You’ve probably noticed it by now: the smeared makeup in fashion editorials, the “messy girl” style of gen Z celebrities like Olivia Rodrigo, and the dance-y, LCD Soundsystem-esque sound of artists like the Dare and … well, LCD Soundsystem, whose reunited lineup seems to be playing shows every night now.
The no-longer-so-niche pop star Charli xcx further foregrounded it with her breakout hit Brat this past summer, an album whose inescapable promotional cycle improbably combined an embrace by the Harris/Walz presidential campaign – cue Jake Tapper trying to explain “brat summer” to your parents – and a birthday party photographed by none other than aughts-era shutter bug the Cobrasnake in his trademark high-flash, low-res style.
I’m talking, of course, of the aesthetic retroactively known as “indie sleaze”. Coined in 2021 by a Toronto Instagrammer, the term refers to the decadent, messy, dancefloor-centric music and culture of early 2000s – and stretching an undefined number of years into the 2010s – hipsterdom. (Really, we’re nostalgic for things that happened years ago? What’s next, 10 minutes?) Think the Strokes, Crystal Castles and Kate Moss at Glastonbury. Gen Zers may idealize it as a time before smartphones, cancel culture and fentanyl contamination took the fun and spontaneity out of being young, dumb and full of original formula Sparks. But as someone who was there, I’d urge the children to look a little closer before deciding this way of life is something to celebrate.
On the artistic front, indie sleaze was unoriginal. So much of early 2000s “indie” music (I put “indie” in scare quotes because most of these bands were quickly signed to major labels) was nothing but a backward-looking rerun of movements past, many of which took place in New York and London back when rent was truly cheap, the streets truly dangerous. As Dan Ozzi wrote in his review of the music journalist Lizzy Goodman’s love letter to the era Meet Me in the Bathroom:
Each artist … fits the mold of a bygone trope. Ryan Adams was the self-professed ‘wannabe beat poet guy,’ fitting the chain-smoking mold of folk predecessors like Bob Dylan; LCD Soundsystem saw James Murphy fusing rock sounds with electronic elements as had been covered ad nauseum [sic] through the 80s; and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Karen O rocked the costume-heavy art-punk done 20 years prior by Wendy O and the Plasmatics.
Of course, the biggest band of the era, the Strokes, and their many imitators, presented a pitch-perfect aping of New York in the 1970s, when artists like Lou Reed, Patti Smith and Television invented punk in the bombed-out remains of a disinvested city. The aughts version of this was tasteful enough, especially compared with the other rock bands of the era, but it added nothing new, and lacked the depth of the originals, issuing as it did from Bloomberg’s rapidly gentrifying downtown (a process in which it soon was made complicit). A well-done retread is OK here and there, but should it inspire nostalgia for itself? Do we really want to make copies of copies until everything under the sun is just a crappier version of things that came before? I will resist the urge to date myself by citing the 1996 film Multiplicity, but my fellow elder millennials know where I’m going with this.
On a political level, the indie sleaze era was marked by a hedonistic nihilism that was at best naive, at worst straight up reactionary. Much like the optimistic, collectivist radicalism of the 1960s gave way to the grim, individualistic cynicism of the 1970s as barbarism triumphed over socialism, the socially conscious 1990s were obliterated by 9/11.
This singular event caused such a massive political and cultural backlash that the vast majority of the American public cheered on the Bush administration as it hacked a bloody swathe through the Middle East. Tastemakers like the owners of Vice weren’t going to throw their lot in with the Republicans, because that wasn’t cool, but they also weren’t going to stick their necks out, because they were capitalists, so they settled on a detached, postmodern whatever shrug where everything was a big joke and it was cringe to care. (It should come as no surprise that the guy doing ironic racism and sexism in the Vice dos and don’ts is now an out and proud leader of the far right.)
Even the Strokes were not immune; although initially meant as an “overtly political” response to the 1999 police murder of the Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo, the ACAB anthem New York City Cops got left off the post-9/11 version of their debut album. Plenty of progressive-minded youths went along with this depoliticization, because we’d just protested the Iraq war by the millions and seen it do absolutely nothing, and because we were privileged idiots who wanted to be cool. And hey, maybe the vaguely progressive-seeming new president was going to fix everything? But as we quickly learned, Barack Obama was not our savior, and no amount of partying can erase our responsibility to try to improve the world, which is demonstrably not fixing itself.
On the subject of gender politics specifically, women who came of age in the post-MeToo era would be appalled by the level of misogyny that was enabled and tolerated by this crowd. I’m not only talking about the images of underage-looking girls splashed across everything in an effort to market an even less empowering version of the Playboy lifestyle, but the alleged harassment that men like Terry Richardson, Dov Charney and countless less famous wannabes were accused of committing against the women who worked under them. (Charney was never actually found guilty of sexual harassment, despite the multiple allegations. Terry Richardson has been sued for sexual assault. He has denied the allegations).
I will never forget signing Vice’s now infamous “non-traditional workplace agreement”, wherein I promised not to be offended by anything that went down – or as I like to think of it, the extremely traditional workplace agreement. Or have you not seen a show called Mad Men? I’ve already written about this subject at length, so I won’t dwell on it, other than to say that the stories I’ve told so far are only the tip of the iceberg.
I’m not saying the #indiesleaze revival is uniformly bad. I love some of the music as one can only love the music from one’s tumultuous youth, and I’m too embarrassed to say how much I paid for tickets to see the TV on the Radio reunion. It makes me feel relevant, if old, that teens on TikTok are asking in all sincerity what it was like to see MGMT in 2009. But on the whole, I much prefer the youth culture of today, which is far more creative, socially conscious and committed to positive change than anything we had back in the days of too-tight pants and bad cocaine.
