Best Coast

@ jaymc omg wow!!!

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

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?)

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.

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”…

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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 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/

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)

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

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

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

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

sorry for the typos

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 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

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

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.

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.

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.)

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”

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.

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