Best Coast

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Grizzly Bear are pretty forgotten for sure

pretty sure grizzly bear broke up as well, though quietly

I? not I! He! He! HIM! (akm), Friday, 15 December 2023 20:49 (ten months ago) link

Dan and Chris Bear from that band scored Past Lives this year and we’re all hoping they get a deserved Oscar nod for it (personally rooting for Mica to win it, tho)

i do, what’s wrong with that? so? what now? (flamboyant goon tie included), Friday, 15 December 2023 21:46 (ten months ago) link

grizzly bear may have broken up or whatever, but they are not forgotten.

it's been said many times before, but whatever bands were on some level "cool" ~10 years ago are almost always seen as lame/boring/uncool in current times. that's where grizzly bear is imo

intheblanks, Friday, 15 December 2023 22:04 (ten months ago) link

Tune-yards!

Maybe the funny thing about the memory-holing of peak indie/gapdy is that there was a disconnect between the critical discourse and popular music - post poptimist eoy lists may age better wrt reflecting actually popular music (although there's a whole thread for post-poptimist canon building)

corrs unplugged, Saturday, 16 December 2023 01:20 (ten months ago) link

These bands are from more like 15 years ago. The year of gapdy was 2009.

There are definitely musicians from that era that I have not lost interest in, but I didn't think anyone considered the MP3 blog bands of the late 00s were viable long term or even medium term at the time. My recollection was that most people would hear a catchy and derivative jingle, look for the band and .rar on Google, download a folder with 12 identical songs, put it on a playlist called 'driving around with Barbara' and forget about it within a month. It's funny that it was an alternative to the mainstream pop of the time because it's whole mode of consumption was so relentlessly about disposability. If this music had any capital in the hipster wars era it was hearing and disposing of a song/band before it your friend with a veterinary surgery haircut decided they were her new favourite band or subsequently you heard it at American apparel.

This is not even a dismissal of the motivations of those actually making the music, who were likely no more or less sincere than any other hype cycle of pop bands. I'm sure plenty of people believed in what they were doing but the vehicles that propelled this stuff did so much to encourage instant amnesia.

I also feel like so many bands had really similar names.

Maybe it's the same or worse now. I imagine that canny big budget stars have just lifted some of the viral marketing ideas from bands/musicians of that era to diversify their portfolio. Taylor swift and Beyonce seem like examples of this in some ways. Billie eilish.

plax (ico), Saturday, 16 December 2023 07:57 (ten months ago) link

the most curious thing about this whole conversation is that the best of the Best Coast albums is California Nights which came out in 2015 and therefore missed "peak indie"

boxedjoy, Saturday, 16 December 2023 12:12 (ten months ago) link

I don’t personally identify with that post at all, plax!

Ugh the last thing I wanna do this lovely morning is post about Pitchfork but from 2007-2012 the indie music scene was entirely defined by that website’s aesthetic and the musical values it espoused

It’s always been weird to me that “GAPDY” is this thing. Who made that up? Why are Phoenix and YYYs in there? Phoenix are French pop who took off in like what, 2004? and we’re Coppola famous? YYYs were even earlier? They were a Vice Magazine band. Why are they included in this acronym and why not Vampire Weekend instead? Makes no sense to me

i do, what’s wrong with that? so? what now? (flamboyant goon tie included), Saturday, 16 December 2023 15:07 (ten months ago) link

Haha “we’re Coppola famous” we certainly are

i do, what’s wrong with that? so? what now? (flamboyant goon tie included), Saturday, 16 December 2023 15:08 (ten months ago) link

The origin of "GAPDY" is that albums by those five bands dominated year-end lists in 2009. I think Whiney coined it?

____

How many lists are gonna be fuckin AnCo, Grizzly Bear, Dirty Pro and Phoenix in different orders?

― my adrian langs a ton (Whiney G. Weingarten), Thursday, December 10, 2009 7:35 AM (fourteen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

...

i do have to say that grizzly/AnCo/phoenix/dirty pro/yeahyeahyeahs (GAPDY) are all perfectly fine albums, but to call them the BEST ALBUMS OF THE YEAR really just means that you're not listening to enough records.

― my adrian langs a ton (Whiney G. Weingarten), Thursday, December 10, 2009 2:06 PM (fourteen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

jaymc, Saturday, 16 December 2023 15:18 (ten months ago) link

The Pazz & Jop top 6 for 2009 was those albums plus Neko Case at #3.

jaymc, Saturday, 16 December 2023 15:20 (ten months ago) link

As for tUnE-yArDs I’ve always had the same opinion of that band: the first album bIrD-bRaInS is amazing and it played at every good party in Canada the year before she got famous. It’s a great album. They do amazing film scores now. Also listen to Ruth Garbus.

i do, what’s wrong with that? so? what now? (flamboyant goon tie included), Saturday, 16 December 2023 15:21 (ten months ago) link

@ jaymc omg wow!!!

For whatever reason I was sitting here thinking “did Whiney have something to do with it?”

i do, what’s wrong with that? so? what now? (flamboyant goon tie included), Saturday, 16 December 2023 15:22 (ten months ago) link

Ha. Here's Rob Harvilla in 2010:

Your friend and mine Chr1st0ph3r R. W31ng4rt3n last year around now spearheaded this thing called GAPDY, wherein he chastised critics for lavishing praise on the same five, indie-centric 2009 albums: Grizzly Bear, Animal Collective, Phoenix, Dirty Projectors, Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Is there any doubt VW shows up on this year’s tortured anagram, alongside Arcade Fire, the National, LCD, Sleigh Bells, etc.? (Can I sneak Dream or Deerhunter into that list so we can make VNDAL?)
(FWIW, Vampire Weekend, Arcade Fire, The National, LCD Soundsystem, and Sleigh Bells did all make the P&J top 10, but #1 was My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, which made it difficult to make the case for an indie takeover again.)

jaymc, Saturday, 16 December 2023 15:30 (ten months ago) link

since i brougth GAPDY into this discussion, i meant to place it in contrast with the 2010-2012 stuff like best coast. the gapdy bands (and the ones listed in jaymc's post right above mine, and some others) and basically indie/indie-adajcent artist who first got big from 2001-2007 were the actual "legacy acts" of "peak indie".

The indie/indie-adjacent stuff that broke out in 2010 and after--stuff like best coast--didn't have nearly the same cultural footprint. The "moment," whatever it was, was basically done, even if money was still flowing for a few years.

intheblanks, Saturday, 16 December 2023 15:41 (ten months ago) link

So it’s a critic thing, and not a notion that ppl actually listened to that cluster of bands as, like, a “taste profile”? I don’t know that Dirty Projectors ever had much of a “cultural footprint”…

This field is required (morrisp), Saturday, 16 December 2023 15:43 (ten months ago) link

which is not to necessarily discount anything cosentino said. i do think that whoever said upthread that "trendchasing" is endemic in the type of indie folks who read p4k was otm

intheblanks, Saturday, 16 December 2023 15:44 (ten months ago) link

the dirty projectors guy wrote songs for solange on a #1 album and worked on that kanye song, they were definitely the least commercially successful of those bands but there is some cultural footprint there

intheblanks, Saturday, 16 December 2023 15:46 (ten months ago) link

My sense is that Peak Indie was the result of the 2000s boom in blogging and file-sharing, yes, but also a wider media ecosystem that increasingly took cues from what was happening online. Crucially, it was a time when there was a rise in new digital media outlets, and a desire on the part of traditional media to keep up. But it was also a time before poptimism had fully taken root in music criticism, before diversity became a more prominent consideration in decisions about media coverage, and before online pageviews warped media incentives. (These things are all intertwined.) So in the late 2000s you had a lot of white indie fans in the position of being tastemakers, which gave a lot of cultural visibility to the big indie acts of the era.

jaymc, Saturday, 16 December 2023 15:52 (ten months ago) link

Didn’t The xx also dominate 2009 EOY lists(?) Guess I don’t remember. I’m sure Whiney knew what he was doing with his zinger, but I’ve also never rarely understood with those bands had to do with each other… now I get the concept anyway.

This field is required (morrisp), Saturday, 16 December 2023 15:53 (ten months ago) link

*really understood (I “rarely” understand anything!)

This field is required (morrisp), Saturday, 16 December 2023 15:54 (ten months ago) link

The xx was #7 on the 2009 P&J (right behind Grizzly Bear). So yeah, we probably could've made it GAPDYX.

jaymc, Saturday, 16 December 2023 15:58 (ten months ago) link

https://web.archive.org/web/20090228101636/http://hypem.com//

plax (ico), Saturday, 16 December 2023 16:01 (ten months ago) link

I argued as early as 2007 iirc that the dominant “problem” with Pitchfork was the decimal ranking system, applied across genres. I intuited that it would be “bad for music” over time. That it would create a musical landscape that would privilege “good recordings” over “interesting creations”. That it would celebrate music that was pacifying rather than music that was revolutionizing. That it would naturally skew white and male and straight and upper-middle class. That Pitchfork’s influence had grown to such a point that prospective collaborators (publicists, for example) would just bluntly ask “what’s your Pitchfork score on your latest release?” when assessing if they should work with an emerging artist.

I furthermore said that bands were going to change the way they made music. They would start making creative decisions that would favour Pitchfork’s metric. I’d seen friends tell me about their next record and I’d feel Pitchfork’s influence in them. I tracked these decisions within myself and my own creation. I mean… Deerhunter’s arc seems to me to be the best example of this, I guess

i do, what’s wrong with that? so? what now? (flamboyant goon tie included), Saturday, 16 December 2023 16:06 (ten months ago) link

I know I already invoked Nabisco in this thread, but this 2009 piece by him is an interesting look at the cultural status of indie at that time and how it got to that point:
https://pitchfork.com/features/article/7704-the-decade-in-indie/

jaymc, Saturday, 16 December 2023 16:13 (ten months ago) link

Deerhunter is interesting in this context because Cox seems to have basically stopped making music, after being so active for years… (unless he’s doing stuff I haven’t heard about)

This field is required (morrisp), Saturday, 16 December 2023 16:14 (ten months ago) link

was abt to say he did that record with cate le bon but... that was apparently in 2019

corrs unplugged, Saturday, 16 December 2023 16:24 (ten months ago) link

looks like he played a solo show for the first time in years a few months ago but deerhunter seem to have quietly broken up. not a band i ever quite understood the hype around

ufo, Saturday, 16 December 2023 16:25 (ten months ago) link

Fading Frontier is all time for me

have seen them live a few times, too noisey for me

there was a time when it seemed like my local venue booked every bnm artist they could (and that was a lot) and... I guess I went to all the shows

p4k was such a monolith

corrs unplugged, Saturday, 16 December 2023 16:26 (ten months ago) link

the most important reason GAPDY took off is because it's fun to say

every one of the GAPDY bands are leagues better than Best Coast too

someone mentioned the 10 year cycle of being considered kind of lame about 10 years after the peak which is true (with a nostalgia boost at 20 years) but the one problem they will have, as compared to I don't know disco or hair metal or grunge or pop punk or nu metal, these bands weren't really that popular in real world terms compared to and of those genres, it was more than they dominated the conversations about music in a certain media/Internet/social media niche

Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Saturday, 16 December 2023 17:12 (ten months ago) link

sorry for the typos

Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Saturday, 16 December 2023 17:12 (ten months ago) link

Cryptograms + Fluorescent Grey is a perfect double vinyl album imo, one of the best of this century

I liked Microcastle (especially) and everything else, sure; the dissonance that I felt around their peak-popularity (Halcyon Digest, great title in retrospect) was that it felt as if some decisions were made to make the music more blog-friendly, and... blogs were friendlier.

i do, what’s wrong with that? so? what now? (flamboyant goon tie included), Saturday, 16 December 2023 17:17 (ten months ago) link

I don't exactly understand what nabisco's thesis is in that P4k piece but it is always such a pleasure to read his writing, thanks for the link jaymc

i do, what’s wrong with that? so? what now? (flamboyant goon tie included), Saturday, 16 December 2023 17:21 (ten months ago) link

the one problem they will have, as compared to I don't know disco or hair metal or grunge or pop punk or nu metal, these bands weren't really that popular in real world terms compared to and of those genres, it was more than they dominated the conversations about music in a certain media/Internet/social media niche

I think this is exactly right

Paul Ponzi, Saturday, 16 December 2023 18:00 (ten months ago) link

it really seems like much of that music was specifically based around a scene that was very much of the moment, perhaps even more about the social aspect than other music scenes were. this doesn't NOT describe the scenes swirling around disco, hair metal, etc, but i think a lot of the PFM indie of the time just also doesn't stand up to scrutiny thru the nostalgia lens, a lot of it disappeared into vapor because it was pushed to prominence by that particular niche, and you really had to be there. i didn't have to be there for zeppelin or sabbath or abba, but maybe for the GAPDY groups the subsequent generations aren't going to understand it at all? idk i also know that doesn't strictly describe GAPDY, it happens to all scenes. UMS otm obv.

omar little, Saturday, 16 December 2023 18:55 (ten months ago) link

That is probably true to some extent but to another (larger) extent the opposite is true, in that so much of this was consumed by many through platforms that did nothing to build/maintain scenes or communities. So much of the audience was instantly accessed through content aggregators, mp3 blogs, BNM. A good chunk of the initial enthusiasm for band A could come from an audience with little additional buy in. Next week there would be something else coming out of the hose. Coming in the gap between the end of CDs and the return of vinyl it also meant that even if you played something a lot one week it was so easy to forget it even existed a week later. When I visit my parents house I still find all the CDs i bought when I was a teenager but I'm sure a good chunk of stuff I listened to in my 20s has been totally deleted from my memory when I lost an iPod shuffle in Spain in 2011.

plax (ico), Saturday, 16 December 2023 19:31 (ten months ago) link

i think that goes hand in hand a bit with the era being ephemeral, something that existed as an in-person scene but which was didn't exist as widely in terms of physical media (not a minor thing; that does lend itself to music not being memory-holed.) so it winds up feeling so much further back in time, maybe.

all my MP3s from that era i downloaded and burned onto a bunch of MP3 CDRs and then lost the whole damn thing. def had some GAPDY-era stuff on there. i think in fact it was primarily all that (plus a decent chunk of revived lost albums posted on MP3 blogspots that have now been properly reissued.)

omar little, Saturday, 16 December 2023 19:43 (ten months ago) link

Something that might not be relevant but still might be interesting: I observed and it’s been confirmed by many others that across the board, sales of physical media at shows have spiked immensely over the past decade. A colleague of mine said he thinks it’s because “people are going to record stores less, seeing a merch table is an exciting thing”

i do, what’s wrong with that? so? what now? (flamboyant goon tie included), Saturday, 16 December 2023 19:51 (ten months ago) link

xp It was also right before Spotify destabilized the role of indie music as status symbol for a certain type of educated consumer who knew which blogs to follow. I find it harder to look back on that stuff and see something with an enduring cultural significance when it feels like it was so quickly swallowed up.

jaymc, Saturday, 16 December 2023 20:20 (ten months ago) link

the most important reason GAPDY took off is because it's fun to say

This is why I got no support for my acronym YPDGA

Halfway there but for you, Saturday, 16 December 2023 22:53 (ten months ago) link


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