August 24, 2025 • 19 mins
The definitive history of twenty-first-century indie rock-from Iron & Wine and Death Cab for Cutie to Phoebe Bridgers and St. Vincent-and how the genre shifted the musical landscape and shaped a generation
Maybe you caught a few exhilarating seconds of "Teen Age Riot" on a nearby college radio station while scanning the FM dial in your parents' car. Maybe your friend invited you to a shabby local rock club and you ended up having a religious experience with Neutral Milk Hotel. Perhaps you were scandalized and tantalized upon sneaking Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville from an older sibling's CD collection, or you vowed to download every Radiohead song you could find on LimeWire because they were the favorite band of the guy you had a major crush on.
However you found your way into indie rock, once you were a listener, it felt like being part of a secret club of people who had discovered something special, something secret, something superior. In Such Great Heights, music journalist Chris DeVille brilliantly captures this cultural moment, from the early aughts and the height of indie rock, until the 2010s as streaming upends the industry and changes music forever. DeVille covers the gamut of bands-like Arcade Fire, TV On The Radio, LCD Soundsystem, Haim, Pavement, and Bon Iver-and in the vein of Chuck Klosterman's The Nineties, touches on staggering pop culture moments, like finding your new favorite band on MySpace and the life-changing O.C. soundtrack.
Nerdy, fun, and a time machine for millennials, Such Great Heights is about how subculture becomes pop culture, how capitalism consumes what's "cool," who gets to define what's hip and why, and how an "underground" genre shaped our lives.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/arroe-collins-like-it-s-live--4113802/support.
Maybe you caught a few exhilarating seconds of "Teen Age Riot" on a nearby college radio station while scanning the FM dial in your parents' car. Maybe your friend invited you to a shabby local rock club and you ended up having a religious experience with Neutral Milk Hotel. Perhaps you were scandalized and tantalized upon sneaking Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville from an older sibling's CD collection, or you vowed to download every Radiohead song you could find on LimeWire because they were the favorite band of the guy you had a major crush on.
However you found your way into indie rock, once you were a listener, it felt like being part of a secret club of people who had discovered something special, something secret, something superior. In Such Great Heights, music journalist Chris DeVille brilliantly captures this cultural moment, from the early aughts and the height of indie rock, until the 2010s as streaming upends the industry and changes music forever. DeVille covers the gamut of bands-like Arcade Fire, TV On The Radio, LCD Soundsystem, Haim, Pavement, and Bon Iver-and in the vein of Chuck Klosterman's The Nineties, touches on staggering pop culture moments, like finding your new favorite band on MySpace and the life-changing O.C. soundtrack.
Nerdy, fun, and a time machine for millennials, Such Great Heights is about how subculture becomes pop culture, how capitalism consumes what's "cool," who gets to define what's hip and why, and how an "underground" genre shaped our lives.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/arroe-collins-like-it-s-live--4113802/support.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Good morning, Chris. How are you doing today?
Speaker 2 (00:02):
Doing great? How are you Errow?
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Absolutely fantastic and very excited to share a conversation with you,
because we're at a crossroads right now. And here's here's
why I say that. And the importance of this book
is that just the other day, as a generation Zeer
looks at me and says that Robert Plant, he's such
a great indie artist. And I look at that. I mean,
I guess in their world without them doing the homework,
and they see this solo performer still out there, is
(00:27):
he an indie artist?
Speaker 2 (00:29):
I mean, I don't know what label he's on.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
You know, I wouldn't call him an indie artist, but
you're right that that is Like, that's a big theme
of the book is like what what.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Does what does indy even mean?
Speaker 1 (00:43):
You're right? So yeah, because so many bands. I remember
back in the nineteen nineties when I was jocking seven
to midnight and even doing the morning show, a lot
of these bands would come in and they say, don't
call me an indie band. We're alternative, we own an alternative.
Do not call me an indie band. And that was
kind of the beginning of a war as well.
Speaker 3 (01:04):
Yeah, the difference between you know, branding yourself as indie
versus alternative. Yeah, alternatives seemed like it was something at
least in the nineties, it seemed like it was something
that was happening on the radio on MTV. Alternative was like,
you know, a band of that ILK that was actually
like had the chance of making it, or like was
(01:26):
trying to make it, or you know, was reaching a
larger audience. And Indy was definitely more the underground side
of that it at least as I understood it. But yeah, Indy,
I think in the two thousands, Indy started to take
on a meaning sort of similar to what alternative became,
(01:47):
maybe not quite as like hard hitting as you know,
you think about alternative, I feel like you think about
grunge and you think about Nirvana and Pearl Jam and stuff,
And with Indy, some of these bands are a little
bit softer, kind of more influenced by like rim sort
of the college rock thing. But yeah, so, as I
trace in the book, it's like you got this breakthrough
(02:09):
in the two thousands where indie bands start getting featured
on like the OC and even like Grey's Anatomy, and
you got the Internet making it so much more accessible
for people to discover these bands. And at the same time,
the Internet kind of jumbling all the genres together, so
you get a lot more kind of genre hybrid kind
(02:29):
of music and MySpace and iTunes happening, and there's all
these factors, and there's even philosophical factors, like you know
within the music critic community, where like people kind of
warm up to the idea of pop music as something
to be taken seriously instead of written off, and so
you end up getting indie music really transforms over the
(02:50):
course of a couple of decades. And you know, that
was my initial subtitle for the book, is How Indie
Rock Went Pop. We ended up retitling it, but that
was definitely something I had in mind as a through line.
Is like this thing that was this kind of esoteric,
(03:11):
off the grid kind of music that I discovered when
I was in high school. It got to the point
where it was like, you know, extremely in the culture
and extremely accessible, and the sound of it and the
culture around it had changed so much.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Well, you're spot on when you say when indie rock
goes popular and the reason, and that really bothered me
deeply back in the nineties because as the music director
of the radio station, I did not want indie music
on the station. And the reason why it had nothing
to do with my ego but everything to do with
trying to protect it in the underground. And I felt
that if we played those songs every two and a
half hours, it was over. Then it was it was
(03:45):
too much out there in front of people and it
was no longer hours to.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
Have mm hmm.
Speaker 3 (03:51):
Yeah, And that's like that that was such an interesting
phenomenon when that stuff did start to blow up. It
was you know, I was somebody who was listening to
that stuff, and I felt like two ways about it.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
You know.
Speaker 3 (04:06):
On the one hand, I felt like very protective, like,
oh no, this is my thing. But on the other hand,
it's like, wow, these bands that I like are you know,
are getting famous and that's so cool for them, and
somehow I felt like it was cool for me, like,
you know, in some sort of parasocial way. So yeah,
(04:28):
it definitely so much about the attitudes around quote unquote
selling out or going pop have changed, and some of
that has been like an economic thing too, where it's
just like it's gotten harder and harder to make a
living as a musician, and so the idea of like
putting your song in a commercial or whatever, like the
(04:50):
I feel like people's attitude in the underground about that
changed a lot, almost out of necessity.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
Yeah, because they're also doing games too. These gamers are
getting these songs long before the radio world, and then
when you tied it up with TikTok, then even that
audience gets gets that song before the radio world gets it.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
Yeah, games are a huge thing.
Speaker 3 (05:12):
I didn't really talk about games in the book, but
I've been writing sort of bonus content on Substack that
I've been calling b sides from the book, and I
wrote one about skate videos and video games where I
talked to a guy who is really big into skateboard
videos back in the two thousands, and he talked about
(05:34):
how that turned him on to a lot of indie
rock stuff, and how skateboarders turned to indie rock for
like sort of a change of pace instead of putting
you know, metal and punk and rap in their videos.
But then that turned into a whole thing about the
Tony Hawk video games, and then you got you know,
certainly you've got the guitar hero and rock band games,
(05:54):
but even like you know, FIFA or NBA two K
or something like That's that was a huge way for
people in my generation to discover a lot of this music.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
You spoke about the underground. You've got one of the
best quotes in here about the underground. Capitalism gets to
consume what's cool, the underground shaped lives. Oh my god.
And you prove that inside these pages.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
Yeah. Thanks. I like to think that I proved it.
It was you know, it was a lot of work.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
There's a lot of research that went into it, and
there's a lot of different factors that are being considered here.
Like I don't think it's just like one story about
one subject, Like you know, it's definitely a story about technology.
Speaker 2 (06:38):
It's a story about fashion. It's a story about like
sort of.
Speaker 3 (06:44):
The idea of cool and the people who chase it,
and like kind of being an early adopter and when
you want to and when you want to define yourself
as a person who's on the cutting edge, what do
you do when everybody else starts to like the stuff
that you like? You've got to find a new cutting edge.
And so all those kind of ideas are happening in
the book. And it was a lot to filter through,
(07:07):
but I think it came out pretty coherent.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
Please do not Move. There's more with Chris Deville coming
up next the name of the book Such Great Heights,
The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion from
Chris Deville. One of the things that I really found
very interesting about the indie rock movement was the fact
that how open they were. In fact, I was doing
some research today about that. Why are singer songwriters so
(07:31):
open to share their story? It's the storytelling and that,
to me is exactly what those musicians of the nineties
going into two thousand were all about. They wanted to
meet you. They wanted to see you at Van Warps.
They wanted to see you in there and be up
close and personal with you. Just ask the right questions, right.
Speaker 3 (07:48):
Yeah, there was definitely sort of an accessibility, a personal
accessibility that was happening there. And that's something that the
Internet really put into overdrive, especially when you get up
to like the MySpace era, where you know, the bands
could just connect directly with the fans and the you know,
(08:11):
the gatekeeping was at a minimum like that. So when
they already had that sort of attitude that you know,
we want to connect with you directly. We want to
put ourselves in the songs. We want to meet you
at the merch table to be able to then expand
that to the whole world through the Internet. That was
(08:31):
a huge factor in all of this.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
I would love to see the research of modern day
bands that are up and coming that are going to
grab this book and they're going to study it. And
the reason why is because they play like they are
indie musicians. They're doing their own internet work, they're doing
their own producing, their own songwriting. You know, they're they're
going out there and shaping a sound of their own,
and even when it comes to promoting, they're doing it
the indie way.
Speaker 3 (08:53):
Yeah, it's interesting because the landscape now is so different
from the one that I was writing about.
Speaker 2 (08:59):
In the book. That's when, you know, at the end
of the.
Speaker 3 (09:03):
Book, I talk about how like when streaming came along,
when social media came along, a lot of the structures
that helped these bands blow up were kind of put
by the wayside. Like you know, if you think about
music blogs being taste makers, like those were kind of
made extinct by social media and streaming. And so, yeah,
(09:29):
now you've got a landscape where theoretically there are fewer gatekeepers,
but you still got there's just so much music being
made and it's so much harder to break through. You
almost have to like catch a freak wave on TikTok
or something in order for your music to break through.
(09:51):
But the ones I think this is true of musicians
and of a lot of people who are trying to
slug it out on a DIY level. That like, for
that connection with the listener directly is a thing that
I think is going to help these bands succeed because yeah,
it's like nowadays, you know, the money is definitely.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
The money in the music business ain't what it used
to be unless.
Speaker 3 (10:17):
You're in the upper one percent, right, and so like, yeah,
to be able to to build like a real coalition
of people who follow you online and to be able
to communicate directly with them and maybe even not signed
to a label depending on the needs of your band. Yeah,
(10:37):
it's it's it's like a whole different game that's being
played now. But I do think that there are lessons
to be learned from this book because history does repeat itself.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
Yeah, I've talked with many musicians about being on that
Spotify list, and they said, yeah, for the ego, it's good,
but it's not going to pay for the engine that
just broke down last night.
Speaker 3 (10:53):
Yeah, it's interesting, like you just don't get a lot
of royalties from streaming unless you're on like, you know,
at Drake or Taylor Swift kind of level, like they're
you know, they're doing fine on streaming income. But like
a band that used to be able to make a
living through selling a few thousand copies of their album,
it's like the equivalent of that, a few thousand people
(11:16):
listening to your album on streaming is just like pennies.
So uh yeah, it's it's definitely uh. But but getting
placed on a playlist, I think you can at least
say for that that it can have an effect where,
you know, maybe it exposes you to a new you know,
(11:37):
a new group of listeners and maybe you can get
a foothold there. It's probably still not the same impact
that you know, being played on the radio would have.
You know, can you tell I'm sucking up to you?
Speaker 1 (11:51):
Oh you got a new song that has come out?
I mean, nowadays when they reach out to me, they go, hey, man,
can you play my song on your podcast? I'm going, dude,
it's a podcast. I can do my best, but it's
a podcast. It's not an outreach of radio stations and things.
But you know what, you have done so much homework
here for those of us that love the history of music.
I mean, you've got several layers in paths here that
(12:11):
and you put it into one place of discovery, and
you're right when when you're going through the pages, you're going, Damn,
I didn't know that. Why why would I Google that
or go to chat GPT? It didn't tell me this? Oh,
because Chris has it, That's why.
Speaker 3 (12:26):
Yeah, I mean, really, some of the stuff in the
book is not really on the Internet anymore, just because
I mean, it's just as hard for media as it
is for bands, you know, And so there's a lot
of dead links. There's a lot of websites that were
there was a time when there was like a flourishing
media ecosystem covering a lot of this stuff too, and
a lot of that withered away. And so I mean,
(12:50):
I'm really grateful for the Wayback Machine because, like I
was able to find a lot of stuff that you know,
maybe isn't actually online at the original site that it's
been archived, but yeah, and you know, I went back
and found a lot of old interviews the artists did.
There's a few interviews that I conducted that you know,
(13:10):
I worked for a website called Stereo Gum, and you know,
I've interviewed bands like Pavement and Run the Jewels and
Tame and Paula and you know a lot of that stuff.
A lot of those you know, were used in the
book as well. But for sure, it's like I think
that there's a very condensed amount of information here, all
(13:34):
in one place, like you said, that you won't get
from just googling around. That's part of the reason that
I wrote the book, too, is because I felt like
this is a story that has been told through blog
posts and social media posts and message boards and stuff,
but isn't maybe totally told in a book before.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
Now, Yeah, because it's all based on but yeah, inside
your book, I feel like that it's not based on
You're giving us fact and that's what I loved to
hear and love to look at us, like, god, dang man,
this is this is great content.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
Thanks. Yeah, I like to think so.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
So now let me ask you a question. First of all,
the name of the book is Such Great Heights, the
complete cultural history of the indie rock Explosion. This moment
in music history changed adult radio. In other words, we
weren't playing Michael Bolton anymore. It was time to rest
Rod Stewart. This movement changed where we were with music
listening on the radio.
Speaker 3 (14:30):
Yeah, I think, you know, the rise of like adult
alternative is definitely a subplot in the book Like and
I think some of the hipster audience that was initially
there for indie rock kind of reacted against that and
for some of the like kind of people who wanted
(14:51):
to be cutting edge chasseemakers. A band like I'm trying
to think of a good example, like The National they were.
They were cool at first, but then you know, it
was like, oh, is that Starbucks music or whatever? And
I'm gonna go listen to this experimental electronic music instead. Uh,
(15:13):
And so I mean that, but I think that those
kinds or Feist is another one like where it's like
she came out of, you know, a very hip band
called Broken Social Scene as well as her Social her
solo career, and then she had the song one, two,
three four in an iTunes or iPod commercial and that
(15:34):
really made her blow up to a whole other level,
and you know, she she was helping to kind of
create that adult alternative sound. But yeah, I mean part
of the book is like what do you do when
you are a people who consider themselves taste makers or
(15:55):
you know, early adopters or cutting edge, Like when everybody
else starts to get into the same stuff that you like,
then it's like.
Speaker 2 (16:06):
Where do you go next?
Speaker 3 (16:07):
And for a lot of hipsters in the two thousands,
it was well, I'm actually gonna instead of pivoting towards
something weirder or more abrasive, I'm gonna pivot towards something
even poppier. Because there was a big push to the
idea that people need to take pop music more seriously
and that maybe people's reasons for not taking pop music
(16:28):
seriously were rooted in like sexism or racism or whatever.
And so you know, within the music critic world that
was kind of shaping the taste of a lot of
this scene. It was like, well, maybe the thing that's
really progressive now is to become more of a pop
band or to like be a person who listens to
indie music and pop music. And so then that inevitably
(16:50):
had an influence on the way that the music developed too.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
Don't you think though, that indie music really started to
rise because we were going through a sound in music
history that we were getting taught of hearing the same
hip hop beat, and it's like we needed something up
to date, we needed something that was going to speak
to us and really relate with our lives, And all
of a sudden, we started making that turn to indy
because it was just something new to have in our life.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
I think that's true.
Speaker 3 (17:14):
I think it was like this was a scene that
existed before, like before it blew up, and you know,
there's been waves. You know, you've got different waves of
underground rock bands that end up kind of breaking through.
This is just one wave that I'm tracking here. But like,
(17:35):
I think for sure that one of the conclusions I
had at the end of the book is like, of
course this stuff blew up because there was maybe it
wasn't accessible through sort of the biggest media apparatus at
the time, but once the Internet came along and made
(17:55):
it easier to find this stuff, Like there was an
audience that didn't even know that it was like it's like, oh,
this is what I needed.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
I didn't even know this is what I needed.
Speaker 3 (18:06):
But yeah, there was probably listeners who didn't fit into
like whatever MTV was playing. I know that, and that
was the case for me. Like I I was really
in high school. I was really into like new metal
like olymp Biscuit and Deftones, porn and all that, and
it was like that was just that was what was
popular around, you know, that was what was around.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
That was what I was aware of.
Speaker 3 (18:29):
But then when I discovered that there was this whole
other kind of world of music that I wasn't privy
to before, it was like this kind of epiphany moment,
like a light bulb going off over my head, like
oh yeah, this is a lot more aligned with like
what I'm interested in and what I like. And so
I mean, I still I still like to go back
(18:51):
and feel some nostalgia for my new metal days, Like
I definitely don't mean to trash that, but yeah, for sure,
it was like, Wow, all of a sudden, there is
a way for a lot more people to discover this,
and you know, we're off to the races.
Speaker 1 (19:09):
Wow, Chris, You've got to come back to the show
anytime in the future. We're just barely scratching the surface
on your research.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
Well, I would be happy to come back anytime you
want to have me.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
Excellent man. Will you be brilliant today?
Speaker 2 (19:21):
Okay, thank you, Sam
Good morning, Chris. How are you doing today?
Speaker 2 (00:02):
Doing great? How are you Errow?
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Absolutely fantastic and very excited to share a conversation with you,
because we're at a crossroads right now. And here's here's
why I say that. And the importance of this book
is that just the other day, as a generation Zeer
looks at me and says that Robert Plant, he's such
a great indie artist. And I look at that. I mean,
I guess in their world without them doing the homework,
and they see this solo performer still out there, is
(00:27):
he an indie artist?
Speaker 2 (00:29):
I mean, I don't know what label he's on.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
You know, I wouldn't call him an indie artist, but
you're right that that is Like, that's a big theme
of the book is like what what.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Does what does indy even mean?
Speaker 1 (00:43):
You're right? So yeah, because so many bands. I remember
back in the nineteen nineties when I was jocking seven
to midnight and even doing the morning show, a lot
of these bands would come in and they say, don't
call me an indie band. We're alternative, we own an alternative.
Do not call me an indie band. And that was
kind of the beginning of a war as well.
Speaker 3 (01:04):
Yeah, the difference between you know, branding yourself as indie
versus alternative. Yeah, alternatives seemed like it was something at
least in the nineties, it seemed like it was something
that was happening on the radio on MTV. Alternative was like,
you know, a band of that ILK that was actually
like had the chance of making it, or like was
(01:26):
trying to make it, or you know, was reaching a
larger audience. And Indy was definitely more the underground side
of that it at least as I understood it. But yeah, Indy,
I think in the two thousands, Indy started to take
on a meaning sort of similar to what alternative became,
(01:47):
maybe not quite as like hard hitting as you know,
you think about alternative, I feel like you think about
grunge and you think about Nirvana and Pearl Jam and stuff,
And with Indy, some of these bands are a little
bit softer, kind of more influenced by like rim sort
of the college rock thing. But yeah, so, as I
trace in the book, it's like you got this breakthrough
(02:09):
in the two thousands where indie bands start getting featured
on like the OC and even like Grey's Anatomy, and
you got the Internet making it so much more accessible
for people to discover these bands. And at the same time,
the Internet kind of jumbling all the genres together, so
you get a lot more kind of genre hybrid kind
(02:29):
of music and MySpace and iTunes happening, and there's all
these factors, and there's even philosophical factors, like you know
within the music critic community, where like people kind of
warm up to the idea of pop music as something
to be taken seriously instead of written off, and so
you end up getting indie music really transforms over the
(02:50):
course of a couple of decades. And you know, that
was my initial subtitle for the book, is How Indie
Rock Went Pop. We ended up retitling it, but that
was definitely something I had in mind as a through line.
Is like this thing that was this kind of esoteric,
(03:11):
off the grid kind of music that I discovered when
I was in high school. It got to the point
where it was like, you know, extremely in the culture
and extremely accessible, and the sound of it and the
culture around it had changed so much.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Well, you're spot on when you say when indie rock
goes popular and the reason, and that really bothered me
deeply back in the nineties because as the music director
of the radio station, I did not want indie music
on the station. And the reason why it had nothing
to do with my ego but everything to do with
trying to protect it in the underground. And I felt
that if we played those songs every two and a
half hours, it was over. Then it was it was
(03:45):
too much out there in front of people and it
was no longer hours to.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
Have mm hmm.
Speaker 3 (03:51):
Yeah, And that's like that that was such an interesting
phenomenon when that stuff did start to blow up. It
was you know, I was somebody who was listening to
that stuff, and I felt like two ways about it.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
You know.
Speaker 3 (04:06):
On the one hand, I felt like very protective, like,
oh no, this is my thing. But on the other hand,
it's like, wow, these bands that I like are you know,
are getting famous and that's so cool for them, and
somehow I felt like it was cool for me, like,
you know, in some sort of parasocial way. So yeah,
(04:28):
it definitely so much about the attitudes around quote unquote
selling out or going pop have changed, and some of
that has been like an economic thing too, where it's
just like it's gotten harder and harder to make a
living as a musician, and so the idea of like
putting your song in a commercial or whatever, like the
(04:50):
I feel like people's attitude in the underground about that
changed a lot, almost out of necessity.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
Yeah, because they're also doing games too. These gamers are
getting these songs long before the radio world, and then
when you tied it up with TikTok, then even that
audience gets gets that song before the radio world gets it.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
Yeah, games are a huge thing.
Speaker 3 (05:12):
I didn't really talk about games in the book, but
I've been writing sort of bonus content on Substack that
I've been calling b sides from the book, and I
wrote one about skate videos and video games where I
talked to a guy who is really big into skateboard
videos back in the two thousands, and he talked about
(05:34):
how that turned him on to a lot of indie
rock stuff, and how skateboarders turned to indie rock for
like sort of a change of pace instead of putting
you know, metal and punk and rap in their videos.
But then that turned into a whole thing about the
Tony Hawk video games, and then you got you know,
certainly you've got the guitar hero and rock band games,
(05:54):
but even like you know, FIFA or NBA two K
or something like That's that was a huge way for
people in my generation to discover a lot of this music.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
You spoke about the underground. You've got one of the
best quotes in here about the underground. Capitalism gets to
consume what's cool, the underground shaped lives. Oh my god.
And you prove that inside these pages.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
Yeah. Thanks. I like to think that I proved it.
It was you know, it was a lot of work.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
There's a lot of research that went into it, and
there's a lot of different factors that are being considered here.
Like I don't think it's just like one story about
one subject, Like you know, it's definitely a story about technology.
Speaker 2 (06:38):
It's a story about fashion. It's a story about like
sort of.
Speaker 3 (06:44):
The idea of cool and the people who chase it,
and like kind of being an early adopter and when
you want to and when you want to define yourself
as a person who's on the cutting edge, what do
you do when everybody else starts to like the stuff
that you like? You've got to find a new cutting edge.
And so all those kind of ideas are happening in
the book. And it was a lot to filter through,
(07:07):
but I think it came out pretty coherent.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
Please do not Move. There's more with Chris Deville coming
up next the name of the book Such Great Heights,
The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion from
Chris Deville. One of the things that I really found
very interesting about the indie rock movement was the fact
that how open they were. In fact, I was doing
some research today about that. Why are singer songwriters so
(07:31):
open to share their story? It's the storytelling and that,
to me is exactly what those musicians of the nineties
going into two thousand were all about. They wanted to
meet you. They wanted to see you at Van Warps.
They wanted to see you in there and be up
close and personal with you. Just ask the right questions, right.
Speaker 3 (07:48):
Yeah, there was definitely sort of an accessibility, a personal
accessibility that was happening there. And that's something that the
Internet really put into overdrive, especially when you get up
to like the MySpace era, where you know, the bands
could just connect directly with the fans and the you know,
(08:11):
the gatekeeping was at a minimum like that. So when
they already had that sort of attitude that you know,
we want to connect with you directly. We want to
put ourselves in the songs. We want to meet you
at the merch table to be able to then expand
that to the whole world through the Internet. That was
(08:31):
a huge factor in all of this.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
I would love to see the research of modern day
bands that are up and coming that are going to
grab this book and they're going to study it. And
the reason why is because they play like they are
indie musicians. They're doing their own internet work, they're doing
their own producing, their own songwriting. You know, they're they're
going out there and shaping a sound of their own,
and even when it comes to promoting, they're doing it
the indie way.
Speaker 3 (08:53):
Yeah, it's interesting because the landscape now is so different
from the one that I was writing about.
Speaker 2 (08:59):
In the book. That's when, you know, at the end
of the.
Speaker 3 (09:03):
Book, I talk about how like when streaming came along,
when social media came along, a lot of the structures
that helped these bands blow up were kind of put
by the wayside. Like you know, if you think about
music blogs being taste makers, like those were kind of
made extinct by social media and streaming. And so, yeah,
(09:29):
now you've got a landscape where theoretically there are fewer gatekeepers,
but you still got there's just so much music being
made and it's so much harder to break through. You
almost have to like catch a freak wave on TikTok
or something in order for your music to break through.
(09:51):
But the ones I think this is true of musicians
and of a lot of people who are trying to
slug it out on a DIY level. That like, for
that connection with the listener directly is a thing that
I think is going to help these bands succeed because yeah,
it's like nowadays, you know, the money is definitely.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
The money in the music business ain't what it used
to be unless.
Speaker 3 (10:17):
You're in the upper one percent, right, and so like, yeah,
to be able to to build like a real coalition
of people who follow you online and to be able
to communicate directly with them and maybe even not signed
to a label depending on the needs of your band. Yeah,
(10:37):
it's it's it's like a whole different game that's being
played now. But I do think that there are lessons
to be learned from this book because history does repeat itself.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
Yeah, I've talked with many musicians about being on that
Spotify list, and they said, yeah, for the ego, it's good,
but it's not going to pay for the engine that
just broke down last night.
Speaker 3 (10:53):
Yeah, it's interesting, like you just don't get a lot
of royalties from streaming unless you're on like, you know,
at Drake or Taylor Swift kind of level, like they're
you know, they're doing fine on streaming income. But like
a band that used to be able to make a
living through selling a few thousand copies of their album,
it's like the equivalent of that, a few thousand people
(11:16):
listening to your album on streaming is just like pennies.
So uh yeah, it's it's definitely uh. But but getting
placed on a playlist, I think you can at least
say for that that it can have an effect where,
you know, maybe it exposes you to a new you know,
(11:37):
a new group of listeners and maybe you can get
a foothold there. It's probably still not the same impact
that you know, being played on the radio would have.
You know, can you tell I'm sucking up to you?
Speaker 1 (11:51):
Oh you got a new song that has come out?
I mean, nowadays when they reach out to me, they go, hey, man,
can you play my song on your podcast? I'm going, dude,
it's a podcast. I can do my best, but it's
a podcast. It's not an outreach of radio stations and things.
But you know what, you have done so much homework
here for those of us that love the history of music.
I mean, you've got several layers in paths here that
(12:11):
and you put it into one place of discovery, and
you're right when when you're going through the pages, you're going, Damn,
I didn't know that. Why why would I Google that
or go to chat GPT? It didn't tell me this? Oh,
because Chris has it, That's why.
Speaker 3 (12:26):
Yeah, I mean, really, some of the stuff in the
book is not really on the Internet anymore, just because
I mean, it's just as hard for media as it
is for bands, you know, And so there's a lot
of dead links. There's a lot of websites that were
there was a time when there was like a flourishing
media ecosystem covering a lot of this stuff too, and
a lot of that withered away. And so I mean,
(12:50):
I'm really grateful for the Wayback Machine because, like I
was able to find a lot of stuff that you know,
maybe isn't actually online at the original site that it's
been archived, but yeah, and you know, I went back
and found a lot of old interviews the artists did.
There's a few interviews that I conducted that you know,
(13:10):
I worked for a website called Stereo Gum, and you know,
I've interviewed bands like Pavement and Run the Jewels and
Tame and Paula and you know a lot of that stuff.
A lot of those you know, were used in the
book as well. But for sure, it's like I think
that there's a very condensed amount of information here, all
(13:34):
in one place, like you said, that you won't get
from just googling around. That's part of the reason that
I wrote the book, too, is because I felt like
this is a story that has been told through blog
posts and social media posts and message boards and stuff,
but isn't maybe totally told in a book before.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
Now, Yeah, because it's all based on but yeah, inside
your book, I feel like that it's not based on
You're giving us fact and that's what I loved to
hear and love to look at us, like, god, dang man,
this is this is great content.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
Thanks. Yeah, I like to think so.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
So now let me ask you a question. First of all,
the name of the book is Such Great Heights, the
complete cultural history of the indie rock Explosion. This moment
in music history changed adult radio. In other words, we
weren't playing Michael Bolton anymore. It was time to rest
Rod Stewart. This movement changed where we were with music
listening on the radio.
Speaker 3 (14:30):
Yeah, I think, you know, the rise of like adult
alternative is definitely a subplot in the book Like and
I think some of the hipster audience that was initially
there for indie rock kind of reacted against that and
for some of the like kind of people who wanted
(14:51):
to be cutting edge chasseemakers. A band like I'm trying
to think of a good example, like The National they were.
They were cool at first, but then you know, it
was like, oh, is that Starbucks music or whatever? And
I'm gonna go listen to this experimental electronic music instead. Uh,
(15:13):
And so I mean that, but I think that those
kinds or Feist is another one like where it's like
she came out of, you know, a very hip band
called Broken Social Scene as well as her Social her
solo career, and then she had the song one, two,
three four in an iTunes or iPod commercial and that
(15:34):
really made her blow up to a whole other level,
and you know, she she was helping to kind of
create that adult alternative sound. But yeah, I mean part
of the book is like what do you do when
you are a people who consider themselves taste makers or
(15:55):
you know, early adopters or cutting edge, Like when everybody
else starts to get into the same stuff that you like,
then it's like.
Speaker 2 (16:06):
Where do you go next?
Speaker 3 (16:07):
And for a lot of hipsters in the two thousands,
it was well, I'm actually gonna instead of pivoting towards
something weirder or more abrasive, I'm gonna pivot towards something
even poppier. Because there was a big push to the
idea that people need to take pop music more seriously
and that maybe people's reasons for not taking pop music
(16:28):
seriously were rooted in like sexism or racism or whatever.
And so you know, within the music critic world that
was kind of shaping the taste of a lot of
this scene. It was like, well, maybe the thing that's
really progressive now is to become more of a pop
band or to like be a person who listens to
indie music and pop music. And so then that inevitably
(16:50):
had an influence on the way that the music developed too.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
Don't you think though, that indie music really started to
rise because we were going through a sound in music
history that we were getting taught of hearing the same
hip hop beat, and it's like we needed something up
to date, we needed something that was going to speak
to us and really relate with our lives, And all
of a sudden, we started making that turn to indy
because it was just something new to have in our life.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
I think that's true.
Speaker 3 (17:14):
I think it was like this was a scene that
existed before, like before it blew up, and you know,
there's been waves. You know, you've got different waves of
underground rock bands that end up kind of breaking through.
This is just one wave that I'm tracking here. But like,
(17:35):
I think for sure that one of the conclusions I
had at the end of the book is like, of
course this stuff blew up because there was maybe it
wasn't accessible through sort of the biggest media apparatus at
the time, but once the Internet came along and made
(17:55):
it easier to find this stuff, Like there was an
audience that didn't even know that it was like it's like, oh,
this is what I needed.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
I didn't even know this is what I needed.
Speaker 3 (18:06):
But yeah, there was probably listeners who didn't fit into
like whatever MTV was playing. I know that, and that
was the case for me. Like I I was really
in high school. I was really into like new metal
like olymp Biscuit and Deftones, porn and all that, and
it was like that was just that was what was
popular around, you know, that was what was around.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
That was what I was aware of.
Speaker 3 (18:29):
But then when I discovered that there was this whole
other kind of world of music that I wasn't privy
to before, it was like this kind of epiphany moment,
like a light bulb going off over my head, like
oh yeah, this is a lot more aligned with like
what I'm interested in and what I like. And so
I mean, I still I still like to go back
(18:51):
and feel some nostalgia for my new metal days, Like
I definitely don't mean to trash that, but yeah, for sure,
it was like, Wow, all of a sudden, there is
a way for a lot more people to discover this,
and you know, we're off to the races.
Speaker 1 (19:09):
Wow, Chris, You've got to come back to the show
anytime in the future. We're just barely scratching the surface
on your research.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
Well, I would be happy to come back anytime you
want to have me.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
Excellent man. Will you be brilliant today?
Speaker 2 (19:21):
Okay, thank you, Sam
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