Bill Wasik wrote a great essay, “Hype Machine,” on indie rock as a web extra for Oxford American’s 2007 music issue. Wasik dissects the culture of indie rock and the power of the blogosphere to turn an unknown band of yesterday into the It band of today, and ultimately, the passé band of last year. Wasik illustrates his point with The Annuals, a band touted in 2006:
As promised, half past ten on the morning of July 18 saw Ryan Schreiber, the founder and editor-in-chief of Pitchfork, place his imprimatur upon the new band, which he likened to “some fantasy hybrid of Animal Collective, Arcade Fire, and Broken Social Scene.
We’ve provided a few references to some of the songs and bands mentioned in the article for the uninitiated.
“Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)” from Arcade Fire’s Funeral:
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“Hotel” from Broken Social Scene’s Broken Social Scene:
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“Fireworks” from Animal Collective’s Strawberry Jam:
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“Young Folks” from Peter, Bjorn and John’s Writer’s Block
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“Ease My Mind” from The Annuals’ Big Zeus
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Wasik demonstrates how quickly the blogosphere moves on a band. Pitchfork first posted on The Annuals on July 18t, 2006. Eight weeks later Stereogum.com posted on the band on September 7th, 2006, their post is met with a derisive “DUH.” We guess commenting and posting about bands is a contest to out-cool each other, but frankly we find the contest boring. Flaming doesn’t demonstrate your cool factor. It only documents that you’re a jackass.
Once Pitchfork blesses an act, any mention of that act on other blogs needs to be accompanied by an acknowledgment that one has lagged terribly behind the times. On September 7, Stereogum.com not only quoted Pitchfork’s review but wrote, “The hype machine”—by which they presumably meant blogs like themselves, because not a single dollar had yet gone into promoting the new band—“has been in motion for this band, so we feel sorta silly calling them a Band to Watch (we know, we know…you blogged about them first.)” Even so, the first comment, just fifteen minutes after the post, began with one word in all caps: “DUH.” By September 18, Idolator, the music blog of Gawker Media’s online empire, could pull back for a world-weary dissection of the new band as phenomenon, complete with “Odds of Backlash,” which it placed at five-to-one. On October 5, when Rolling Stone magazine’s “Rock & Roll Daily” blog finally weighed in, with an unctuous pronouncement of phony hipness—“Trust us on this one: you guys are gonna seriously sweat us for introducing you” to this band—commenter “nick” unloaded with justifiably righteous scorn:
yeah…everyone is really gonna “sweat you” for being (LITERALLY) the last blog on the Internet to write baout (sic) these guys.
This sentence made us laugh. Has cool ever sounded so cliche? Here’s another:
Last Fall I met Annuals in New York at a vegan grocery/café on the Lower East Side.
Wasik goes onto to reinforce the idea that indie rock is the culture of the young and educated Wilson wrote about in his article, “The Trouble with Indie Rock.”
Everyone I know listens to indie rock. At the older end, some still hang onto bands from their day, while others are “graduating” towards classical or jazz; at the younger end, some fold mainstream hip-hop into their mix, while others dabble in metal or trance. But everyone I know listens to indie rock. They all vote Democrat, too, and in this regard we reside in the “urban archipelago,” as a very smart essay in Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger called the urban-liberal consensus just after the heartbreaking (for us) 2004 election. But more remarkable than this nationwide political consensus is the nationwide cultural consensus that has sprung up within or alongside it, among hundreds of thousands of young adults, and not only in big cities, but in college towns and even rural retreats. Journalists rarely write about this consensus, perhaps because most of them reside squarely inside it. One might call it the hipster consensus, to use the somewhat unfortunate term that (for better or for worse) has come to denote these educated young Americans; and no cultural genre defines this consensus more than does indie rock.
John Richards, a DJ at KEXP, made an interesting observation about the excitement of finding a new band and the disappointment of seeing them again:
“But the second time,” he went on, “well, now it sold out early, and it’s at a bigger club. And I’m not that guy anymore. I’m not the guy discovering them. I’m just a guy who is with everybody else who also knows who they are.”
A friend of ours once made a similar of observation, but he attributed his disappointment in seeing a band when they are popular to a different factor. We live in New York City. He said in a city with this many people you have to find the next cool bar, band, neighborhood, etc. because as soon as everyone finds out about it, you won’t be able to do it anymore. The price will go up. It will be impossible to get in. Part of what drives us in New York City is the need to stay ahead of the pack. The quality of the experience of seeing a band for $15 at a small venue is vastly more rewarding than seeing them play Madison Square Garden for $75.
Wasik concludes with this idea:
Maybe they, and maybe we all, will learn to make art, to find narrative, in this churning, viral culture by embodying the churn, embracing it, by envisioning a life not as some decades-long epic, but as a succession of discretely plotted six-month shorts. Maybe, moreover, we are becoming so fragmented, so besotted on the specificities of our cultural subdivisions, that the future historians of the twenty-first century, maintaining their collaborative wiki-textbooks while they lounge about in silvery bodysuits, will identify our era to be when the story ended, as it were, the end not of history but of history as narrative—of the fiction that a culture, or even a subculture, is an arrow.
Wasik confirms David Brooks fears. We might never have another band with the discography of The Rolling Stones, U2, or even Radiohead. It would be ironic if the destruction of albums and catalogues of albums into autonomous MP3 files is stayed by the creation of disposable bands who produce only one album. If a band has only 14 great songs on one album, instead of 14 great songs spread over eight albums, we might be inclined to digest those 14 songs as a whole, instead of as greatest hits.
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