I have a hunch that web 2.0-style social media engagement metrics are a major culprit. Since the gatekeeping & curation aspect of music journalism was pretty much killed by having all the music all the time online, your best bet for drawing in clicks to keep your job has been issuing spicy takes that make the music nerds bicker *and* draw in normies who like having their tastes validated.
Perhaps this is a hot take here, but MBDTF deserved that 10. I still listen to it regularly.
That being said, Pitchfork ratings have always been weird and inconsistent, and I think whatever marginal impact music journalists had previously has been greatly reduced. So now, instead of influencing the discourse on music, they cater to the social media crowd and try to stay relevant/eke out a living/try not to get too many death threats from the stans.
I think that is an extremely room temperature take. MBDTF was, for instance, number 1 on the Pitchfork 2010s Reader Poll, and people had turned on Kanye by 2019, so that just shows how undeniable the album really is
Funny. I think of FutureSex/LoveSounds as the turning point. Before that Pitchfork didn’t really review mainstream albums except to dunk on them. This seemed like a “hey guys, pop music can be good” moment. And I agreed for that album. But then it quickly became regular to review every pop album and I think something was lost.
I don't think indie music listeners started liking Beyonce. I think Beyonce fans started liking indie music. Indie just became so *good* in the late 00's that it attracted everyone. Animal Collective, Arcade Fire, Grizzly Bear, LCD Soundsystem, Vampire Collective. They put out records that the mainstream couldn't ignore anymore.
So the people who discovered Animal Collective with MPP are of course also Beyonce fans a few years later. The person who loves STGSTV? Probably not so much.
You can't be elite about things everyone now likes.
I think you're right about the direction of the shift from indie fans to indie + pop fans, but in terms of the other way around, I think it's got to be the influence of how music distribution changed in the late 00's. All those bands are great, but indie music was absolutely killer in the 90s, too. When I think about where I first heard Arcade Fire, LCD Soundsystem, etc., it was in the late 00s and early 10s through online playlists (I miss 8tracks dot com every day), and links on blog posts (where you could put a little "Listening to" tag on all your posts). Before that, I really only heard about new music when my friends brought their CDs around while we were hanging out, or on the radio.
I also wonder if there's just... less clannishness, less culture, around liking certain music genres. Not that metalheads and...... well, actually, I was trying to find a couple things for a list of current musical subcultures that are *like* metalheads and I came up completely dry, which maybe proves the point. I was briefly a ska kid in high school; I can't think of anything remotely like ska kids anymore, or emo kids, or goths--groups of adolescents who would go to the local venue for an all-day festival of just ska or punk or metal, only so much caring who the bands were so long as it was the *kind* of music we liked and might give us the clout of saying we saw X and Z live among those who didn't get to go.
My younger sister, Zoomer to the core, has The Antlers, Mitski, Beyonce, and about six drag queens in her most-listened list. She'd just as readily go see Katy Perry live as Phoebe Bridgers. The idea of being mainly into just one genre is so 2005, I guess.
Rebellion (Lies) is now played on my city's classic rock radio station. It's insane how much technology spread music. Indie albums that arrived even a few years earlier will never get that treatment.
I think the ascendence of poptimism happened to overlap with the music industry falling apart, music criticism dying as a field, rock music stagnating as a genre and 'the album' form losing most of its value in the age of Spotify playlists. It looks poptimism won the war but really, everyone's dead. What's the "best album" of 2021? What score did Pitchfork give Kanye? Who cares? Audiences have fallen into their niches. The poptimists got poptimisted, nobody cares about elite opinion whether it sides with the masses or doesn't.
"Audiences have fallen into their niches" is definitely true for me, though it dates basically from the end of the '90s. I've always liked a bluegrassy/southern rock-ish musical style and I've never paid any attention to what was "popular." So I guess I fit right in with the modern times?
Tiny Cities is a curiosity that totally saps the source material of verve. I love the effort—clearly the work of a fan—but I dislike almost every track. It's like an experiment in amputating all the aesthetic qualities I love.
It's like… I think they are difficult songs to cover because covers tend toward euphonious arrangements and a lot of what makes MM interesting are the dissonant elements: shouting, jamming on long after the last verse, eerie harmonics that just kind hang there.
"Wild Pack of Family Dogs" is one of those songs that I still, twenty some years later, catch myself singing to myself at random times. It is beautiful, but it's so sad, isn't it? It seems to me there are very few songs that combine absurdity and poignancy to such a high degree. Thanks for writing this!
I loved The Moon & Antarctica so much in high school I used my seasonal-job-at-Kohl's money to buy it on vinyl and I didn't have a player of my own. Had my mind blown by the origin of the title ("the two places man has visited but hasn't colonized"). shout out to Paper Thin Walls which is instant serotonin and definitely made it onto multiple mixtapes for girls
Totally agree on We Were Dead. doubly disappointing it was made with such a legend and my favorite guitarist to emulate back then too!
Freshman year dorms, lunch hall, for some reason people needed to write down their favorite band, and some hip looking gal wrote, "Modest Mouse". I napstered their catalog and felt like I discovered gold. Purchased their later stuff as it came out. Forgot about them. Thanks for this, was fun to revisit.
Same. Same. For me it was my super hip girlfriend freshman year put it on a mixed tape. I saw them in concert in like 2004 and it was very awesome. I had not thought about MM in years and am loving the listen this Friday afternoon. Thanks for this Freddie
Love the focus on MM, Freddie. I'd like to see you do this with other bands/groups if you feel so inclined. I think you have a gift for it. You might also consider a followup that traces the influence MM have had on other bands/artists. For instance, as I was reading, I thought of the appreciative Modest Mouse reference in Vampire Weekend's 'Step', -- "I'm stronger now, I'm ready for the House / Such a Modest Mouse" -- off their superb 2013 album "Modern Vampires of the City." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mDxcDjg9P4
... months from now when you, the intrepid listener, have exhausted "This Is A Long Drive For Someone With Nothing To Think About" and "Lonesome Crowded West" but somehow you still need more of *that* Modest Mouse?
Pick up "Building Nothing Out Of Something". It's a greatest hits collection of the pre-"The Moon And Antarctica" Modest Mouse except it's composed only of tracks that didn't make it onto those records.
If I ever hear Never Ending Math Equation live at a show I think I will die. In a positive way.
I don’t care for most of that record but Little Motel is a really lovely tune. I also have a soft spot for dashboard; it’s one of those songs with just enough angst and drive that I can’t help but dance and smile when I hear it, and before long it’ll have me singing right along.
I do music stuff for a paycheck I love your music posts! It’s a joy to read such heartfelt reflections on my chosen craft; I always dig reading reviews/recommendations from people who aren’t musicians themselves but are good writers and attentive listeners
Wait there was backlash to Float On? I still love that song. My memory of 2004 was that the MM-loving hipsters (like myself) loved it immediately and talked about it online when they started playing it live, and then were basically proud of its ascendance and crossover appeal. But maybe I'm projecting -- after years of trying to get my normie friends to play, like, Broken Social Scene at high school parties they finally loved a song I loved.
But I stopped going to music sites not long after so maybe I missed people turning on it
The 3 (4 including Building Nothing Out of Something) albums released between 97-04 are one of the most unique and wide-ranging peaks of any rock band's career. The new stuff just isn't as good, but there are gems to be found (Back to the Middle).
I'd love to read more about what you think "selling out" and "indie" mean in 2022.
I've lost almost all the enthusiasm I had for this kind of music in my teens and early twenties. I can't really separate the supposed classics from today's empty and cynical indie music - not entirely. Kim Gordon and Stephen Malkmus were just as droll, contemptuous, and smug as Phoebe Bridgers is today. But I'm not entirely over it. I still think there might be something worth saving.
I have a hunch that web 2.0-style social media engagement metrics are a major culprit. Since the gatekeeping & curation aspect of music journalism was pretty much killed by having all the music all the time online, your best bet for drawing in clicks to keep your job has been issuing spicy takes that make the music nerds bicker *and* draw in normies who like having their tastes validated.
Perhaps this is a hot take here, but MBDTF deserved that 10. I still listen to it regularly.
That being said, Pitchfork ratings have always been weird and inconsistent, and I think whatever marginal impact music journalists had previously has been greatly reduced. So now, instead of influencing the discourse on music, they cater to the social media crowd and try to stay relevant/eke out a living/try not to get too many death threats from the stans.
I think that is an extremely room temperature take. MBDTF was, for instance, number 1 on the Pitchfork 2010s Reader Poll, and people had turned on Kanye by 2019, so that just shows how undeniable the album really is
Oh I agree, I just wasn’t sure how much the FdB readership overlaps with Pitchfork readers and/or Kanye fans.
Funny. I think of FutureSex/LoveSounds as the turning point. Before that Pitchfork didn’t really review mainstream albums except to dunk on them. This seemed like a “hey guys, pop music can be good” moment. And I agreed for that album. But then it quickly became regular to review every pop album and I think something was lost.
Agreed, in my memory that album was the major turning point.
I don't think indie music listeners started liking Beyonce. I think Beyonce fans started liking indie music. Indie just became so *good* in the late 00's that it attracted everyone. Animal Collective, Arcade Fire, Grizzly Bear, LCD Soundsystem, Vampire Collective. They put out records that the mainstream couldn't ignore anymore.
So the people who discovered Animal Collective with MPP are of course also Beyonce fans a few years later. The person who loves STGSTV? Probably not so much.
You can't be elite about things everyone now likes.
I think you're right about the direction of the shift from indie fans to indie + pop fans, but in terms of the other way around, I think it's got to be the influence of how music distribution changed in the late 00's. All those bands are great, but indie music was absolutely killer in the 90s, too. When I think about where I first heard Arcade Fire, LCD Soundsystem, etc., it was in the late 00s and early 10s through online playlists (I miss 8tracks dot com every day), and links on blog posts (where you could put a little "Listening to" tag on all your posts). Before that, I really only heard about new music when my friends brought their CDs around while we were hanging out, or on the radio.
I also wonder if there's just... less clannishness, less culture, around liking certain music genres. Not that metalheads and...... well, actually, I was trying to find a couple things for a list of current musical subcultures that are *like* metalheads and I came up completely dry, which maybe proves the point. I was briefly a ska kid in high school; I can't think of anything remotely like ska kids anymore, or emo kids, or goths--groups of adolescents who would go to the local venue for an all-day festival of just ska or punk or metal, only so much caring who the bands were so long as it was the *kind* of music we liked and might give us the clout of saying we saw X and Z live among those who didn't get to go.
My younger sister, Zoomer to the core, has The Antlers, Mitski, Beyonce, and about six drag queens in her most-listened list. She'd just as readily go see Katy Perry live as Phoebe Bridgers. The idea of being mainly into just one genre is so 2005, I guess.
Rebellion (Lies) is now played on my city's classic rock radio station. It's insane how much technology spread music. Indie albums that arrived even a few years earlier will never get that treatment.
Phoebe Bridgers is basically Taylor Swift with bleached hair and a skeleton onesie - and I don't think she's even wearing the onesie anymore.
Also, these days, Taylor Swift is basically Phoebe Bridgers. She wrote her last two albums with the guy from the National and Bon Iver.
What I'm trying to say is, these aren't separate cultural worlds anymore. They're the same world.
I'm embarrassed to admit that I think about this quite a lot.
I think the ascendence of poptimism happened to overlap with the music industry falling apart, music criticism dying as a field, rock music stagnating as a genre and 'the album' form losing most of its value in the age of Spotify playlists. It looks poptimism won the war but really, everyone's dead. What's the "best album" of 2021? What score did Pitchfork give Kanye? Who cares? Audiences have fallen into their niches. The poptimists got poptimisted, nobody cares about elite opinion whether it sides with the masses or doesn't.
Wow! Freddie, comment of the week nomination ^
Haha, I actually already had a pretty similar comment that got comment of the week at some point.
"Audiences have fallen into their niches" is definitely true for me, though it dates basically from the end of the '90s. I've always liked a bluegrassy/southern rock-ish musical style and I've never paid any attention to what was "popular." So I guess I fit right in with the modern times?
Somehow I want to hear everything about this trip through the Alaskan wilderness.
Tiny Cities is a curiosity that totally saps the source material of verve. I love the effort—clearly the work of a fan—but I dislike almost every track. It's like an experiment in amputating all the aesthetic qualities I love.
It's like… I think they are difficult songs to cover because covers tend toward euphonious arrangements and a lot of what makes MM interesting are the dissonant elements: shouting, jamming on long after the last verse, eerie harmonics that just kind hang there.
Fair enough. I probably just don't "get" SKM :)
I'm with you Scott. I just can't get into Mark Kozelek. The main photo on his wikipedia page says it all.
Lonesome crowded west is my vinyl club’s record of the month. Excited to listen for the first time
Excited for you! Curious what you think!
"Wild Pack of Family Dogs" is one of those songs that I still, twenty some years later, catch myself singing to myself at random times. It is beautiful, but it's so sad, isn't it? It seems to me there are very few songs that combine absurdity and poignancy to such a high degree. Thanks for writing this!
I loved The Moon & Antarctica so much in high school I used my seasonal-job-at-Kohl's money to buy it on vinyl and I didn't have a player of my own. Had my mind blown by the origin of the title ("the two places man has visited but hasn't colonized"). shout out to Paper Thin Walls which is instant serotonin and definitely made it onto multiple mixtapes for girls
Totally agree on We Were Dead. doubly disappointing it was made with such a legend and my favorite guitarist to emulate back then too!
Modest Mouse has been on my list of bands to give a thorough listen to (I loved both Good News and The Moon and Antarctica), so thanks for this!
Freshman year dorms, lunch hall, for some reason people needed to write down their favorite band, and some hip looking gal wrote, "Modest Mouse". I napstered their catalog and felt like I discovered gold. Purchased their later stuff as it came out. Forgot about them. Thanks for this, was fun to revisit.
Same. Same. For me it was my super hip girlfriend freshman year put it on a mixed tape. I saw them in concert in like 2004 and it was very awesome. I had not thought about MM in years and am loving the listen this Friday afternoon. Thanks for this Freddie
Love the focus on MM, Freddie. I'd like to see you do this with other bands/groups if you feel so inclined. I think you have a gift for it. You might also consider a followup that traces the influence MM have had on other bands/artists. For instance, as I was reading, I thought of the appreciative Modest Mouse reference in Vampire Weekend's 'Step', -- "I'm stronger now, I'm ready for the House / Such a Modest Mouse" -- off their superb 2013 album "Modern Vampires of the City." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mDxcDjg9P4
Horn Intro makes a great message alert tone for your phone.
... months from now when you, the intrepid listener, have exhausted "This Is A Long Drive For Someone With Nothing To Think About" and "Lonesome Crowded West" but somehow you still need more of *that* Modest Mouse?
Pick up "Building Nothing Out Of Something". It's a greatest hits collection of the pre-"The Moon And Antarctica" Modest Mouse except it's composed only of tracks that didn't make it onto those records.
If I ever hear Never Ending Math Equation live at a show I think I will die. In a positive way.
Agree! BNOOS isn’t a real album-album, but if it was it’s probably my second fav or even my fav!
Thirded! Building nothing out of something became the one that I ended up listening to the most, somehow
I don’t care for most of that record but Little Motel is a really lovely tune. I also have a soft spot for dashboard; it’s one of those songs with just enough angst and drive that I can’t help but dance and smile when I hear it, and before long it’ll have me singing right along.
I do music stuff for a paycheck I love your music posts! It’s a joy to read such heartfelt reflections on my chosen craft; I always dig reading reviews/recommendations from people who aren’t musicians themselves but are good writers and attentive listeners
Hell yeah
Just listened to Lonesome Crowded West for the first time in ages. Goddamn I feel great. Trailer Trash killed me.
Wait there was backlash to Float On? I still love that song. My memory of 2004 was that the MM-loving hipsters (like myself) loved it immediately and talked about it online when they started playing it live, and then were basically proud of its ascendance and crossover appeal. But maybe I'm projecting -- after years of trying to get my normie friends to play, like, Broken Social Scene at high school parties they finally loved a song I loved.
But I stopped going to music sites not long after so maybe I missed people turning on it
My favorite band.
This version of Ocean Breathes Salty is so good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNcmTgCLwk8
The 3 (4 including Building Nothing Out of Something) albums released between 97-04 are one of the most unique and wide-ranging peaks of any rock band's career. The new stuff just isn't as good, but there are gems to be found (Back to the Middle).
I'd love to read more about what you think "selling out" and "indie" mean in 2022.
I've lost almost all the enthusiasm I had for this kind of music in my teens and early twenties. I can't really separate the supposed classics from today's empty and cynical indie music - not entirely. Kim Gordon and Stephen Malkmus were just as droll, contemptuous, and smug as Phoebe Bridgers is today. But I'm not entirely over it. I still think there might be something worth saving.