Floating on and selling out: 2004 was the year "indie" lost all meaning

Can you feel nostalgic for something that never happened? If so, the recent Paramount Plus series Lolla: The Story of Lollapalooza offers up a few hauntological pangs for Lollapalooza 2004. That year the venerable music festival was supposed to tour sixteen cities, with a two-day bill—headlined by Morrissey, Sonic Youth, Modest Mouse, and a newly reunited Pixies on one day, and jam-and-jam-adjacent bands like The String Cheese Incident and Gomez on the other—that was meant to return Lollapalooza to its more “alternative” roots, after a shaky 2003 comeback had gone heavy on chug-rockers like Audioslave and Incubus. Lollapalooza would “embody the spirit of the gypsy!” once more, its co-founder Perry Farrell gushed, while Farrell’s less-poetic partner, Marc Geiger, swooned that they were newly refocused on “eclectic music not driven by the commercial marketplace.” It was a prophecy quickly fulfilled when the whole thing was scrapped due to low ticket sales.

There were lots of reasons why Lollapalooza 2004 failed to launch. It was a dismal year for summer tours in general. Lollapalooza was facing increasingly stiff competition from the other festivals it had inspired, like the Warped Tour, Bonnaroo, and Coachella. And as contemporary critics pointed out, its lineup appealed primarily to aging Gen-Xers, who had neither the time nor the lower backs to expend on music festivals anymore, and whose interest in jam bands likely ranged from nil to “vaguely familiar with Phish.” But in Lolla, Geiger suggests the death of Lollapalooza 2004 represented a more existential crisis. “We’d been through so much, the ups and downs,” he laments, over the kind of somber synth tones normally reserved for Dateline. “Trying to stay on edge where there just isn’t an edge anymore.” 

This elusive “edge” had bedeviled Lollapalooza since its beginning in 1991, of course, when the festival’s tidy commercialization of the counterculture had seemed so immediately obvious, it only took The Simpsons five years to make fun of it. But by 2004, the notion that there was any “edge” left to exploit felt especially quaint. “Alternative” music had been languishing for nearly a decade beneath a sloppy glurge of post-grunge, rap-rock, nu-metal, and third-wave ska. Around the turn of the millennium, groups like The Strokes, The White Stripes, and The Yeah Yeah Yeahs had been hailed as the “saviors of rock” just for wresting the genre away from the aggro mooks, playing music—although tagged with Orwellian Newspeak labels like “neo-garage,” “new new wave,” and “post-punk revival”—that was more broadly lumped under the catchall of “indie.” And for a few glorious years, indie had owned whatever “edge” still remained. 

But by 2004, indie music was suddenly everywhere, its success driven not only by the commercial marketplace, but by actual commercials. It had never been more massive, nor more mainstream. It had never been more meaningless.

What had “indie” ever meant, if anything? Here I’ll ease my creaky bones down onto this gnarled tree stump and explain that, in the olden days, “indie” used to mean that your music was released on an independent label, whether by circumstance or some ethical choice. But by 2004, those distinctions had all but disappeared. It wasn’t just that The Strokes, The White Stripes, and The Yeah Yeah Yeahs had all signed to major labels. It was that the Internet was making labels themselves largely irrelevant. In the great, open-air bazaar of MP3 downloads, there was no longer any practical difference between an “indie” band and a major-label one. 

More abstractly, “indie” had once suggested a kind of hip erudition, the kind you had to work for by going to small club shows, scouring zines, or withstanding the withering condescension of a record-store clerk. But the Internet changed that, too. As LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy observed in 2001’s “Losing My Edge,” there was now an entire generation of “Internet seekers” who could torrent a band’s discography overnight. And in 2004, just about everyone had heard of Pitchfork, whose 9.7 review of Arcade Fire’s Funeral that September catapulted the Montreal group to overnight success, and anointed Pitchfork itself as a cultural authority capable of making or breaking bands with a single glowing endorsement or snarkily deployed GIF.

“Indie,” like “alternative” before it, had always required some baseline to oppose, and that was still mostly true in 2004. Glossy pop, rap, and R&B ruled the radio. The early ‘00s were the era of the “socialite,” some of whom even had their own hit albums, and broadly speaking, post-9/11 America had curled up into a lotus-eating haze of late-capitalist nightmare reality shows like The Simple Life, The Swan, and The Apprentice that celebrated excess and artificiality. The nation’s number-one series, American Idol, manufactured new pop stars with the audience’s enthusiastic participation, and its winners—and even some of its losers—dominated the Billboard charts. Compared to this, indie bands earned points just for being organic, their ranks composed of working (albeit largely upper-middle-class white) musicians, rather than karaoke avatars anointed by Simon Cowell. 

“Indie” still suggested some defiantly anti-commercial quirk—a rawness to the production, a lack of crowd-pleasing hooks, or lyrics that tended toward abstraction and ironic deflection. Often it just meant your singer had a weird voice, the kind the American Idol judges would have laughed at. But by 2004, few of these things proved barriers to mainstream success anymore. Arcade Fire might have used eccentric instruments like accordions and xylophones, and had a singer who sounded like he had a nasty sinus infection, but its “whoa-ohs” already seemed destined for arenas. “Maps,” The Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ breakthrough single from late 2003, was the kind of softly soaring emo ballad that programmers could slot seamlessly next to Norah Jones. And as for Modest Mouse, the most nominally “indie” band on that discarded Lollapalooza 2004 lineup… well, Isaac Brock still had a weird voice. But when he put it over a shuffling disco beat in service of a breezy, sing-along hook, it spawned one of the year’s biggest hits.

“Float On,” from Modest Mouse’s 2004 major-label debut Good News For People Who Love Bad News, could be heard blaring from every Top 40 radio station and frat party that summer, alongside two of the year’s other indie-ish breakouts, The Killers’ “Mr. Brightside” and Franz Ferdinand’s “Take Me Out.” Maybe you wouldn’t have expected to hear “Float On” on American Idol (that would take three more years), or covered by Kidz Bop (one). But it was part of a growing wave of idiosyncratic hits by indie bands that, as Entertainment Weekly observed in 2004, were suddenly huge with the same teens and tweens who would normally be “buying Britney Spears CDs.” 

Entertainment Weekly even suggested a name for this semi-movement: “Seth Cohen rock,” after the character on the mega-popular Fox drama The O.C. whose incessant referencing of Death Cab for Cutie and Bright Eyes had helped propel those bands to stardom (in addition to making “indie” a convenient screenwriter’s shorthand ever after). By the midpoint of The O.C.’s first season, the show was an acknowledged tastemaker, credited with introducing Middle America to scores of just-under-the-radar artists whose songs wallpapered its sad-teen montages, and were then collected on its official soundtracks (three of which arrived in 2004 alone). Some of these bands—including Modest Mouse and The Killers—would go on to appear on The O.C. itself. In fact, arguably the year’s most significant indie-rock event wasn’t at some festival, but in the January 7 episode where The O.C.’s cast attends a show by the L.A. indie-poppers Rooney, a band it hyped up with the same awed reverence that Full House once engendered for the Beach Boys. 

“The O.C. effect” was considerable. After its appearance, Rooney’s record sales jumped by 200 percent. By November, Death Cab for Cutie had signed with Atlantic Records. Even Seth Cohen’s TV dad, Peter Gallagher, put out an album. But in a bigger, much more lasting way, The O.C. had brought indie out of the fringes and into everyone’s living rooms. Now even the uber-rich teens who lived in palatial, Scarface-style beach mansions could get down with the likes of Rooney. Welcome to the monoculture, bitch.

As The O.C.’s creators have acknowledged, a lot of this came down to timing. The O.C. arrived at a crucial, if fleeting moment when the traditional means for discovering new music had all but fallen apart. Pitchfork could only review so much; its reach only extended so far. MTV had long since relegated music videos to its sister channel, MTV2—and with the cancellation of 120 Minutes in 2003, it no longer had any showcase for breaking lesser-known bands. Napster was dead, and although other peer-to-peer networks like Limewire and Kazaa continued to be great resources for downloading viruses disguised as Metallica MP3s, you still kind of had to know what you were looking for to use them. 

In 2004, soundtracks briefly filled that curatorial void, as TV and movie producers pulled songs from their own iPods and started building entire scenes around their emotional beats. They even started writing the artists themselves into the scripts—as in arguably the year’s second-most important indie moment, when Natalie Portman promised that listening to The Shins would “change your life” in Garden State.

It seems kind of ludicrous now (and frankly it did back then, too). But again, you couldn’t argue with the results: The Shins’ first post-Garden State album debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard charts, James Mercer has been obligated to play “New Slang” at every show since, and even Republican vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance briefly enjoyed an indie phase. And after Garden State took home the Grammy for best soundtrack, indie became the default score for everything: in movies like Juno, (500) Days Of Summer, and Twilight; on TV shows like How I Met Your Mother and Gossip Girl; in the background of your own melodramatic break-ups and trips to Urban Outfitters. Indie, already nebulously defined as a genre, had become more like a “vibe.”

Perhaps what was most notable about indie’s sudden ascent to the mainstream was the change in those artists’ attitudes. For much of the lifespan of alternative music, there had been no greater crime than the appearance of “selling out.” Most of those first-generation alt-rock bands would have revolted over their songs being used in commercials, while the very idea of appearing on a show like The O.C. would have been seen as cred-destroying and deeply uncool. On the rare occasion that someone dared to cross over, they tended to laugh it off as a subversive piss-take, like that time The Flaming Lips “rocked the house” on Beverly Hills 90210. 

But by 2004, no one really cared about that stuff anymore. When The Killers released “Glamorous Indie Rock & Roll” as the bonus track to 2004’s Hot Fuss—with singer Brandon Flowers sneering at rote hipster signifiers like thrift stores and coffee shops—the band seemed to draw a line in the ideological sand. “There’s so much snobbery,” Flowers later recalled. “It’s bullshit. I just didn’t want to be like that. We like big songs and we’re going to embrace it.” This new wave of indie bands made no apologies for its ambitions, and felt zero shame about  “selling out.” 

You could hardly blame them. In 2004, there just wasn’t much else left to sell. By 2005, iPod sales had quadrupled, and although CD sales briefly ticked up in 2004—spurring some label heads to express cautious optimism to Rolling Stone, like Belfast shipbuilders proudly slapping the hull of the Titanic—this would prove to be less a rebound than a death rattle. Some of those young indie fans were still buying music, but they were also burning those songs to blank CDs and passing them around to their friends. Licensing—to a TV show, to a commercial, to some compilation for Levi’s—wasn’t just the quickest route to exposure for a struggling indie band. Increasingly, it was the only way for them to get paid.

“Selling out” was therefore no longer seen as a betrayal of indie’s ideals, but a pragmatic means of survival. As Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock put it in a 2004 interview with The A.V. Club, “People who don’t have to make their living playing music can bitch about my principles while they spend their parents’ money or wash dishes for some asshole.” When PopMatters asked The Walkmen’s Hamilton Leithauser how he might respond to fans who would accuse the group of “selling out” for playing The O.C., he was equally blunt. “I’m not sure what I’d say,” Leithauser mused. “Maybe ‘fuck you.’” 

By 2004, “indie” had abandoned the hoary old ethics that had once defined it, taken down the barriers that set it apart, and willingly embraced its reign in the monoculture. But this would also prove to be the year that the monoculture began to disappear, in ways that would prove both reinvigorating and devastating for the genre.

Let’s start with the good: Yes, the Internet was killing the music industry, but it was also giving new artists more avenues than ever to find an audience. Pitchfork’s success led to a mini-explosion of other aspiring cultural influencers, as a lot of the dumb money that once poured out of record labels was suddenly being funneled into “new media.” (And as someone who owes their own precarious career to that mid-‘00s boom, all I can say is, thanks.) By 2005, a band could blow up after having its MP3s featured on a site like Stereogum or Gorilla Vs. Bear, or even by uploading them directly to MySpace, which made early viral stars out of artists like Arctic Monkeys and Lily Allen. 

This was the dawn of “blog rock,” and while the playing field that was leveled in 2004 ended up creating a glut of middling bands—a post-Strokes rush of countless The Somethings comprising what Esquire’s Dave Holmes would later affectionately term “The Deleted Years,” and that the ever-clever British press derided as “landfill indie”—it also allowed some of the less commercial acts to sidestep the usual gatekeepers, without compromising their sound. Indie started to embrace a more diverse span of artists, many of whom took the genre to far weirder places. 

You can see this transition arrive in Lizzy Goodman’s oral history Meet Me in the Bathroom, where 2004 dawns like a Monday morning for bands like The Strokes, Interpol, and The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, who all seemed to end that year burned out and creatively spent. But then Goodman’s story shifts to a new generation of indie groups, many of them made up of serious-minded, conservatory-schooled kids who cared less about garage-rock purism—who cared less about genres, period—and who seemed more interested in chasing interesting time signatures than good times. Bands like TV On The Radio, Grizzly Bear, and The Secret Machines (all of whom released debut albums in 2004), along with The Walkmen, The National, and, soon, Vampire Weekend were making music that didn’t fit neatly into indie’s post-post-punk continuum, many of them boasting complex rhythms and textures, strange samples and unusual instrumentation, and influences that ranged from krautrock to Tin Pan Alley, industrial to African pop.

Notably, a lot of these bands weren’t all that cool—and that’s what made them exciting. “By mid-2004, most music fans had grown just as tired of smug old Brooklyn as they were of self-insulating ‘irony’,” Pitchfork’s Amanda Petrusich wrote in her end-of-year appraisal of Animal Collective’s Sung Tongs. “Global conflicts were escalating to disastrous levels, politics seemed hopelessly stunted, and warmth and compassion suddenly (and unexpectedly) seemed to become the most appealing aesthetic choices.” That year, Pitchfork ranked Sung Tongs—a record filled with “easy singalongs, gleeful hollers of ‘meow!,’ and man-made bird twitters”—as the second-best record of 2004, behind only Arcade Fire’s Funeral, an album that trafficked in similarly earnest celebrations of “reconciliation, acceptance, and hope.” Both of these records sat atop a list filled with other emotive, whimsical, gleefully rainbow-hued albums by the likes of Joanna Newsom, The Fiery Furnaces, and The Go! Team. 

This shift from irony to sincerity paralleled the changing of the guard from Gen-Xers to millennials, who increasingly prized artists that projected vulnerability, and who made music that was more suited for coffee shops than cocaine binges. “Music for cats, music for couples,” as TV On The Radio’s Jaleel Bunton puts it in Meet Me In The Bathroom—and if you had at least one unnecessary and weird instrument in your band, so much the better. 

“Indie,” while perhaps never more meaningless as a descriptor, had, almost paradoxically, also become its most self-consciously meaningful. The need to distinguish themselves, again, from the alt-rock mainstream pushed artists to experiment beyond the guitar, bass, and drums hegemony that had long held the genre in its grip. The expectation—or fear—of having their lyrics picked apart by a site like Pitchfork forced them to try a little harder to say something that could justify weeks of breathless analysis by the blogosphere.  And now they could be as niche as they liked, because it was theoretically easier than ever to find the one listener who would love them, if only on shuffle.

The only downside, of course, is that most of these acts weren’t making any money. By 2004, there was now an entire generation that had grown up believing that music was a free and endlessly renewable resource. Within a few short years, the industry would give up trying to convince them otherwise. In 2005, MP3 blogs and MySpace were joined by streaming services like Pandora and (beginning in 2008) Spotify, which quickly found newer, more innovative ways to bleed those artists to death, paying them just fractions of a cent for every spin. 

In the end, the technology-enabled ease of not just producing songs yourself, but promoting and distributing them as well, proved to be most beneficial to artists who could do it alone from their laptops—pop, hip-hop, and electronic musicians, not rock bands still hashing out albums in rehearsal rooms. Social media and YouTube, the replacements for videos on MTV, created a faux-intimacy that came to favor artists with strong personalities and interesting backstories; having a good “narrative” became nearly as important as the music itself. And pretty soon, simply being an organic-seeming group of working musicians just didn’t cut it anymore (although in terms of having a financial safety net to support them, being upper-middle-class definitely still helped).

So, can you feel nostalgic for something that never happened? When the “indie revival” first reached its peak exposure in 2004, it suggested a rising tide that would lift up other smart, singular artists, who would then reshape the mainstream. But a lot of those mid–’00s bands—even the really talented ones, even the ones who tried “selling out”—didn’t live to see the end of the Obama administration. (Thanks, Obama!) Most of the “indie” bands that truly flourished, like The Killers or Kings of Leon, were those who steered further into the middle-of-the-road, or who made the kind of strummy emotional wallpaper most suited for Grey’s Anatomy. Today, some of the old indie-rock lifers still pull respectable, mid-sized theater crowds, and they remain mainstays on the second tiers of music festivals. But they also have to keep working and touring year-round, sometimes supplementing their art with day jobs, because the royalties that might have once kept them afloat between releases have all dried up. 

Maybe it’s only natural, then, to wax a little sentimental about the year when “indie” still felt like some sort of burgeoning movement. Lately I’ve noticed a growing wistfulness for that mid-’00s era, as epitomized by the “indie sleaze” trend and the Instagram account of the same name. There, under ancient scans from Vice magazine and photos of SXSW parties culled from abandoned Flickr accounts, you’ll find younger millennials and Generation Z-types pining in retrospective envy for the days of Misshapes parties, American Apparel V-necks, and Motorola Sidekicks. Some of these kids (or so I’ve read) have even started smoking cigarettes again. 

But even more than the fashions or the specific bands, what a lot of these people seem to be longing for is that brief blip of the indie monoculture that arrived in 2004, just before it was lost forever. Back then there was still the illusion that “indie” music was part of some larger scene—that we were all still discovering new sounds together, before everyone got lost down their own musical rabbit holes and siloed behind their increasingly niche cultural walls. Today no one even watches the same movies or TV shows anymore, and getting your song on a soundtrack no longer guarantees mass exposure. Today’s soundtracks—and more importantly, the TikToks that repurpose them—seem much likelier to bring renewed interest to some nostalgic, cleverly recontextualized hit, rather than break new artists.

Today there is no “edge,” of course, only individual preferences. “Indie” no longer stands in opposition to much of anything. Outside of Marc Geiger in Lolla, I can’t remember the last time someone used the word “edge” unironically. The National and St. Vincent are writing songs for Taylor Swift, and “mindie” singers like Charli XCX and Carly Rae Jepsen walk a blurred middle ground that’s equally inspired by ‘00s-era indie and the kind of Britney Spears-led pop that the genre was supposedly rejecting. And maybe it’s not just indie that’s lost all meaning, but “genre” itself, as the young musicians who were raised on the Internet naturally learned to absorb and synthesize a little bit of everything all at once.

This isn’t a wholly bad thing. Those old divisions were always a little elitist, anyway, steeped in sublimated notions of classism, racism, and misogyny—and frankly, it just seems kind of pointless, not to mention gauche and old-fashioned, to care too much about anyone else’s music tastes these days. The rejection of snobbery that began in 2004, along with the embrace of warmth, compassion, and commercial ambition, has fostered a less judgmental culture where “let people enjoy things” has become the law of the land, and “selling out” has been replaced by the philosophy of “get that bag.” There’s just too much new music for any one person to consume—and too little money going to those who make it—to weigh its practice or enjoyment down further with inflated meanings and made-up rules.

“Indie-rock” itself isn’t dead, even though we seem obligated to check its pulse every few years. I still receive between ten and twenty press releases a day for new artists, and I’d estimate a good 80 percent of them toss in the word “indie,” often in tandem with the word “sensibility.”  It’s as meaningless as ever, even though you still kind of know what it means. There are currently hundreds, if not thousands of these acts plugging away on Soundcloud and Bandcamp and inside your local clubs, and many of them are as good—or better!—as all those now-“classic” indie bands. They’re just not making the music that gets the largest numbers of people excited anymore, at least not at the moment. Even Pitchfork has long since turned its spotlight toward rappers and pop stars, because that’s where the clicks lie. For now, indie-rock has returned to being a largely niche interest, and maybe that’s where it belongs.

Lollapalooza survived too, by the way. Just this month, it hosted another sellout crowd inside Chicago’s Grant Park, where the festival first rebounded and settled down in 2005, thriving there ever since. This year’s lineup was once again ruled by pop and hip-hop acts like Megan Thee Stallion, Future x Metro Boomin, and Chappell Roan (along with a set from The Killers, who are now firmly the big-song classic-rock act they always aspired to be). Other recent Lollapalooza headliners, like Drake, Billie Eilish, Miley Cyrus, and Post Malone, have moved the festival about as far away from its “alternative” roots as you can get—but again, we’re also about twenty years away from when that really mattered to anyone. 

Like we all first started to realize in 2004, eventually you have to let go and stop worrying about “edge,” just like most of us eventually stop going to music festivals, and start concerning yourself less with what music means to the culture than what it means to you, specifically. Maybe it’s a sad story, but it’s also a hopeful one. It could use an indie song.