itself as … “indie rock.” The music of the margins shouldn’t be prone to discover the attain it did for just a few fleeting years of the 2000s. However nice issues, indie insists, are made for their very own sake.​If you purchase a e-book utilizing a hyperlink on this web page, we obtain a fee. Thanks for supporting The Atlantic.