Column: Remember When…

Mar 20, 2013 by PORTALS    2 Comments    Posted under: Columns, Features  

Daniel Kolitz looks back on the forgotten acts of “indie”, forgotten for better or for worse.

Last fall, a naked raver stole my laptop* and, along with it, the few thousand mp3s I’ve accumulated since first using Napster to make a bootleg of NOW 3 in 1999. This was devastating, if not karmically just—not like I’d paid for that stuff to begin with. I’ve spent the months since rebuilding, attempting in drunk late-night nostalgia binges to reconstruct, from memory, that monument to a decade’s worth of identity-building.

I decided early on to go about my project with maximum accuracy. Anything less would be a disservice—an insult!—to my past self, or selves. If the album had ever graced my iTunes, it would be dutifully Torrented, no matter how drastically it reduced this new collection’s cool quotient, and regardless of whether or not I had any pressing urge to hear it again. This was the mania of the miniature ship builder, fretting over details which serve no practical function (I certainly don’t plan on listening to “Californication” anytime soon) outside of satisfying some obscure compulsion.**

It was this masochistic impulse, though, that led to my re-discovering I’m From Barcelona. Not that I ever liked them much to begin with. But that’s not the point.

If you were an indie-leaning high school kid in the mid-’00s, as I was, then you were witness to a lost history, scrubbed from indie’s official narrative by its superlative-loving gatekeepers. I’d nearly forgotten it myself, until I moved from I’m From Barcelona‘s Pirate Bay page to the (in retrospect, touchingly) optimistic blog posts of 2005. That was the year when Clap Your Hands Say Yeah made plausible the idea that a modest indie-pop band might find major success through the internet. The names alone made my eyes well. Probably the strongest emotional reaction I’ve ever had to The Boy Least Likely To was reading their name eight years after kinda-enjoying and quickly forgetting their first record.

I am not accusing our nation’s art critics of an elaborate conspiracy to make us forget that they were once really into Tapes ‘n Tapes. The little guys, as the majority of people who have ever been born can tell you, almost always get written out of the picture. But here let me submit that it is these very little guys—those unexceptional, workmanlike bands who padded out playlists six summers ago, who had one great single and maybe soundtracked some significant coming-of-age type experience—that give each (indie) generation its distinct musical character.

Because you might forever link The Hold Steady to a particular time and place (2006, your best friend’s parents’ kitchen that weekend they went off to Maine) but the fact is that they will transcend time, if they haven’t already. So too will LCD Soundsystem; so too will The National. The ‘big albums’ of any given indie epoch will inevitably be downloaded by the next generation of obsessives, and while the former generation might get minorly peeved when (for example) a bunch of kids who could barely walk when Kevin Shields first changed sound forever start getting all excited about the new My Bloody Valentine record, the fact remains that by canonizing it and others of its ilk in lists and books and extended reissue reviews this older generation ensured that record’s longevity. Loveless isn’t of 1991; it is, like all timeless music, of the exact moment you first hear it.

Not so for, say, Voxtrot. Voxtrot is of its time precisely because no one listens to Voxtrot anymore; they were a moderately popular band who are now a shared secret of a generation of (indie) listeners, listeners who ten years from now can smile knowingly at one another when none of the younger kids can sing along to “The Start of Something” at some bar’s 2000s night, and can then maybe afterwards go home and make out and talk about seeing Islands on their Return to the Sea tour fifteen years ago.

I don’t care how complex your tastes have become in the intervening years; what I am asking you to do right now is open up Spotify and let your forgotten past in—unless our past listening histories aren’t identical, as I’ve presumed they have been up to this point; in that case, I am just delighted to still have your company, here. Do it for yourself, if not for the bands. When I imagine what the critically touted, quickly forgotten buzzbands of the mid-’00s are up to now I see roving bands of Swedish kazoo players begging for jobs on the street; see indie-pop artists once poised for whatever constitutes stardom in this star-saturated era of tampon-eaters slouched on the counters of bowling alleys and American Apparels nationwide; see frontmen forwarding letters to the editors who once praised them, informing them of their latest EP, up on Bandcamp right now, pay what YOU want. Seems a fair trade-off: you get to briefly remember what it felt like to know even less than you do now; they get like a tenth of a penny from Spotify. Everybody wins.

*Just grabbed it right out of my bedroom. I am at a loss to explain exactly how this happened, but I assure you it did.

**What I’ve ended up with broadly resembles its forebear, but in particular details, gets it all wrong, in a way that cannot be remedied—it’s missing the songs I can’t remember. Nothing I can do but wait for a stay melody to come visit me from whatever adolescent afternoon I left it on, and go rushing to the Pirate Bay to reclaim what was never rightfully mine.