A Barometer For Indie Culture?

originally published October 17, 2007

One of the most unexpectedly controversial albums of 2007 has been a small sampler released by Vice Records in partnership with MTV2 and Alternative Distributor Alliance, the company that gets minor-label releases into major stores. The compilation, titled This Is Next: Indie's Biggest Hits, Vol. 1, collects 15 "hits," such as they are, from acts like Cat Power, Of Montreal, Deerhoof, Sonic Youth, the Shins, M. Ward, Bright Eyes and Spoon. As a product, it's not too different from all those Now That's What I Call Music! comps that clog up Best Buy and Billboard charts, except that its scope is much narrower. More crucially, the press release claims it was based on the Garden State soundtrack, which changed the Shins' career and is beginning to look more like a generational bellwether than anyone other than a publicist could have predicted. Decorating box-store endcaps, This Is Next is pure product, intended to sell not only itself, but albums by the featured artists.

As a product, it's, well, a product, but as a music compilation, it proves fairly innocuous, with too many tracks that veer toward the rootsier end of things: The sequencing of Bright Eyes' "Four Winds," Cat Power's "Lived in Bars" and Neko Case's "Hold On Hold On" creates a mid-album lull that's broken only by Deerhoof's scratchy "The Perfect Me," which (by their criteria) is an accessible pop song. There are some honest-to-goodness from-the-trenches indie rockers here as well: Spoon (which was briefly on a major label 10 years ago), Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (is "Satan Said Dance" really the best choice?), Ted Leo, and Athens' own Of Montreal ("Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse" still sounds kinda awesome). Then there's Sonic Youth, which by now has appeared on three generations of this kind of compilation. Its presence ("Do You Believe in Rapture?" from last year's Rather Ripped) challenges an important assertion in the comp's title: This isn't Next, but Past. Nearly half the tracklist comes from 2006 releases; the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' "Cheated Hearts," for example, is more than 18 months old.

That may sound like grousing, but it's an important criticism: Indie culture is notoriously fickle and fast-moving, for better or for worse, which makes this comp appear considerably out of step with the underground it seeks to document. Writing in his Village Voice blog Status Ain't Hood a week before the comp's release, Tom Breihan lamented its conservative tracklist and called This Is Next "a Whitman's Sampler of blog-friendly pop-rock. The cover includes the term 'indie's biggest hits,' but it offers no indication of what that might mean…" Earlier in the review, he states, "Indie here doesn't necessarily have anything to do with actual independent record labels."

The day after its release, Pitchforkmedia.com gave This Is Next a very rare 0.0 out of 10.0 (full disclosure: the author of this piece is a staff writer for Pitchfork). Matt LeMay called it "a baffling artifact of music biz cluelessness… This Is Next seeks to exploit indie's recent surge in popularity while entirely ignoring the cultural and technological shifts that have made this surge possible." It's an interesting point: why should a consumer need to spend money on a CD sampler when all of the tracks have been available (for free, in some cases) online? Why even bother with a CD, especially when indie has gone digital?

LeMay's questions provoked an intense online debate, with all the expected sniping and parsing, but the music blog Merry Swankster had a good answer to those questions: "This is a compilation for the uninformed, the casual shopper; or, people with priorities that exist outside the musical underground - a term used very loosely in this context, but perfectly on point for the potential owners of the disk." That's a legitimate counterpoint: there is a world beyond indie, and even curious, open-minded listeners don't always keep track of the latest Liars release or have access to the latest technology.

This debate transformed This Is Next from a quick-buck comp into a barometer of several issues affecting indie culture at this precarious moment, when bands like the Shins, Arcade Fire, Interpol and even Spoon are posting huge sales. As Breihan commented, "It's tempting to posit the release of This Is Next as this generation's moment of reckoning, a rough equivalent to the time that Janis Joplin song showed up in an actual Mercedes Benz commercial." It raises uncomfortable questions: how durable is indie culture when exposed to the mainstream glare? Can indie music affect a positive change musically, or will it become a fad like '90s alternative, further fragmenting formats and audiences? Does a state-of-indie comp assembled outside of indie make the latter inevitable?

But what of those "cultural and technological shifts" LeMay mentioned in his review? The acts on This Is Next have all benefited from the Internet and the ease with which music can be disseminated digitally. In fact, their unprecedented popularity may be a happy byproduct of that widespread shift from CDs to MP3s, from Discmen to iPods. However, most major labels have been reluctant - even hostilely so - to utilize this new medium, and any efforts in that direction seem either too slow or too misguided to those who normally navigate these waters. So, in removing the music from its digital context and reselling it on primitive technology, This Is Next appears not only redundant, but downright imperialistic - a means of co-opting, exploiting and perhaps destroying a thriving underground.

Ironically, the hubbub and hand-wringing didn't continue beyond that week, nor did the publicity generate actual sales. Most of the participants, of course, already had all these songs or were at least familiar enough with the acts to have already formed opinions. In fact, according to the blog Catbirdseat, first week sales of This Is Next barely exceeded 1,000 copies, out of 100,000 units shipped. Perhaps the planned second volume will be a stronger collection and post better sales, or at least revive what is potentially a fascinating and even necessary debate.

Stephen Deusner

Liner Notes is Flagpole's music opinion column.