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 every