Brooklyn's lost indie decade

23:37Emilie:Yeah, I totally agree with that. And it was also kind of the media moment too, wasn't it? Those records from the early 2000s were so monolithic. It was like everybody had Is This It and White Blood Cells and the AASEP and all that. Whereas, you know, five or 10 years later, it wasn't that easy to keep track of because there really were so many things going on in so many different venues. You know, you could make the case that I don't know that I'd call like the Strokes epochal, but just for lack of a better word, were there as many records that had the impact of Is This It in the Brooklyn scene?

24:12Emilie:Maybe not. Was it kind of greater than the sum of its parts? And did it turn out to be maybe more robust than what was going on? I think you could make that case.

24:20Ronen Givony:it's interesting to me too because i feel like when you look back at that era of the aughts and the tens like you know yes like you were saying the bands that come to mind are like yeah yeah as interpolled strokes but culturally i think like brooklyn is very like associated with that era and like you know the big picture rise of like the hipster and like what youth culture meant at that time but i think folks who you know besides like those of us who are more like well-versed in it or sort of like worked in that world like might not even like necessarily realize the distinction the very very big distinction between Brooklyn and downtown and the music scenes there but it's like I almost feel like Brooklyn culturally gets lumped in with the strokes and Interpol and yeah it doesn't for me but maybe it's interesting if you're from like somewhere else yeah I just mean like way broadly like in like western popular culture kind of you know you think of like cool music hipsters and yeah i mean for me like i know that that was those are very fundamentally different scenes i think a lot of people who are like into music do but right it kind of becomes this weird gradient that overlooks like a lot of kind of like critical spiritual distinctions maybe do you think of the brooklyn scene as a reaction to the manhattan scene or it was just kind of contiguous andrea was talking about miss shapes for example last night um which is like very quintessential Manhattan to me.

25:43Ronen Givony:But then I was thinking about how someone I know who was involved in Miss Shapes later popped up in like the Brooklyn Roxy and how it all feels kind of fluid.

25:52Emilie:I think you could make that case. You know, if you read the chapters in the book about parts and labor, say, or Oneida, you know, they were very self-consciously setting themselves apart from what was going on in Manhattan. Dan Friel of parts and labor has a quote I always think about where he says, you know, when we started, which was, I think, 2002, 2003, it was basically the, you know, the cocaine mustache phase of the New York rock revival. And there were two wars going on and nobody was talking about it at all. Meanwhile, the guys in Oneida, you know, were saying that if you were able to get on a bill in Manhattan, it was, you know, as the second ban out of seven at the spiral or somewhere like that.

26:35Emilie:So, yeah, I think that partly out of necessity, partly out of opposition. There was an element in which those early years in Williamsburg were set up a bit in opposition to The Strokes and Interpol and such. I do think also that a lot of those bands did share in that spirit. I think that the AAS, I think TV on the radio, these were essentially sister groups to a lot of the bands that I wrote about. So I wouldn't want to overstate it. But yeah, I do think that because, again, these two scenes happen in such proximity that it's easy to conflate them a bit.

27:12Ronen Givony:So the book opens in the prologue with this really lovely description of you getting an invite to and subsequently attending a secret loft show featuring Neutral Milk Hotel's Jeff Mangum. This is in 2010, so it was kind of like legendary. He was already reclusive. The album was, you know, cemented in people's hearts and cultural lore, but never really got to see him that often. So it was very special. And so about that, you wrote the line that for anyone who cared about a certain school of songwriting, it was a once in a lifetime event. But for those who lived in Brooklyn in the aughts, this was a regular occurrence.

27:49Ronen Givony:I was wondering if you could expand a little bit on what is the this to you? Like what was special and unique about this scene? What was that regular occurrence? What was the substance of it that you were experiencing then that defined it?

28:02Emilie:That was a memorable night. I think on the one hand, obviously I'm overstating it a bit. I mean, I think that was an unforgettable experience where you're seeing one of your favorite songwriters in the world with 30 or 40 other people. That doesn't happen that often. But what I meant more is that just this ability and this opportunity to experience, you know, really world-class musicianship, world-class artistry in these really affordable, homegrown, community-minded, artist-friendly establishments. I don't want to say that this was the only time this happened. Clearly that's not true and it's not the only place it happened, but for me and for a lot of people, and this was already, you know, a couple of years into this era I'm talking about, but it showed you that it didn't have to be done in a club where there was a guy who was going to kick you out at 10.01 because the room had to be turned over for a dance party later that night.

28:57Emilie:That's not to knock places like that. I used to book a place like that for seven years and you need the late night thing to pay for the earlier part, you know, but for 10 or 15 years in Brooklyn, there existed this whole kind of secondary infrastructure where there were bookers like Eden and Rami and Brooke and Roland, who, if you could sell a hundred tickets, sure, that helped, but that wasn't really the reason they were doing it. And it wasn't the reason why the people were behind the bar. And it wasn't the reason why the people were working at the door. Everybody there wanted to be there. The places kind of existed such that you got as much out of it as you were willing to put in, which means that if you went more than once or twice to 285 Kent or Death by audio, the chances were good that you would become friends with the staff, that you would become friends with the artists.

29:50Emilie:If you were a musician, chances are good that you would, you know, probably start out opening for a bigger band, opening for a touring band. And one day, you know, you yourself would be the headliner. There was this ecosystem that existed for a reason other than profit, for a reason other than sheer capitalism. That was the part of it that was happening every day was that there was more going on than any one person could know about. And the sense was that anybody could participate. You didn't have to, you know, be on a list. You didn't have to have a certain number of followers or whatever.

30:26Ronen Givony:Yeah, I want to point out that the Jeff Magnum show that was literally at like my friend's house or like I didn't go to that show, but it was just musicians who had taken over this really cool former schoolhouse and they were they did not make music that sounded like Jeff Magnum. It was this band called Forma that was one of the leaders of the synth revival at the time, which would seem like a completely incongruous scene. And then they end up with this show instead of him going to like a Bowery Presents venue or whatever.

30:54Emilie:Yeah, no. And I mean, I, as a promoter myself, I did Jeff's first, I don't know, six or seven shows in the Northeast after he kind of came out of retirement. And I remember specifically he and his agent could have played, you know, any club, any festival. They were like, we want you to find a cool old weird theater in Boston, a cool old weird theater in Woodstock and New Haven. And it was very much an indie thing. So yeah, there were lots of nights like that. There was spiritualized playing at, you know, secret project robot. I mean, if you start listing, you know, the shows at Glasslands and 285 and the people who played there at different points in their career.

31:39Emilie:You know, I think that the bookers there really had their nose to the ground, but it was the kind of thing where you almost couldn't miss. You know what I mean? Like if you had a venue and you had a stage and if you were quite competent in keeping it scheduled, they made you look better than you deserve.

31:54Ronen Givony:I also just want to point out, like, I think this is like a very unique thing. And this runs from the beginning of your book, like the importance of space and artists getting access to or literally living at the venues where this was taking place, which I think is something you won't see as much right now. Yeah. When we were talking about, sorry, I just want to, I want to quote, I want to quote you like while we were prepping, like you put it really well. You were saying there's, you know, the through line is like the artists kind of like owning the means of production creatively and otherwise.

32:25Ronen Givony:And a lot of that I think had to do with that infrastructure. Yeah. Like it was, the artistry was not just playing the music. It was hosting the music and creating an environment for the music to occur, which was now that I think of it, maybe like uniquely possible. I mean, it was there were other points in New York music history when this happened, but it was like a moment where there was all this like real estate where you could kind of it was like cheap to come by in these areas in Brooklyn and you could kind of like get in there. And it was always very fragile because there was always like the threat of the authorities finding out somebody calling in a noise complaint.

32:59Ronen Givony:But the fact of just having the space is important and perhaps responsible for the flourishing of creativity and the unique character of the work, I think. Absolutely.

33:10Emilie:It's not a coincidence that all of the venues I wrote about from Glasslands to Death by Audio to Silent Barn, they were all opened by artists, by visual artists, by musicians. And that itself is kind of a tradition in New York. You know, whether you're talking about Yoko Ono and her loft on Chamber Street or Ornette Coleman or David Mancuso, Phil Nyblock, there's always been kind of this history of people kind of making do with the limited resources that they have. You know, we're kind of in an interesting moment now in New York City real estate in that you have this kind of profound vacancy rate still in large parts of the city in Manhattan and New Jersey and Queens.

33:54Emilie:You sort of wonder if any of that will ever be accessible to artists in the same way. It does seem like a different sort of thing than, you know, what was happening in Williamsburg or downtown.

34:05Ronen Givony:yeah it just in us talking about this i was just thinking about how i mean a lot of that is how just like the whole real estate game has kind of shifted but it's hard to even imagine like a jeff mangum pop-up show or something not getting like pre-predated on by like live nation or golden voice or something i mean i'll do respect to golden voice but i feel like social media has allowed a lot of this kind of like power consolidation to happen and for it was wielding that power or like benefiting from the click, just getting to this stuff first before this kind of DIY or underground culture can even start to foment now, even if some of those spaces technically are still there.

34:44Emilie:It's interesting you say that because, you know, it occurs to me, a band that I think they're fine. I don't really know a ton about them, but, you know, Wet Leg, who kind of started in the indie world and they became pretty big pretty fast. If I'm not mistaken, you know, when their last record came out, that was done under the rubric of either Live Nation or AEG, I don't know. But when they started, they kicked off the tour at Market Hotel in Brooklyn, you know, which tells you that for whatever it's worth, that DIY world still holds some appeal, whether it's to the band or to the people who are kind of marketing this thing.

35:19Emilie:But Live Nation or AEG kind of takes over as soon as that is out of the way. And then everything else is kind of business as usual.

35:26Ronen Givony:Yeah, exactly. I'm glad you brought them up because I feel you're kind of like a perfect example of this. It was a real trip to me because so I used to work at KCRW in Los Angeles. I don't know if you're familiar, the public radio station, but we did a live session with Wetleg around their first album. Like one of our DJs was like one of the first to put them on. And it was like literally in our music director's backyard and, you know, sort of just like very DIY and the cops got called because it was like too loud and it was chaotic and like messy and they were just like oh like whatever and it was just very fly by the seat of our pants and then it was like flash forward two years later whatever it is last April as they're getting ready for moisturizer to come out and the next gig we go to by them is this like very fancy formal super secret like underplay in frog town here invite only like all the who's who of the industry you know like can't talk to the band you know whereas before it was like we're literally like sitting with our feet in the pool with them like chatting and they're like overwhelmed and now it's just like very like fashion which isn't to knock the band or anything i'm happy for them it's great they're cool girls but yeah it was just a big a big 180 that i feel like was really really facilitated by the needs of the modern mainstream music industry do you think that the pipeline for

36:47Emilie:the wet legs and the geeses and the big thieves has kind of shortened like that where, I mean, I don't know, maybe those are outlawed, but it seems like those bands, when they do happen, blow up so fast because people are kind of hungry for it. Or can you not even use that as an example?

37:04Ronen Givony:No, I think that's true. And again, I think so much of this is like algorithmically spurred, right? We did an episode probably more than a year ago now with Brandon Hagen of the band Vundabar, or like a Boston-based like proper like Western Mass sorry Western Mass I should know that yeah Western Mass and they're a band that's made like despite a lot of commercial success like Miz made a point to really like stay DIY but he was telling us about how you know they had been at this for like 10 years and suddenly a song from like their first album which was almost 10 years old at that point like randomly went viral on TikTok and Brandon was talking about how like overnight suddenly all of these record labels that i guess had you know he said they had like some kind of like alerts set on something for when streams for a track go above a certain number on a social platform and then they just like he's just said they were completely inundated with different offers and their and their their profile like jumped accordingly but it put him in a weird position which he talked about in the episode yeah yeah it's kind of like wolf parade isn't it

38:05Emilie:i'm just reading an interview with them where they say promoters look at our instagram numbers and they don't understand you know and to me like the idea of a promoter needing to look at wolf parade's instagram numbers to book them as you know a tragedy lick or joke but like it makes me wonder if we had been in 2009 2010 and a song could randomly break out on tiktok or something like that how that would have changed things i mean i guess grizzly bear had something like that

38:32Ronen Givony:happened didn't they i mean i see that going back to like i don't want to go too hard into this but like 285 Kent, which is the venue that I spent the most time at, I see that dynamic very present. And I want to ask you about why you didn't write about 285 Kent in the book. We spoke about this when I was reading your book. But I saw that dynamic present at the sort of more commercially aware end of the DIY scene where it was very much in dialogue with the music media and trying to create these sort of like spectacles in an alternative space that would attract above ground attention and sort of flirting with that subversively if that makes sense so do you want

39:20Emilie:to name names i feel like i i who is an example of a someone who was trying to game the system in

39:26Ronen Givony:2012 no like i don't mean gaming i just think that like i was a co-founder of ad hoc which is the company that was booking 285 Kent. So maybe I can't speak for Rick who was doing the actual booking, but I think there was this sense of sort of like we're locked out of the mainstream, you know, establishment industry and we are going to fall back on our gritty resources and do stuff that is going to cause a splash in sort of a mischievous way. One really big moment was like the Grimes ASAP Rocky set, for example. And it was like kind of constantly flirting with too much attention and disaster. But that was sort of, there was a playfulness to it in that way.

40:06Emilie:Well, yeah, that was part of it too. I feel like 285 Kent, when it closed, there was this kind of fever pitch of attention so much so that, and correct me if you saw it differently, but it seemed like the people who were involved with it almost wanted to turn down the temperature a little bit because it felt like it had gotten out of hand or something. Now, you know, Jesse Rifkin has a really amazing quote in his book where he says something like, you know, at the time, it seemed like Todd and 285 Kent and such was getting too much attention. And now it seems like he doesn't get enough. And that was sort of part of my reasoning as well was that, I mean, all these venues are essentially two venues, aren't there?

40:48Emilie:Silent Barn had two incarnations. Glasslands had two incarnations. 285 was Paris, London, West Nile, New York. And like I said, there is a world in which this book could have been 700 pages, but at a certain point I had to make a decision about who has been written about and kind of who has been heard from and who hasn't. And it was just my sense that, you know, Todd is all over Jesse's book as he should be. But, you know, I still don't feel like I had seen anything with Roland and Brooke from Glasslands or the Shinkoyo guys who started Silent Barn. And this was just my attempt at kind of recentering that conversation.

41:28Ronen Givony:Well, thank you for explaining it. And I guess Jesse Rifkin does talk more about that stuff. But I do think it's important to note that there's a spectrum of types of venues that were all coexisting. And I would say that Death by Audio felt a little bit more, and probably Silent Bar felt a little bit more like True Blue, we are creating our own outsider music economy. And then there were others that were a little bit more. I don't know how to describe it.

41:56Emilie:I'm sure there's an analog between like, you know, what was it like the Trotskyists, the Leninists? It was kind of like the narcissism of small differences kind of a little bit. But no, it's like I said, there were Silent Barn people who were like, you're writing about Glasslands in a book about Brooklyn DIY as though I was writing about, you know, the Barclays Center or something.

42:18Ronen Givony:Exactly. And Glasslands is another good example because they were like probably the most together in terms of being like above board on everything and being legal.

42:27Emilie:No, exactly. I mean, I think now a lot of people would maybe puzzle over these differences a little bit. But at least for the people who were there, they do seem still be in place.

42:40Ronen Givony:If you like what you're hearing on this episode, there's a place where you can join the conversation. It's called Cujoplex, and it's a private online hangout zone on Discord where smart, cool weirdos just like you, you know, people who like talking about the evolving state of independent culture, can congregate, share links, and talk about the news of the day. We've had some great conversations lately about creative economies, media theory, AI, politics, the future of journalism, and even the records and TV shows we've been obsessing over this year. Some of our chats have even inspired episode ideas.

43:16Ronen Givony:You can get access to Kujoplex along with our monthly bonus episodes by signing up for a paid subscription over at our Substack. That's theculturejournalist.substack.com. So we talked a little bit about this already, but what, looking back, were the conditions that allowed this scene to happen that maybe aren't there now? Now there's maybe something to be said about how much of this is a story of what happens when a city de-industrializes and then has a ton of kind of unoccupied space and then young people flood back into those neighborhoods.

43:53Emilie:Yeah, I think, you know, when people ask me what I'm writing about, part of me is tempted to say I'm writing a book about the Brooklyn music scene and part of me is tempted to say I'm writing a book about the early aughts in America. And, you know, it really almost was the latter part, I think, that shaped a lot of what was going on. You know, besides, you know, as we've been talking about the fact that there was more space and rents were cheaper and neighborhoods were just a little bit different than they are today. You're talking about, in a lot of ways, an era that was a lot more naive and a lot more romantic in a way.

44:28Emilie:This is right on the cusp of when smartphones are introduced and kind of start taking hold. And at least for the first few years, you know, it wasn't this thing that all of us have now where you have this almost chemical fix. You need to look at the damn thing every 30 seconds. It just wasn't like that yet at the time. You know, social media, it was a thing. You know, Facebook was a thing. MySpace was a thing. But it was a little bit more ramshackle and kind of democratic than it was today, I think you would say. And streaming as well. You know, there were streaming services. I used Rhapsody well before Spotify was around.

45:04Emilie:But the internet just in general, this was a time of file sharing and piracy really. And you had these amazing people who would just set up these rabbit holes online devoted to psych music or hip hop or classical music or jazz. And the spirit was really one of sharing. I mean, that was really all it was for. There was no way to monetize it. readership was a thing, but the status was really in being an expert. I think you can't forget also newspapers and just music criticism and arts listings. We take it for granted, but every week you could open up the newspaper or the New Yorker or Time at New York, and you would see everything from 285 Kent to Carnegie Hall.

45:49Emilie:This was a public service, not only for the artists, but for the audience, you know, to know what is going on. I today subscribe to something like five or six different listings, you know, sub stacks just for arts listings in New York. And every week there is something I still miss. You know what I mean? There's nothing remotely central that just kind of consolidates all of this stuff. And last, you know, it's something Andrea touched on before, which is algorithms. You know, I think that at the time you could go and see Jeff Mangum play with a weird band like Forma opening, which, you know, on paper has kind of nothing to do with it.

46:26Emilie:You know, Forma was kind of closer to, you know, Kraftwerk or Noy or Cluster or something like that than they were at a Neutral Milk Hotel. But you'd be seeing these kind of weird juxtapositions. That's very much what wordless music was about. You know, people were hearing things that were unfamiliar, that were challenging, that were inspiring it, and it all kind of bled into their own music. If you listen to the bigger records from 2007, 2008, 2009, they're this amazing, you know, kind of smorgasbord of psychedelia and R &B and doo-wop and classical and minimalism and ambient. I don't want to say that that's not happening right now, but if you were listening to Spotify now as opposed to kind of being a self-starter and having to seek this out yourself, chances are you're going to hear something or be fed something that's a lot more similar to everything else than something completely new.

47:20Emilie:And I do think that's why, you know, these various factors, there was just so much going on at the time. Right.

47:27Ronen Givony:There was like a real lack of like risk aversion. I feel like there's so much calculus and risk aversion now in approaches to any of this. You know, it's like, look at the numbers first. Like, does it make sense for this band to open that? Like, it seems like those questions just like weren't being asked them. Yeah. I mean, and there were so many venues that like, obviously they didn't want to lose money on a show, but they were not always, you know, Silent Barn wasn't throwing shows being like, oh, we have to worry about is this going to be profitable or not? Like they deliberately put on shows that were not going to be profitable lineups with like five or six obscure noise artists or whatever.

48:02Ronen Givony:And just having places to play like that and options for being given a chance was really important. And then also the opportunity to sort of like work your way up a sort of like ladder where you start out opening when you move up the bill is very like important. I think that still exists, but probably there'd be more scrutiny on in a commercial venue. There might be more scrutiny on like, oh, is this opener going to, you know, pull people or whatever?

48:26Emilie:Well, you know, this whole time that I'm writing about in the book, and I don't, I mentioned it a bit, but I try not to dwell on it. You know, I was booking La Poisson Rouge on Bleecker Street the whole time. And that's, you know, that's not a small venue. It's 700 capacity standing. And that's, there's a lot of dudes in the kitchen. There's a lot of bartenders. There's a lot of stagehands and lighting people. And for me, you know, when you book Deer Hunter and you have 700 people and it's sold out, you feel great. But when you book the band that's going to be Deer Hunter in five years and they pull 50 people the first time, that's a bummer because everybody goes home broken and you feel like you haven't done your job.

49:04Emilie:Those economic necessities weren't really at play in depth by audio. It costs maybe$100 or$200 to open the door as opposed to$1 ,500 at LPR. And you can just take risks and kind of nurture something in a way that you can't on Bleecker Street.

49:20Ronen Givony:I really love what you said earlier about, you know, this book is as much about the Brooklyn music scene as it is a book that's just about like living life in America at that time. How much was the scene a reaction to the politics of the time? You know, especially this backdrop of, you know, Bush number two, the Iraq war that you paint so vividly towards the beginning of the book.

49:44Emilie:Yeah, it seemed to me, I'm someone who, I'm interested in nonfiction, I'm interested in American history, and I'm always curious about books that come out about contemporary times. And I think that partly just because of this dumpster fire we've been living in for the last 10 years, there's this whole 10 or 20 years at the beginning of the century that you wouldn't say it's been forgotten, but at the time, it seemed to me like it meant something pretty different. You know, we forget about it now, but there were all these musicians and artists, Ricardo Villalobos comes to mind, who they refused to play in the United States because of the war in Iraq.

50:24Emilie:And they were not maybe bad money in terms of their audience, but, you know, playing in George W. Bush's America was not an option for them. And we have forgotten that, you know, for eight years, you had a war going on where you were basically told that something wasn't happening. There were no pictures in the newspaper and you kind of had to really seek out after the first year or two, like what was going on just overseas in our own name. I think that there was so much going on in this era between, you know, this kind of 90s lull being interrupted by September 11th and then Afghanistan and then Iraq and then the economic crisis that, you know, it would have been impossible for young people, for artists, for musicians to live through this era and not be impacted in some way politically.

51:18Emilie:You know, when you look back at the time and you compare it, especially to right now, I don't know if you'd call it something like PTSD or what, but it did seem like for the first few years, the cultural response was just one of being stunned and being at a loss as opposed to right now, where you look at Minneapolis or either with ICE or with George Floyd and, you know, obviously with Gaza and with Israel, that the opposition is a bit more organized. And it seems like even if it's in the minority, there's a sense of not quite being by yourself. In the period that I was writing about, it did feel like you were a bit by yourself because, you know, for a year leading up to this election, the president's approval rate was declining.

52:03Emilie:John Kerry was not a great candidate, but he did appear to be not completely useless. And for a minute, it did look like things were going to change. And then for me, that was really the beginning of this book was the day after George W. Bush's reelection. And to me, that was almost like the dress rehearsal for 2016, because it was kind of the masks coming off. And you could say like, well, maybe in 2000, you know, people voted for George W. Bush for one reason, because Al Gore wasn't a great candidate or they wanted to change after Bill Clinton. But to go to the ballot box after Abu Ghraib and after, you know, Colin Powell in Iraq and all this and say, sign me up for four more years of that.

52:46Emilie:To me, and I think to a lot of people, that was such a stunning revelation. maybe it shouldn't have been stunning. Maybe that is like the country we're living all along. But, you know, for a while, just the shock of that, I think really colored a lot of the cultural response to this. And I think that you can't really hear a band like TV on the radio or Animal Collective or The National without thinking about like just the sense of betrayal in the country at the moment.

53:13Ronen Givony:Let's also not forget that like there was definitely debate at the time of whether or not the election was stolen, Florida. Also a sense of censoriousness, right? A lack of freedom of speech, which I think I never really directly felt impacted myself and like people directly in my age cohort in adulthood until recently again, where you have to watch what you say. This is like the time of the Dixie Chicks. I remember when I was a teenager, like, you know, buying CDs and all these like parental advisories and people clutching their pearls over explicit content. And I think we're kind of circling back to that sort of moment again.

53:48Ronen Givony:Yeah. As far as the movement itself, like, was there a politics to this musical movement? Or would you say it was more apolitical? You just stated very clearly that it was, in fact, it arose in context of all this, of course.

54:02Emilie:I go back and forth. I think that you can rattle off a list of songs and records and artists who were obviously political, who were singing about Iraq, who were singing about police brutality, about class consciousness. I think you could also make the case that maybe these artists didn't show up in the way that they could have. you know I think that protest music can take many different forms but I don't know that I would you know look to this scene for its kind of political engagement you know I think there's a lot of people who would say like this is kind of one of its shortcomings that for whatever progressive outlook it might have had artistically that it was kind of people talking to each other a little bit or a lot of people from the same group or from the same little bubble I don't know You know, like to me, it felt political.

54:55Emilie:It felt important. But I think there were probably people for whom it didn't register either. What do you think?

55:00Ronen Givony:I mean, I don't know that it's like I even necessarily meant that question in like the literal sense. Like were the lyrics like were they making protest music? I think it's some of yeah, like you said, like some of them were. But, you know, spiritually, did it feel political maybe because of the kind of climate or conditions from which it arose? Or was it maybe feeling more like it was trying to escape all that? And that's the apoliticalness. Emily, you have something to say. Yeah. No, I think I would say from my experience, it was escapist or not escapist, political through. This sounds like libertarian, but almost like a form of exit thing going on.

55:34Ronen Givony:Keep in mind, this was before, you know, Bernie Sanders came out and was like offering a glimmer of hope of like, oh, you know, here's like an actual concrete political candidate and platform that people with a certain view can latch on to. I mean, people were excited about Obama, that's for sure. And I think you do talk in the book about how the movement represented sort of the optimism around the Obama years in a way. But I think that there was like maybe a sense that young people didn't have very much going on, especially before Obama, that represented their view of the world. And also there was the 2008 recession sort of locking young people out of participation in the world in a big way.

56:21Ronen Givony:And so for me, at least, it was like I graduated into the aftermath of the 2008 recession, land in New York. And I'm like, I'm not going to get a job at the New York Times or whatever. Like, I'm not going to get a job at an establishment publication. I'm going to just start my own thing. And then people being like, I'm not going to get a job at like X venue. I'm going to start my own venue. And that was like the culture of it. And there is a politics to deciding to do that. And it did feel very anti-establishment, but I would say it wasn't like politically engaged directly.

56:56Emilie:I agree. I mean, I think that not to make too fine a point of it, but I think that if I was 26 moving to New York today, as opposed to, you know, at the time I did, I'd probably be a little bit more clued into what was going on in say the Mamdani world than I would, you know, the DIY world such as it is in New York. Because to me, it just seems like that's where a lot more of the energy and a lot more of the excitement was. And there really was nothing remotely like that at the time when we were here.

57:27Ronen Givony:Occupy, I guess, right? Occupy.

57:29Emilie:And I guess Obama too, but didn't even that turn out to be a bit of a double-edged sword? Because it seemed like now, if you look back at a lot of that music, that kind of optimism was that well-placed. I don't know.

57:41Ronen Givony:I think it almost like the optimism and then all this like exciting stuff going on in culture during the Obama years might have blinded the generation to the need to pay more attention to what was actually going on in politics or something. Like everything seems OK. Everything seems great. And then Trump was elected next.

58:01Emilie:Yeah, no. Have you guys seen, I think it's an HBO documentary called Obama, The Final Year? I always recommend this because this to me was like the most amazing insight into why it all happened the way it did. There's a scene where Obama and his team go to, I think it's Vietnam. And so on the one hand, it's like this goodwill gesture of American diplomacy, which right now just seems like a foreign universe. But they have a scene where Ben Rhodes, his speechwriter, goes and talks to a woman at a Starbucks or something in Vietnam. And she's a barista. And the woman says to him, will you be in touch with the next administration when they move in?

58:39Emilie:And he, without even blinking says, yeah, no, we know Hillary's people. We're in touch with them. It's going to be a different bunch of folks, but we know them. And she says, oh, so you think you're pretty sure it's going to be Hillary? And he just has this kind of look of condescension dripping on his face. And he's like, obviously, you know, like, how could you even ask me otherwise? And it's basically an hour of that mindset. And then the election happens and they realize that they have had the rug pulled out from under them. That felt weirdly familiar.

59:09Ronen Givony:On poll, we touched on this a little bit earlier, but how would you describe the scene's relationship, not to politics, but to commerce or to the idea of selling out. Do you look back at the scene as being commercial or anti-commercial? Did it start as one thing and morph into another?

59:28Emilie:I think that, you know, certainly at the beginning of the book, which would be the years 2004 to 2009, 10, you know, you still do see artists who are kind of embodying this 90s ethos of maybe a bit of discomfort of the idea of honor and success or commercial kind of exposure. And then, you know, as the music industry bottoms out, as the record labels contract and sponsors brands like Red Bull and such move in, I think that a lot of that stigma went away, you know, but I think at the same time, you're talking about several venues and labels who probably could have kept themselves going if they had been a little bit more ruthless as capitalists.

1:00:19Emilie:And, you know, the precursor to 285 Kent, which was Paris, London, New York, West Nile, they didn't charge admission. They gave 100 % of the doors to bands.

1:00:30Ronen Givony:Jelko McMullen. Thank you, Jelko.

1:00:32Emilie:You know, you sort of, there's almost this element of martyrdom a little bit where you say, you can keep a couple of dollars to yourself and like pay your rent, you know, but they didn't want to do that you know so that was jelko but that was also brook and roland that was eden that was you know the silent barn crew there really was this aspect of like the art comes first the music comes first and we're not gonna cash in on something that we could you know you could make the case that maybe it's only middle class or upper middle class people who can do that in the first place. But I don't know.

1:01:06Emilie:I think that, you know, there were a lot of people who could have gone to work for advertising companies and brands and even been A &R people for record labels, you know, but they put their effort instead toward like a DIY space or toward a band or toward a record label. And because of that, a lot of this art came out of, I think that you wouldn't say that it was purely mercenary because if it were, you know, certainly a lot of this music would have been more commercial. But it's hard to overlook the fact that, you know, at the end of 2014, you know, a lot of these people are kind of writing songs for pop stars and they're, you know, writing about frequent flyer miles and Vogue.

1:01:51Emilie:And so I don't know, it did seem like at a moment that route to stardom opened up that some people did kind of go that way.

1:01:59Ronen Givony:And then others who you talk about in the book maybe tried to do that and couldn't or never wanted that at all or were in bands where some people wanted that and others didn't. And it's interesting that you capture sort of that spectrum, which I think is important.

1:02:15Emilie:I wanted to write a lot about economics during this era because I feel like it really was, you know, you started out in this moment that was kind of post Napster and it ended up really at the Spotify era. And this was also a time when there were these companies like Scion and Red Bull that were making these gigantic investments in the arts. And the cynical kind of leftist in me looks at this and says, what is the angle and what are they trying to get out of this? And yet I think most people would agree that the absence of that funding is a bit sorely felt these days. I don't know that many people who would object if the Red Bull Music Academy came back, if Scion Music Fest came back.

1:03:00Emilie:And I tried to write about it in a way that was critical, but fair just about its virtues as well.

1:03:05Ronen Givony:No, I see that. There's also like the vice media approach, which was like, we're going, I guess, kind of like what is harking back to what I was saying earlier, even about 285 Kent, but taking to an extreme where it's like, we are going to punk the system by, you know, moving into obviously symbolic, people know symbolic space. Vice media famously took over the space that inhabited by 285 Kent and Death by Audio and formerly Paris, London, West Nile. But they were like, you know, we are going to convince Rupert Murdoch to invest in this punk thing and it's going to be brilliant and amazing and we're changing the mainstream from the inside or, you know, whatever like that.

1:03:46Ronen Givony:That's sort of like the far pole on the other side of what happened and that leads to, you know, further gentrification of the area and stuff.

1:03:52Emilie:I mean, Vice, you know, I wish we had more time to get into this, but, you know, they could have been a much bigger part of the book. You know, I think it's easy to paint them as the villain a bit because, you know, they came in the way that they did and they literally evicted these three pillars of a scene that made them rich in the first place.

1:04:11Ronen Givony:Sorry, Glasslands as well. You have to mention Glasslands.

1:04:13Emilie:But you can't forget, I think that Vice was, you know, people really liked Vice and they were, you know there was a reason why you know they got as as wealthy as they did they were doing something right for for a long time and kind of hitting this nerve in the culture and so i think

1:04:27Ronen Givony:wasn't it that those venues were like gonna get evicted either way and vice just happened to be what came in next or is that kind of unclear okay i think that they accelerated the process

1:04:37Emilie:considerably by telling the landlord that they were ready to move in yeah anyway proceed sorry oh no you know I just this is not really a thread I pursued just because I felt like I didn't have a ton of space but you know you do wonder like is there a strain of this vice mentality like in this whole culture whether it's something like Ariel Pink you know what I mean or or like you know that there is a dark kind of MAGA thread to this whole thing that has been sitting in plain sight

1:05:06Ronen Givony:and also we should say that like a lot of the scene was white male not everyone obviously and there were currents within that but this is a whole other episode i don't know if i personally think gavin mcginnis had a lot to do with that but i don't know if i personally as someone who was at vice for the you know entire decade and change like after gavin mcginnis i think there was a lot more to the story that and the probably the indelible impact of that company on the area was more along the lines of gentrification of the city itself but it's debatable because there's a lot it's a long story and i also do want to say that i wish that vice i mean vice does still exist it's kind of like operating at like half capacity or quarter capacity zombified i do think it's a huge loss that we don't at this time have a robust mainstream left of center magazine employing young people of the like mum donnie generation like i think that's a huge loss um So, I don't know.

1:06:08Ronen Givony:Ronan, why did the scene ultimately die? Was it too fragile of a set of circumstances to last? Did it lie too close to the sun? And also, what, if anything, is the tragedy to this story?

1:06:22Emilie:Well, I guess I would answer this in two parts. I would say that if you get any of the newsletters that come every week that list what is going on in Brooklyn and New York, I don't think you would look at this and say that anything has died, that there's like a vacuum in New York. I think that it has shifted a little bit and moved. You know, I would speak about it in my own terms. I would say that it did seem like, I mean, Glasslands closed on New Year's Eve of 2013, going into 14, I believe. So that made it, you know, just very symbolic and very easy to kind of say like, you know, there was a before and after.

1:06:59Emilie:I think that that's easy to kind of make too much of, you know, Silent Barn was going on for a while after Market Hotel, Transpicos, you know, there's lots of clubs that were kind of continuing and carrying on. And I do think that something definitely did shift after those three venues closed, those being 285K, Classlands, and Death by Audio, and Vice moving in. But I think that at that point, it had been, depending who you ask, 10 to 12 to 14 years, which is a lot longer than most of these things last for. I think that you were looking at a time when just the currency of bands and guitar music period had shifted.

1:07:38Emilie:You know, I think that by 2013, 14, 15, you know, you were looking at a lot of artists like Kendrick Lamar and Miguel and Janelle Monae moving in. And the bands that had been of prominence, you know, Animal Collective, Grizzly Bear, TV on the radio, they either kind of went on hiatus or just went off and were doing their own thing. So, yeah, I think that, you know, just sheer longevity was part of it. And I think that it was around the time that it was 12 years of Michael Bloomberg. You know what I mean? The city was just a fundamentally different place in 2014. And when he started, the pool parties had ended and their place was, you know, Smorgasburg, where you would go and have like a$15 ramen burger.

1:08:22Emilie:that for better or worse was the shift i think culturally in the city and you could make the case that it kind of just migrated elsewhere i don't pretend to have my finger on it in the same way but i i do think that by that point just the idea of like an indie band being something that everybody was excited about had just kind of gotten old and had become something else yeah

1:08:49Ronen Givony:Yeah, there was kind of a shift in the zeitgeist, although rock and roll seems to be alive and well again, maybe in a different way. I don't know if you think of someone like Geese is coming. They're obviously synonymous with New York, but I don't know if there's like a synonymous with a scene in the same way that Geese would have been if they came around.

1:09:06Emilie:I was thinking about that a lot. Yeah. Like, I mean, like, is Geese an indie Brooklyn band? I mean, they must be. What else are they? But, you know, whereas, you know, a group like Future Islands, let's just say when they had their moment on David Letterman, you know, that was a band that their first 10 shows or something were probably with Death by Audio and with Todd. And so they were so like fundamentally associated with that scene. Geese, I mean, I think it's it's really cool that, you know, they have people excited and they have, you know, just it's been a while since a New York band has registered.

1:09:40Emilie:But I don't know for some reason, I don't think of them as like as having come up through that world. Do you guys?

1:09:47Ronen Givony:I think I think of them as coming up through like it's not exactly conservatory, but they they come up through like a like a rock school in Brooklyn. And this has yielded some debates in the Cujoflex discord, Cujo's discord about whether, you know, the wave of the future is not going to be artists that come out of scenes or the artists that come out of conservatories. Something to consider, because that's like a nurturing environment in a similar way.

1:10:11Emilie:I think the Chicago scene is really cool. And I think that all the bands that Matador is signing, starting with Horse Girl, are really exciting. And they seem to me like kind of more of that pipeline than Geese. But yeah, I don't know. I agree with you. I think that we seem to be kind of shifting back toward band mode, which is not a bad thing.

1:10:33Ronen Givony:I also, and I think I've said this on a past episode when we were also talking about the Singies, but I see them much more as like sort of the American extension, along with a few other bands of this kind of tendency towards both like kind of classical training turned into experimental and dissonant music that's been coming out of South London for a minute now. um like i see them as on the same trajectory or like coming from the same sort of ethos and vibe as bands like black country new road shame i mean going back a little farther this is all like the windmill scene in south hondon like goat girl uh black midi the originators kind of of that is the fat white family um but there's just like a lot of like weird music coming from kids who maybe kind to have classical training or conservatory backgrounds that are going back to analog but it's to make this sound that's very visceral and like punk adjacent and like organic in its means of expression and i wonder anything maybe that has to do that's maybe more of like a spiritual ethos that has been that sort of international or not necessarily localized to a scene but to like a feeling that has been allowed to spread i don't know because of the internet i don't know But sounds have spread internationally since pop music was being made.

1:11:54Ronen Givony:But you know what I'm saying? It feels more generational than localized to a particular scene, as far as Geese goes, in my opinion. Are you saying that you think Geese might be aware of that scene or connected to it? I don't know if it's the windmill scene or South London specifically, but I think as bands like Black Midi and Black Country New Road, etc., have gotten traction, and that sound has become much more celebrated and also commonplace, I think, among younger generations. I think that's part of what's getting picked up on. And I think, you know, geese obviously has brought more of like a television and like New York flavor to their sound than those.

1:12:29Ronen Givony:But I see them really of a piece. And then, you know, what I was seeing in like the Montreal scene back in November when I was there, similar kind of stuff. But again, I think it's maybe more generational than localized, or maybe there are through threads between all of these cities, you know, amongst what young people are experiencing in life there that's allowing that to happen. But yeah.

1:12:49Emilie:Do you guys think if a young band were inspired by Keys or Horse Girl, would they play today at where? Trans Picos? Or where would their first or second gig be?

1:13:01Ronen Givony:I was talking to, I met the rapper Xavier Sovaste the other day. And he said that his first show was at Trans Picos, which I thought was really cool. i've been surprised well not that surprising actually um i don't know i can only speak to la but also i think that sound is happening here a little bit i mean like shoegaze is absolutely massive here as far as like actual local bands not bands that have moved to la but bands that are coming up out of here there's been like a real experimental noise and shoegaze has been really like bubbling up in la and because there's a paucity of local media you're not hearing about it that much but but yeah they'd start it like here like this diy venue probably like non plus ultra not diy but our zebulon right like zebulon here is like putting on a lot of cool shit for local bands um that's cool for first looks so that kind of leads me to our last question which is does this story feel open and shut like something that was possible because things were at one point in this area of the city cheaper more accessible but then couldn't happen again Or do you think there are parts of this sort of Brooklyn DIY ethos that can be extrapolated from this and applied to fostering culture in the city that New York is becoming or, you know, the city that L.A.

1:14:20Ronen Givony:is becoming? Like we don't even though there are, you know, Transpicos is still around, Market Hotel is still around. It is not the same. Like I don't think that you can say that there is this DIY infrastructure to the same extent that there was in the past.

1:14:36Emilie:Yeah, I mean, if you had asked me this, you know, a year or two ago before I was done, is this story open or closed? I think I would have said it seemed closed because there just didn't seem to be anything like these venues or just the scene or this ecosystem as you're calling it around. And two years later, I feel a little bit different. I don't know. You know, I was in L.A. in November with Sigur Rós, and that was when the election here happened. And for the first time, literally, that I can ever remember, people in California were like, I want to go to New York. Like, I'm curious about what's happening in New York right now.

1:15:11Emilie:You know, just the other day, I got a newsletter that focuses on classical stuff. And there was an announcement about a Julius Eastman piece called Feminine that was being played here. And I hadn't heard about the show. I instantly clicked on tickets to buy myself a pair and it was already sold out. And so I thought to myself, like, OK, like, you know, say what you want about New York. It's still a place where this random Julius Eastman performance is going to sell out. And there's still, you know, 100 weirdos here who are going to go to it. I feel like it's certainly been dormant for a while, but it does seem like it's looking up at the moment and it feels like a good moment to be in New York.

1:15:47Ronen Givony:And is it happening in similar types of spaces or are people kind of making things work in other contexts? And could that be sort of like an extension of the DIY ethos, if that makes sense?

1:15:59Emilie:I think that there's still the same number of things going on in terms of, you know, little clubs and galleries and lofts. And it might be happening now more in Ridgewood, say, than in Greenpoint. But, you know, I think that that sort of thing is going to be happening sort of always. But what's different now is that, you know, there really isn't much institutional support for any of this in New York or the rest of the country. And so I do think that if you're going to be an artist and you're going to just try to make it happen here, it's going to be DIY because it's either that or nothing. You know what I mean?

1:16:37Emilie:And so I don't have too much worry about that kind of strain persisting here.

1:16:43Ronen Givony:It might be in a venue that is legal instead of semi-legal.

1:16:46Emilie:And that's okay. Yeah.

1:16:48Ronen Givony:All right, Ronan Giveny, thank you so much for coming on. We love the book. It is out on March 3rd. Where can you get it and how can people follow your work?

1:16:58Emilie:Yeah, you can order it at any of the usual online suspects. And there's an usvthem Instagram and sub stack where I've been posting some posters and flyers from the era and a couple of excerpts. I'm going to be doing a couple of release events too that I will be talking about through there. Just want to say thank you guys for having me. And Emily, I feel like you've been quietly and visibly making this book better for a lot longer than I deserve. So really, thank you. It was really written for people who were there and who felt like I did strongly about it. And I hope you feel like it lives up to it.

1:17:34Ronen Givony:I do. Thank you so much. It was a pleasure to work with you on it. And I think people who are around are going to find this really beautiful and special.

1:17:43Emilie:Thanks, guys.

1:17:49Ronen Givony:This episode of The Culture Journalist was produced and edited by Emily Friedlander and me, Andrea Dominick. To check out more, head to our sub stack. That's theculturejournalist.substack.com. And if you like what you're hearing, leave a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or share us with friends to help support independent journalism.