Alternative Rock at the Bottom Again

Given the style audiences and tastes take shifted since, there will probably never again exist a musical year as iconic — recognizable to everyone for a handful of undeniable reference points — as the Summer of Love (1967) or the year punk broke (1977). But to many enthusiasts of indie rock, 1997, two decades ago exactly, established a kind of loftier-water mark.

A web comic called Questionable Content — set in the hipsterville of Northampton, Massachusetts — captured the feeling unambiguously. 2 still-young music lovers stand up in a kitchen, Mercury Rev poster on the wall, recalling some of the great albums that dropped that year. "THAT'S why 1997 was the best year for music," girlfriend says to boyfriend while she grabs what is probably a soy latte.

And information technology really is stunning to see what a unmarried 12-month period produced: Sleater-Kinney's Dig Me Out, Congenital to Spill's Perfect From Now On, Pavement'due south Burnish the Corners, Spiritualized's Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space, and numerous others. To those who lived through the menstruation, it seemed like information technology would last forever.

But youth, similar cultural history, rarely signals when it is about to disappear. For a serial of reasons that would have been hard to discern at the time, 1997 stands as both Peak Indie and the starting time of the end for the style's heyday.

Ascending Acme Indie: the nascency of a heyday

Kurt Cobain performs with Nirvana at the 1992 MTV Video Music Awards.

Jeff Kravitz

Indie, of course, was non born in the 1990s. (And the term, new to most Americans dorsum so, is still more commonly used in the Great britain, where it is more explicitly tied to contained record labels.) Only indie does have a real, verifiable history.

Shortly later punk hit, intense, speed-driven hardcore bands formed in California and New York and DC, and their fans built an infrastructure — a coast-to-coast network of clubs, mimeographed fanzines, college radio stations, record shops, and pocket-size record labels that would make indie possible. Some of them (Camper Van Beethoven, Pixies) sounded similar the indie that would come afterwards; some of them (Black Flag) didn't. But the movement — whether chosen alternative rock, modern rock, college radio, or whatever — was now grounded.

In my book Culture Crash, I appointment the nativity of indie at 1982, when the Smiths began recording and R.E.M. released its debut EP, Chronic Town. The US side of the story is forcefully told in Michael Azerrad's volume Our Band Could Be Your Life; Britain's followed like contours, with indie ideology locking in early and fiercely, as sales charts tracked what was selling at independent record stores.

But just as the '60s really began with the emergence of the Beatles, the indie '90s effectively started a few months after the September 1991 release of Nirvana's 2nd tape. "We won," West Coast rock critic Gina Arnold wrote when Nevermind, driven by the unmarried "Smells Like Teen Spirit," knocked Michael Jackson'due south Dangerous off the summit of Billboard'southward album chart: A scrappy, neurotic punk band from Nowheresville (the indie ethos often pits isolated American college towns or British industrial cities against huge finance-driven capitals) had toppled a corporate-stone warhorse considered to be mode by his prime number. The simultaneous emergence of R.Eastward.Thou., a longtime alt-rock favorite, with the single "Losing My Faith" and its Out of Time LP, didn't injure indie's momentum, either.

What followed was a bidding frenzy in which big corporations began courting cult bands on tiny labels in increasingly remote music scenes. Could one of these be the New Nirvana? A scruffy member of the anti-folk crowd who called himself Beck went from playing country-folk tunes on LA buses and busking on New York's Lower Eastward Side to recording for the David Geffen Company (known in its twenty-four hours equally DGC) and Interscope, and subsequently into Wal-Marts across America; around the time of Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville, boutique indie Matador — who would release work by Pavement, Guided by Voices, and Cat Power — began a distribution deal with the mighty Atlantic Records. Elliott Smith would motility from Kill Stone Stars to DreamWorks.

Kurt Cobain'due south 1994 suicide, tragic as it was for fans and Gen X-ers in general, didn't cause the musical institution to give up on indie rock; the search was nevertheless on for the Next Nirvana, and money connected to menses. The music manufacture, affluent with cash equally consumers replaced their vinyl with expensive CDs, went looking for the side by side "edgy" band or tattooed troubadour. And in many parts of America, indie artists similar Hoboken distortionists Yo La Tengo or grumpy Bob Mould (who'd once helmed Hüsker Dü) were selling out clubs and alluring mainstream audiences to their shows at increasingly large venues.

The best piece of work of that indie heyday — and 1997 alone offered Elliott Smith'southward Either/Or, Stereolab's Dots and Loops, Whiskeytown'due south Strangers Almanac, and Teenage Fanclub's Songs From Northern Great britain — compares well to any yr. And while every band was different, the earth that had been opened up by Nirvana, Sonic Youth, and the Smiths meant an ocean of succinct, structured songs complicated by feedback, overdrive, odd guitar tunings, feminism, Gen X irony, and intense emotion that would never have suited the manlike "classic rock" paradigm of Album Oriented Radio. Behind it was an anti-commercial ethos that made an unsteady peace with commerce.

Bands built whole careers on oddball, not terribly commercial niches, with the Apples in Stereo crossing Pet Sounds with the Silverish Apples, Velvet Shell splicing power popular with introvert Byrd Cistron Clark, and Luna finding the hidden possibilities in the Velvet Hugger-mugger's poorly selling self-titled LP. At that place was a "beautiful losers" ideology to indie, but in a parallel to what was occurring with American independent movie theatre, some of this was happening on big corporate labels or quasi-indie imprints; Matador, Elektra, SubPop, and 550 Music all had ties to either Warner Bros. or Sony.

And so art and money came together: Never again, it seemed, would routine blues progressions, pilus metal, or corporate pap rule the charts.

The bottom falls out: a one-two populist punch

NSYNC appears on MTV's Total Request Live

Linda Rosier/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images

But something else was happening in 1997: Most of these bands' recordings were not selling all that well. Albums in the broad "alternative rock" category moved okay in the amass, simply besides Nirvana and a few others like Pearl Jam and Alanis Morissette, record sales did not compare to mainstream pop, bedroom R&B, hip-hop, or large-hat land.

While much journalistic and industry chatter in 1997 was well-nigh where Wilco or Alejandro Escovedo or the electronica genre might become next, the biggest sellers were the Spice Girls (5.iii million sold) followed by Jewel, Puff Daddy, Garth Brooks, and Hanson. Trends like Christian stone — the band Creed eventually peddled more than vi million copies of 1997's My Ain Prison — were about to intermission out. And frat-rock band Hootie and the Blowfish, whose debut sold almost 10 1000000 in the '90s, left everything indie in the shade.

But you lot had to look further downwardly the charts to notice what would eventually bargain Summit Indie a coup de grace. In 1997, a Mississippi teenager and Mickey Mouse Club veteran named Britney Spears signed to Jive Records — known to indie types as the home of hip-hop hipsters A Tribe Called Quest — and the world would never be the same.

That year, and in the months preceding, Orlando'southward Backstreet Boys would release two LPs that would eventually sell 28 million copies. Jive labelmates NSYNC, whose recordings began to appear in '97, would keep to sell nearly ten million copies of No St r ings Fastened in 12 months' time. Spears would movement, over the years, more than 150 million albums effectually the globe. Her 1999 debut ...One More Fourth dimension — not even her all-time-selling tape — sold more than i.iii million copies in the US in a single week.

Past contrast, Sleater-Kinney's breakthrough LP, 1997'southward Dig Me Out, has sold a hair over 140,000 copies across 2 decades, according to Nielsen Music. The most accessible album by the most critically acclaimed '90s band — Pavement's Crooked Rain, Kleptomaniacal Rain — did not fifty-fifty break into Billboard's superlative 100. Information technology would have been hard to tell in 1997, simply we were at the foot of what UCLA music historian Robert Fink calls Britney Mountain: Later on that, the slope became harder to ignore. Whatever intangibles indie was going to deliver, any information technology symbolized, information technology was not — information technology turns out — really going to be near money and sales.

Needless to say, tape companies, mag and newspaper editors, goggle box producers, radio programmers, and venue owners took note. MTV marginalized so canceled its alternative-centric 120 Minutes. Indie bands and grownup vocalizer-songwriters got dropped past their labels, or constitute their recording budgets and tour support cut. But starting in 1998, y'all could run across Hanson and Korn and the Backstreet boys on Total Request Alive, and shortly they were everywhere.

In a nasty piece of timing, 1999 also saw the inflow of Napster and the explosion of file-sharing and music piracy. Industry revenues, which had been climbing, would stall and and so collapse. As Rolling Stone journalist Steve Knopper recounts in the recently reissued relate Appetite for Cocky-Destruction, stone — and indie — fans would be among the first to bail on physical albums.

"Napster affected rock CD sales disproportionately when it commencement came out in the late '90s," Knopper explained to me via email, "because rock was what a lot of college students were listening to, and they were early on MP3 adopters (and early on pirates.) They figured out quickly how to download MP3s for costless, so rock sales were the first to decline. It would take a while before piracy/the Internet/MP3s/downloads would cut into other genres, considering it took old people a long fourth dimension to effigy out the Net." Everyone would suffer, just those artists and labels would feel it first and worst.

Later on all the good times, this one-two dial at the turn of the millennium left indie — and rock music in full general — reeling.

The aftermath: a subculture once more

Sleater-Kinney perform during the 2022 Sasquatch Music Festival.

Mat Hayward/FilmMagic

So a lot of this was bad. Culling or modernistic or college or indie rock was supposed to save stone music itself — the white-guy-with-guitar genre that had seemed so dogged for decades. Simply then indie started to erode, and rock began to fade aslope it.

Just some of what happened in 1997 or just after, was fruitful — or at least established a way forrad.

One decisive anthology that just marked its 20th anniversary with an extensive reissue, Radiohead'south OK Calculator, would become such a resounding pop and disquisitional success that it would essentially destroy an important subgenre — the Britpop of Haven, Mistiness, and Suede — with the force of its implication: Three-minute songs near drunken nights or critiques of the English language suburbs now seemed unspeakably tiny, and American grunge sounded noisy and antique.

On this and the albums that followed, the Oxford, UK, quintet would have previous trends of the indie era — the guitar dissonance of shoegaze bands like My Bloody Valentine and Ride, a touch of grunge, the ugly beauty of Sonic Youth, a bit of Chicago post-rock — and put it all together into a complex, alienated, weirdly intimate fashion that electrified audiences and the music press. (Information technology probably didn't injure the anthology'southward critical reception that the advance mailed to the printing came in a Walkman — that's a personal cassette actor for you young'uns — that could not be pried open, and then needed to be listened to over headphones.)

Like Radiohead, Built to Spill's expansive and profound 1997 album Perfect From Now On would depict from '70s progressive rock, which had served, for most indie types, as the very definition of uncool. Belle & Sebastian, an eccentric Scottish grouping rooted in folk rock but with a love for the dance flooring, would sally and become on to 2 decades of melancholic glory. The late '90s saw Wilco blossoming in unexpected ways that would behave the group into the side by side millennium.

Simply the '90s band-near-likely-to — Pavement — never put out another great record, and sputtered to a close a few years later. Sleater-Kinney never got better (or better-selling) than Dig Me Out.

Good new work would arrive and good bands — including groups like the Strokes and the White Stripes that sounded to some like '90s retreads — would form in the shadow of Peak Indie. But the lively and innovative movement that followed punk and seemed to offer endless possibilities and critiques of corporate capitalism was starting to echo itself and ebb away.

Record labels began to depository financial institution on something called "electronica" to provide the intellectual and critical heft that guitar bands with cool haircuts had once promised. Two weeks into 1998, a French group called Air released Moon Safari, which seduced indie types with spacey, depression-key grooves; other "downtempo" hits would follow. Uk indie hero Damon Albarn of Blur got into African music and launched the animated "virtual band" Gorillaz.

Over the adjacent few years, "alt-land"— an Austin-rooted hybrid that blended Hank Williams with Dylan and, oftentimes, punk rock — finally found its voice. Longtime disquisitional darling Lucinda Williams hit with her 1998 LP, the unstable just brilliant Ryan Adams released a heartfelt debut the year after, and Gillian Welch and others contributed to the bestselling O Brother, Where Art G? soundtrack. Neko Case, of Vancouver popular-rockers The New Pornographers, would brainstorm a fruitful solo career. In all of these cases, the indie spirit, which had seen itself every bit anti-traditional and sonically inventive, lived on in uncompromising artists, often on genuinely pocket-size labels — Bloodshot, Acony, Lost Highway — playing music with roots in the Appalachian brother bands of the 1920s.

But what was left of the music industry, and the media attention that surrounded it, now focused its free energy on bubblegum popular, R&B and hip-hop, and, later, electronic dance music.

Indie, of course, would continue to live, through festivals like Glastonbury in the United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland and Coachella in California. Pitchfork.com, largely run and read by people who'd spent the indie heyday in diapers, continues to showcase reissues of indie classics, and its accompanying Chicago-based festival ofttimes features '90s bands who helped ascertain the indie era. Last twelvemonth, Sleater-Kinney reformed non just for a tour but for a very strong new album, No Cities Left To Love, its commencement in a decade. Neutral Milk Hotel could fill the Hollywood Bowl playing its cryptic cult LP In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.

But similar the vinyl reprints that became totems to Gen X-ers, all of this cultural activity was retrospective: In that location were expert things happening everywhere, but a certain story was now over, or existence celebrated for its historical role, like the British craze for Dixieland jazz.

Indie had begun as a subculture — and a subgenre — and it became one, once once more. The spotlight moved on, and in a globe of Kanye and Kim and Taylor, indie seemed backward-looking, retro, private and small.

The Columbia University philosopher Arthur Danto used to talk well-nigh visual art reaching the end of its history — the conclusion of a chief narrative that began with Renaissance painting. The dream of indie stone, that information technology could somehow become the vanguard and the mainstream at the same time, is at present as dead as Caravaggio. Merely in the hearts, minds, and record collections of more than one generation, the reality of indie lives on, noisy and sublime.

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Source: https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/10/25/16070928/peak-indie-rock-1997

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