Hey friends,
Didn’t mean to leave y’all on a downer note. I’ve been hard at work finishing up volume 3 of the print version of Big Nothing and it’s occupied most of my music writing brain. But here we are.
Yesterday I was hanging out at my favorite of the myriad dive-adjacent bars that populate my little corner of Portland when I slipped through time. The bartender, who couldn’t have been older than 27, put on a playlist of songs that could have been neatly clipped out of my WinAmp queue during my freshman year of college. TV on the Radio, the Strokes, MGMT. What the kids these days are calling “Indie Sleaze” - if understand correctly.
First of all, I’m terrified that the music that defined my formative years has entered into the category of what once upon a time would have been played on the “classic” or “oldies” station. This was, of course, inevitable with the whole unceasing march of time and all that. But still a wild thing to realize. Secondly, I absolutely love the retronymic of “Indie Sleaze” for the kind of hazed out, dance-adjacent rock and roll that mostly emanated from New York and London around the turn of the millennium.
One thing I love about the genre was it felt like there was still a real sense of danger to the music of that time. Not the type of danger you get from genres that laud violence like gangsta rap or hardcore, or the spooky evil of black metal or the far reaches of psychedelic music, but that intersection of pop songwriting with a kind of art-damaged inventiveness led to a real danger of there being a lot of clumsily weird songs on a record.
For every effortlessly cool song like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Maps” there is a song that only worked within the PBR-soaked confines of the era like MGMT’s “Kids” who’s childlike synth line borders on the absurd and is only rescued by the candy-sweet vocal hook that follows it. These were bands that were trying to write pop music outside of the existing pop-structure machine. They were bands trying to write beats. They brought the messy experimentation and pretension of 20-somethings playing at art-gallery cool into the proto-internet limelight. And they left these awkward artifacts for everyone to view, even with the rose-colored glasses of middle-aged hindsight, a gentle reminder of the fumbling progress of our rakish youth.
Pin - Yeah Yeah Yeahs
I honestly forgot how awful this album art is. Karen O. and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs polished up their sound on later records, but there’s something endearing about the blown out vocals, the teetering drums and general silliness of the proto-metal riff with Karen singing “doot-doot-doot-doot” over the chorus that makes this song hit the nostalgia button for me.
Hands Away - Interpol
Recently I saw an article that was cataloguing some of Pitchfork’s most infamous reviews from the period before they became the slick media machine they are today. I’m not sure if their review of Interpol frontman Paul Banks’ first solo record was on there, but I vividly remember reading the scathing rant with a mixture of horror and schadenfreude-tinged glee as one of my heroes got taken down a peg: “…there is no effort, vision, or craft in this music. The title and artwork were more than enough; the mp3s don’t even need to exist.”
Banks, though, was never one to shy away from an experiment just because it might go poorly. Lyrically he’s turned out some really beautiful lines but also wrote, “Her stories are boring and stuff/she’s always calling my bluff” and “The subway is a porno.” Interpol always succeeded on the ethereally cool post-punk influenced songs alongside Banks’ best Ian Curtis impression. Nowhere is that more apparent than this song which slowly builds a reverb-drenched wave of sound while Banks peppers in lyrics including maybe his most insane couplet:
“Serve it up, don't wait
Let's see about this ham”
(Fun fact, on the Genius lyrics for this song there is one single annotation for the whole song which reads, simply, “what the hell is he talking about?”)
That’s it for today. Thanks for listening.