Of Note 018: An Interview with Chris DeVille, author of Such Great Heights
Howdy folks!
I’ve got an Of Note first for you this month: Chris DeVille, author Such Great Heights: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion, sat down with me for an interview to talk about his great survey of how “indie” became a cultural force.
The book is definitely a recommended read if you’re nearing 40 as you’ll undoubtedly recognize a lot on your own memory lane, but it’s useful for anyone who’s curious in tracing how “indie” became something marketable during the first two decades of the new millennium. While there have been plenty of discussions about this, Such Great Heights fills a need in the literature of tracing it step by step.
I’m very grateful to Chris for taking time out of his busy book promo tour to speak with Of Note. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Don’t worry! I’ve still got some new writing for you to check out, too. Stick around until the end to see Chris’s picks for recent music writing worth reading.
Of Note: Your book builds on deep dives into scenes like Our Band Could Be Your Life and Meet Me In The Bathroom. The subjects of those books are tied together by time and place and/or a shared set of values and I imagine that gave the authors some clarity in how they approached writing. The phenomena covered in Such Great Heights is bound by neither. It spans the globe and many different styles of “indie” and kinds of people. What were some of the challenges of trying to capture something with such breadth? How did you start to organize it?
Chris DeVille: Well, I was working with a subtitle at the time which was “How Indie Rock Went Pop.” When I was writing it, I meant that in multiple senses: how indie rock broke through to a mainstream audience, but also how it morphed into a kind of pop music over the years and also influenced the actual pop stars. We ultimately didn't use that subtitle because my publisher thought “The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion” would be better.
[The original subtitle] was very helpful for me in terms of figuring out what I wanted to cover because I was thinking about several different endpoints. It's kind of like Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King when there's so many endings. I thought about a few different potential endings and included several of them, the latest being Taylor Swift releasing Folklore and people calling it her indie album because she worked with Aaron Dessner from The National and Justin Vernon and pursued a coffeehouse indie style on it. Working backwards from that, how did we get to the point where an album by the biggest pop star in the world was the best-selling album of the year, won album of the year at the Grammys, and was a complete dominant force was also described as indie?
I was also thinking about the rise of the indie pop star. I get at that a lot in chapter 11. That was a big driving force in me wanting to write the book. It was a phenomenon that hadn't really been covered in a book form yet. It had mostly been documented in blog posts and on social media and message boards, in this sort of piecemeal, ephemeral way. The book talks about Hipster Runoff and other sites that aren’t even online anymore. You have to access them through the Wayback Machine. And they were chronicling a lot of artists like Lana Del Rey and Grimes. How did we get to the point where the indie zeitgeist is full of stars trying to morph their sound into more of a pop direction, getting away from the classic formulation of indie rock? Okay, so this is the endpoint, so let's go backwards and figure out what are the tributaries that lead to that.
Of Note: As soon as you said that subtitle, I thought, “That makes a lot of sense” and I can see how you built the book. Another way you organized this is through your own personal journey. Your personal experiences and observations to tie together a lot of the disparate threads. I recognize much of my personal experience in that and I imagine a lot of people our age will also share in that. What is it about indie fans and our taste that we all moved from the garage rock rebirth to baroque rock collectivism to bittersweet folk to twee to indie sleaze to poptimism together?
Chris DeVille: There was still more shared experience then than there is now. Things are just so splintered now. I think of myself – this is not a music example, but a TV one – as somebody who likes to keep up with prestige TV. I like to keep up with the shows that the critics are going crazy about that are gonna get nominated for awards and it's so spread out over so many different streaming networks. There's just so much choice. When you talk about something like The OC that's still not something that everybody shares so it's not a perfect unifying force, but, for a lot of people, their introductory experience with indie music was through that. That's sort of a big tent, one-size-fits-all experience of indie music and so there were some cultural phenomena like that.
Part of the power of the internet was that it did create more choice. It created more variety. The pathways for discovery were opening up all over the place, but there was still some degree of uniform gatekeeping happening. We can't underemphasize the power of Pitchfork. It was such a tastemaker. It was dictating what was hot and what was not with an iron fist, basically. Not to say that it was an evil force, I don't feel like that was the case. I hate the idea that Pitchfork is the main character in the book, but there's definitely been some people who have made that case, and I think that was part of what was making people's experiences similar.
Of Note: It’s that way because it’s true. When I worked in college radio, we’d come into the office and open Pitchfork immediately to see what they reviewed. Going back to your TV examples, we’d open AV Club and read recaps of every show we were watching, even sitcoms. So, at the time, the gatekeepers were still important. One of my takeaways from your book is that a key element in shifting “indie” from a short hand for a factual description of a business relationship or ethos to a stylistic, emotional descriptor was those gatekeepers losing power. Some of this, as you explain in the book, was due to the increased accessibility and exposure enabled by internet becoming more widely available in the home, services that enabled sharing like Napster, and the influence of popular TV shows bringing more people into the indie tent. There were just too many people to “gatekeep.” But that doesn’t seem to explain it all. What do you think finally broke the power of the gatekeepers?
Chris DeVille: I think the gatekeepers did lose power in the late-stages of indie being stretched to meaninglessness and I think they contributed to the concept of indie being altered. Even before they lost their power, indie just became a synonym for taste. Pitchfork, and the AV Club, and Stereogum, these sites started to shoehorn more and more different kinds of music into their coverage. I think about Bloghouse with Steve Aoki. He was putting out Bloc Party and he was throwing these dance parties where Interpol and Yeah Yeah Yeahs performed, and there was a significant overlap between the indie rock artists and the blog house music. Tastemakers who liked indie rock also happened to like Daft Punk.
I do feel like it became less a genre, and more of a listener block, or, like, a demographic. Then eventually, the thing that you're alluding to, is that it became a bunch of different listener blocks, and it was not necessarily just the block that was listening to the opinions of these tastemakers, but it was also people finding stuff through the Spotify algorithm, people finding stuff through influencers – YouTubers like Fantano.
It may be coincidental that the peak of the indie pop thing was at the same time that these factors were being introduced that dismantled the old indie star-making ecosystem, the factors that dismantled it being streaming and social media, mainly. People didn't need to go to MP3 blogs anymore because the music that they would find on MP3 blogs they could just find it on streaming instead. The conversation that they were having in the comments section of a blog, they were having it on Twitter instead.
Of Note: One of the goals of the book is trying to define this shifting term, “indie.” And you cite three helpful perspectives. On page 148, you include a quote from Elizabeth Segran about American Apparel “They made a hard-to-define bohemian lifestyle accessible to an entire generation of young people growing up in cookie-cutter suburbs.” I stopped when I read that. You dive further into that sentiment with Mark Grief’s explaining how the dominant class wants to align itself with the rebel and Nitsuh Abebe’s concept of “The Game” the bougie play to deny being bougie. It seems that once indie artists recognized that trend, we shifted from rockism to poptimism (you describe this around page 296). So when poptimism no longer allows the dominant class to align with the rebels, what’s next? Do you see another era/trend emerging now?
Chris DeVille: I do think that there was kind of a pivot away from the pop star worship. The last Taylor Swift album wasn't that great. Cowboy Carter wasn't as good as Renaissance. Maybe we're just going through a more fallow period for these major statement albums from pop artists. Pop is no longer operating on as high of a level, and so people have moved on from that to some extent.
The trajectory has been back towards bands, especially weirder or abrasive bands. It's not totally true: Wednesday is abrasive but MJ Lenderman, not so much. There's a whole other sort of classic rock thing happening. I think about big groups like Caroline, Black Country, New Road, Racing Mount Pleasant. We have this trend of these big collectives, like you had back in the Blog Rock days, sort of a reaction against everything focusing on solo artists.
I think about Geese as an example with Cameron Winter. I think part of the reason people were attracted to that was because his voice is so bizarre and it doesn't go down smooth. I think about Phoebe Bridgers' whole realm of things. It's sad and dark, but it goes down smooth still, too. There's a reason that she fit in so well on a Taylor Swift track, because it was relatively smooth. And that's not a value judgment on her – this isn't, like, some Phoebe Bridgers takedown – it's just we got so many Phoebe Bridgers sound-alikes. We kind of reached critical mass on that, too. So there were all these really accessible forms of indie, and I do think that I sense the types of bands that tend to be picking up a cult following right now are not necessarily abrasive, but they’re also not smooth.
Of Note: Let’s switch gears: I know you’re a sports fan and I’ve seen an increasing alignment between indie rock and sports the last decade - you can see this at Bill Simmons’ ventures, Grantland and The Ringer. But it also feels like an offshoot of poptimism with some artists and fans really embracing mainstream sports culture (just look at all the NBA jerseys at a music festival). It feels like this generation of sports writers are looking for their own Bruce Springsteen, who seemed to be the favorite of every older beat writer. If you were to write a bonus chapter on the connection between sports and indie, what do you think you’d write about?
Chris DeVille: I think that gets at one blind spot in the book – which is not sports, certainly, I didn't really touch on sports at all in the book – but country, in general, and alt country. I mentioned it in passing in the indie folk chapter, but there's a lot more to be said about country music and I feel like the sports writers have sort of settled on Jason Isbell as their new Springsteen. I think that I would probably start digging around in that general direction of sportswriter-core. I don't think that that's the only area of overlap, because if we're counting all the blog rap as a wing of the indie music universe then you get like Lil B versus Kevin Durant. Since media is a big through-line in the book, I think that Grantland would probably factor in as well. I loved that website.
Of Note: We’ll finish up with a fun one. As a sports fan, you probably know the game “Remember a guy?” where we can kind of just sit around and just name old players and be like, oh yeah, I like that guy. Your book sometimes feels like an indie rock version of that. You cover a lot of ground! But you had to leave some folks out. So here’s your chance, let’s remember some bands. Who were some of the harder artists to leave out?
Chris DeVille: Well, one that I remember distinctly leaving out was the band Black Kids. I had been writing the chapter about Pitchfork, MP3 blogs, and Poptimism. I was using Clap Your Hand Say Yeah as a cautionary tale of hype getting inflated too quickly, a band not being able to keep up with their own hype in terms of live performance. I wanted to also bring in the story of Black Kids, which is an even more accelerated version of that arc, but my editor felt like we'd made this point already. That's an important part of the whole peak pitchfork era.
I was also gonna say The Wrens. I'm not sure if I ever mentioned them in the book. They were important to me and definitely belong in any 2000s indie starter pack.
Of Note: Thank you so much for spending this time with me. To finish up: this newsletter is about music writing worth reading. What are some of your favorite articles or books you’ve read about music recently?
Chris DeVille:
I've been late to it, but I've really been enjoying The Replacements biography, Trouble Boys: The True Story of The Replacements by Bob Mehr. There are so many hilarious and heartbreaking details, and he understands the band so innately.
I thought Chris Richards’ Oasis concert review in The Washington Post explained the buzzing excitement around their reunion better than anything else I've read.
Grayson Haver Currin's profile of Geese in GQ is one of many great things I've read about Geese lately, and one of many great profiles written by Grayson lately.
One of my favorite Pitchfork Sunday Reviews in a while was Laura Snapes writing about Kate & Anna McGarrigle, which was a backstory I didn’t know. She did such a good job contextualizing their music within their story.
With the unexpected death of Kaleb Horton this week, everyone should go back and read his piece reacting to the death of Merle Haggard, which MTV so foolishly took offline along with the rest of their editorial archive. A lot of people have been writing on social media about how talented Kaleb was, and they're all correct.
If you enjoyed this you can subscribe to Chris’s Such Great Heights newsletter where he’ll be posting bonus content from the book and chapter soundtracks. You can also follow him on BlueSky.
Thank you for reading! Thanks again to Chris!
Justin Anderson-Weber
