When You’re Down

Indie Rock Needs to Cheer the Hell Up

originally published April 7, 2004

I've seen an unusual number (for me) of unsigned/ indie-type bands lately, whether because I was playing with them or seeing them open for some better band or actually going out and seeing a whole show of unsigned bands without personally knowing any of their members (!).

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At a certain point it really struck me how similar, despite their superficial genre signifiers, they all were, and in a way I didn't expect. (Regrettably, this point was then passed and I saw yet more bands of this type, which made me want to run, make a sign reading "I AM SO SICK OF INDIE ROCK" and parade out front of selected venues, but wisely - or not - this did not occur. I had a milkshake instead.)
As I say, they would seem to range in styles: one was sort of loud Coldplay-ish Britrock with keys and yelling, one was Joy Division-fixated post-punk (to the degree that they seemed to be trying to look like Joy Division, which was icky), one was Elvis Costello-y power-trio nerd-rock, one was hardcore-influenced indie stuff with a Sleater-Kinney/ Pretty Girls Make Graves vibe, etc., etc. None of these genre choices are themselves particularly surprising. The weird thing is the way they were interpreting these various styles. It was like all of them were taking from their influences, but they were listening through headphones with little filters over the ears labeled "sad."

The Long, Dark Shadow of Emo
For the sake of convenience (but not accuracy), let's call this the emo influence. You can call it whatever you like - borecore, mope-rock, etc. - but there's no denying that a discomfortingly large portion of the music being made today by "the kids" has a very gray undertone, a sort of assumed stance of despair. And not even desperate despair, which is interesting - just kind of, you know, despair. It's the musical mode as much as it is the lyrical: Sure, we're sort of unspecific yelling about Things Being Bad, but we're also throwing together a lot of muddled chords, indistinct melodies, bleeding basslines, sloppy drums. It hits a certain drone of loudness but doesn't really progress much, and never hits the spots I'm looking for.
Now, I could spend another six pages critiquing this reflex, but it also seems like a reasonably obvious issue - either it annoys you or it doesn't, and my ranting about it probably isn't going to change anyone's mind much. But what is interesting about it is the phenomenon suggested by the title: the way it's leveling out all of these disparate genres into this sort of sad glop, this common sound that ultimately unites seemingly unrelated projects.
The weird thing is that defaulting to depression wouldn't seem like an obvious thing to do. Look at all the styles I name-check above: none of them except for hardcore are even 50 percent sadness. For every mopey dadrock band to misinterpret Radiohead - more on that in a moment - you have a wholly joyous song like Idlewild's "Roseability." For every asshole who hasn't gotten over his depressed teenage years and ignores all the dance in Joy Division, you have the innumerable post-punk bands that traded in joy, or at least anger - Blondie, the Talking Heads, the Raincoats, Kid Creole, etc. For every band that can only hear the depression and romantic complaint in Elvis Costello and the Smiths, there's a whole pile of songs attesting to their rapture and irreverence. There's no particular requirement of genre fidelity to love these styles and sing sad songs. (Indeed, one of my great disappointments at dance-punk is its undifferentiated mood of Blah, which The Rapture at its best wholly overcomes.)
It seems particularly weird when you consider the bands that are supposedly at the root of all the emo-ness in the air right now: Rites of Spring and Weezer. But RoS, like most of the "old-school emo" brethren, were an ecstatic experience, full of unrestrained, passionate emotion; this didn't mean they were good, but it's far more reminiscent of that desperate despair I was talking about earlier. And sure, Weezer has some sad-ish stuff, but so much of it is so damn happy, and even the sad songs are clear, crisp and wonderful. "El Scorcho" is seemingly the apotheosis of the modern-emo inspiration, lyrically, but it's a giddy, screamy mix of confession and grinning guitar, with far more in common with RoS than Dashboard Confessional, and even more in common with Cheap Trick.

Hardcore, Grunge and Anger
I think the key to understanding why we're in this state comes partially in recognizing that a lot of the emo urge right now represents a simple repressed pop urge in the youth, and so mod-emo is an ideologically correct alternative that's really just mopey variations on what's come before in pop. But we can also come closer to an understanding by adding a few more musical requirements to this particular canon.
For one thing, there's the simple fact that hardcore, originally the enemy of emo, gradually enveloped its former nemesis in the hardcore aesthetic of contained aggression. Emo kids today get derided as pussies even by already pretty pussified indie kids, but Chris Carrabba isn't any more a threat to masculinity than the Cure or the Smiths, unlike emocore. Emocore wasn't a gesture of tragic romanticism like modern emo, but clutchingly embraced awkwardness and loudness simultaneously, and that loss of self would be way valuable to a lot of today's music audience and makers.
Also, no matter how they want to portray it, no emo kid got their entire musical education from Dischord Records; there were other major elements in their musical educations. One has already been tagged as an influence of rap-metal stuff, but I think that given the confluence here between modern interpretations of genres, we need to add it to the inspiration of the indieground: grunge. Grunge was, in its generic form, a celebration of heroiny moping, and that legitimization of self-indulgent self-pity (along with, again, a healthy dose of misinterpretation - if all you can hear in Nirvana is the self-pity, you're missing a lot of pop, a lot of giddiness) is certainly a key influence of the attitude you hear underlying a lot of the music being put out there right now "by the people."

Master of the Puppets?
I think along with Weezer and RoS, you have to add Radiohead as a key specific-band influence on today's sound. The band's most obvious influence has been on the Brits, who do soaring melodrama well anyway, but I think either Radiohead's attitude or the attitude that leads to Radiohead moving a hell of a lot of units is what's leading so much of this. Radiohead does a lot of things well, and so you can pick and choose, but as much as I see it as fundamentally happy and hopeful, let's be honest, it sure doesn't come off that way at first. Radiohead takes these semi-ambiguous (sometimes melodic and pretty, sometimes dour, sometimes discordant) backings and puts a grim top-level on it, usually in the form of the vocals.
But again, this is largely a misinterpretation: Radiohead can get away with it because the grimness is translated through Thom Yorke's voice, which can throw out a whole lot of beauty and hope and transcendence with even the most gray melody and lyrics. Very few people have his voice, but a lot of people are still trying to reproduce the Radiohead effect (though not the Radiohead sound, please note) with a different set of tools and coming out with sort of a bad pastiche of the way they make self-conscious dimwits feel.
But more so than any specific band or genre, I think the root cause of all this is a particular aesthetic assumption and a particular practicality.
The assumption is that sadness is more noble than happiness, and more real than anger; something sad is just, to many people's minds, more valid, more artistic, more worthy of attention. I think this is true for a good 75 percent of the audience for music, and it's truly unfortunate for the forward progress of the art form. I understand that it's sort of cyclical and that the attitude is in part a reaction to the smiling, plastic attitude that permeated the music of the late '90s (a time period from which, unsurprisingly, dour bands like the American Music Club and Red House Painters are now being critically extracted), but I still don't like it, and I still think it's gone on too far. I think people could really do interesting things with these influences, and I think people have, but by and large it's just not happening on a large scale.
The practical reality, of course, is that sad is easier to do than happy. We're still slackers at heart.
So yes, it's not that I don't like sad music, because I do, very much so - Dirty Three, Leonard Cohen and Cordero number among my favorite artists. But the "add-sadness" formula a lot of people seem to be applying to their music these days, I do not like so much.
And despite my restraint, enraged-placard-making-wise, I am getting pretty damn sick of indie rock, which seems to be one of two major loci (along with mod-emo) of the sadness-as-authenticity thing. (And yes, I recognize that getting sick of indie rock is a big part of being an indie kid, although this clearly crosses genre borders; I think it's legitimate, plus this feels like a real breaking point right about now, especially if I have to hear too many more goddamn unsigned bands.) It's this, plus the weird aesthetic morality about recording and playing live and anti-catchiness and community-over-quality and all that shit that make me want to sign to Columbia and call up Tom Lord-Alge and Bob Rock and Trevor Horn and the Matrix and Linda Perry and make a rap-rock-teen-pop album containing nothing but songs about various consumer brands. I will call it Pop Fucking Music and it will sell a million copies and you will all be sorry, suckers.

Mike Barthel