The guys from Fleet Foxes and Dirty Projectors think indie rock peaked in 2009
The ongoing debate about the relevance of rock music has been raging for some time, with essay after essay about why rock’s stock has fallen and who precisely is to blame for it. Last night on the battlefield of Instagram, Dirty Projectors singer/guitarist David Longstreth threw a question out into the void: “Is it me or is the condition of indie rock in the 24½th century both bad and boujee?”
You see, Longstreth felt a need to connect to the youth of world by referencing something they know and love, Migos’ chart-topping hit “Bad And Boujee,” even if it was only tangentially relevant to his larger point. Longstreth qualified his point with, “bad in the basic sense of like, musically underwhelming,” and “boujee in the word’s negative sense: refined and effete, well removed from the raindrops and drop tops of lived, earned experience?” Longstreth clearly knows a thing or two about a lived, earned experience, as his status as a Yale dropout is certainly akin to those who came up selling drugs to make ends meet. Yet he threw this observation into the void, encouraging people to contribute their own thoughts to this fruitful discussion. And, like a horse to water, Fleet Foxes frontman Robin Pecknold appeared.
“I get bogged down in thinking there is a ‘right’ music to make at a given cultural moment,” Pecknold wrote, going on to say, “to me there is a always a vast expanse of feeling being explored by everyone engaged in music and it’s all valid in that it defines a feeling or creates a new one, for whatever group or groups have their ears turned on that music.” And sure, that’s a completely valid point. One person will like Migos while another enjoys Fleet Foxes, and that’s totally fine. But then the discussion took a turn, as Pecknold used this as a chance to say that current indie acts such as Angel Olsen and Mac DeMarco aren’t “cutting edge.” “I feel like 2009, Bitte Orca / Merriweather / Veckatimest, was the last time there was a fertile strain of “indie rock” that also felt progressive w/o devolving into Yes-ish largesse,” Pecknold would continue. This made Longstreth seemingly double back on his initial argument, positing that “we don’t need music that changes all the time; for this, tradition is valuable.” Grizzly Bear’s Ed Droste even chimed in, adding the incredibly cogent thought: “😱..”