Independence Play

In this episode we are acknowledging the sound of American Independence with a twist.  This July 4 marked 250 years since the Second Continental Congress formally adopted the Declaration of Independence in the United States of America.  

One day before this official anniversary, Madonna released a new album that is built on the concept of freedom from tyranny too, only hers plays out on the dancefloor.  This got us thinking about the connection between political independence, and independent music.  So we’re following her lead and considering how to go it alone through the story of cutting edge music as it played out in the early 2000s.

Through a parallel reading of Michael Barclay's Hearts on Fire and Chris DeVille's Such Great Heights we will share some takeaways about trend cycles, who decides what is ‘cool,’ the hazards of fame and how to maintain integrity under financial pressure.  

Whether performing in a rock arena or a political one, there are lessons too about what it means to remain truly independent, and the tradeoffs that come along with freedom.  And there are reminders about the power of creative work, in any field, and how it can endure when coming from an honest place.

Listen for more, and long live the free!

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Welcome to the Kinbright Podcast, sharing human stories, creative power, and bright ideas to help you thrive. I'm Claire Cameron, founder and principal of Kinbright, a creative consulting firm based in beautiful Niagara, Canada. We're on a mission to bring bright ideas, meaning, delight, and some sense of beauty into our working lives. Our approach combines creative and corporate practice to help you see things in a new way. In this episode, we are acknowledging the sound of American independence with a twist. This past July 4th marked 250 years since the Second Continental Congress formally adopted the Declaration of Independence in the United States of America. One day before this official anniversary, Madonna released a new album that is built on the concept of freedom from tyranny too. Only hers plays out on the dance floor. This got us thinking about the connection between political independence and independent music. So we're following her lead and considering how to go it alone through the story of cutting-edge music as it played out in the early 2000s. In this episode, we will share some takeaways about trend cycles, who decides what is cool, the hazards of fame, and how to maintain integrity under financial pressure. Whether you're performing in a rock arena or a political one, there are lessons too about what it means to remain truly independent and the trade-offs that come with freedom. There are reminders here about the power of creative work in any field and how it can endure when coming from an honest place. Let's go! In the constant cycle of cultural production and consumption, what starts as a niche eventually disperses and diffuses. New movements either spark and fade or catch on and get boring. When independent spirits hit the big time, they tend to either flame out or start to sound like everything else. Michael Barclay and Chris Deville recently wrote two very different books about the indie music scene in North America from 2000 onward. The fact that books like these exist at all is a testament to how we are all truly getting old, and everything becomes history eventually. Their work also shows how the story of indie music in North America follows a familiar pattern of creative construction and diffusion. Barclay and Deville share story after story about how indie artists went mainstream or withered into obscurity, much as it seems like all new culture does eventually. Groundbreaking revolutions can start with spilling tea and end with peeling paint. Music and politics are both subject to the same cycle of spark, inspiration, brilliance, adoption, spread, and decline until something new comes along. The neutral pH norms of culture might be impressionistic landscapes for visual art, easy listening for music, and maniacal dictatorships for political power. We often forget that peaceful democracies have been the outlier in human history, and openly democratic societies are more fragile and tenuous than we like to think. If the typical median of political life tends to lean towards dictatorship, whether under a king or a ruler or a lord or supreme leader or what, then democratic freedom is the ultimate indie record label. Political history around the world shows a tendency for oligarchy to represent the mean rather than being a weird blip. Power-hungry structures are unfortunately the mainstream radio hits on average. Open liberal democracies are far more like listening to your college station. By looking at the history of indie music in North America and how it had a particular moment through the early 2000s, we can find some takeaways about political life and anything us humans try to do, quite frankly, as we constantly teeter on the razor's edge of being incredibly inventive and then screwing up good things by letting them become famous, or letting them get boring. The consequences of boredom in music are relatively low. Going mainstream will at worst win new legions of fans, sometimes it will win you a Grammy, and it might lose your oldest, most passionate supporters. In politics, however, the hazards of boredom are way worse. Whether an audience has checked out of democratic participation because of actual boredom or because of overwhelming chaos that cannot compute in people's minds anymore. Those who only hear political signals as background noise will not be devoted enough to fight for the thing's survival. Democracy does not work as a sideshow, and it isn't a good supporting act. It's supposed to be the headliner of every festival, and it needs to play for a rabid crowd. Let's throw in some national pride here as well. Barclay is Canadian, and Deville is American. Both wrote books about the same era in music, both from very different angles. By closely reading their work, maybe we can fix Kuzma and the Gordy Howe bridge while we're at it. I remain optimistic about the power of nostalgia. So let's go back in time to grab a CD burner, rip some free downloads from Kaza, and imagine you're living in an age when musicians will start to abandon the big muff for bedroom pop and pro tools, and a lot of hipsters will start insisting they are not hipsters and they never were. In the musical War of Independence, it's hard to call a winner, but the battlefield sure sounds good. Michael Barclay has cornered the market on writing tomes about esoteric Canadian music scenes. Hearts on Fire picks up where his previous work have not been the same left off, telling the story of independent music in Canada and how for a brief moment a few Canadian indie artists made it very big worldwide. He focuses on the five years from 2000 to 2005 and offers more than 700 pages about this brief era. Barclay builds extremely detailed text around hours of audio interviews with artists themselves. He writes with an epic scope about bands that enjoyed relatively small-scale success when measured against American Billboard chart statistics. Arcade Fire and Broken Social Scene were Canadian outliers in how their careers uniquely took off. Barclay isn't interested in the hard economics of Canadian independent music, even during this supposed golden age of its flowering. His point seems more to utter a giant 700-page wow that so many Canadian bands did what they did at all and received any kind of recognition from the rest of the world about their work. There can't be a more Canadian impulse than that to cheer for ourselves extra hard when anyone living outside of Canada actually takes notice. This classic trope of our national identity courses through Barclay's work, which might be summed up by saying, Look, they see us. What's absent from Barclay's work is any admission that an equally powerful and perhaps even greater Indy Renaissance was playing out in exactly the same years south of our border. He does not place the relative success of Canadian Indie artists like The Weaker Then's in relation to equivalent American bands like NautiSurf, who, by virtue of scale, enjoyed a starting audience that was ten times greater and concentrated in larger population centers. Barclay also makes no room to assess how Canadian artists were inspired and influenced by American musicians, and he treats homegrown talent as if it sprung directly from the Canadian Shield fully formed. The Constantines frequently mentioned Fugazi as an influence. The obvious impact of other artists like Sevado, Dinosaur Jr., the Pixies, and Pavement get no acknowledgement from Barclay. Canadian artists weren't working in a vacuum, exclusively influenced by each other. Yet Barclay doesn't dare make room to write about the audible impact of American sounds on Canadian musicians. Even Arcade Fire's success may be less a story about Canadian cultural might and more a case study in how this band was able to keep moving physical albums at a massive scale in the late 2000s and 2010s, despite the rise of file sharing and streaming services. Another anomaly about Arcade Fire, beyond coming from Montreal and wearing evening gowns, was that they managed to regularize hitting number one on the American Billboard 200 without the support of top 40 style radio singles. Something was up with Arcade Fire, way beyond the simple fact they were Canadian, and much of their success may have come down to lucky demographics. Arcade Fire fans were closer in age to U2 and Radiohead's base, early millennials and late Gen Xers from another era who were still willing to spend money on physical media and may have had jobs by 2004 that allowed them to invest in CDs rather than rip an online stream of Arcade Fire albums. Barclay's work is still impressive. His detailed chronicles give great recognition to underappreciated artists. Other questions he could consider might include a deeper look at national pride. What makes a band Canadian, after all? Even going back to the classics from another generation, diehard definers of what makes Canadian music have agonized about the band and heart for their inclusion of Americans in their original lineups. The heroes of Barclay's indie rise are no different. Will and Wynne Butler of Arcade Fire were from Texas. Nico Case of the New Pornographers was born and raised in Washington State. Peaches, Feist, and Chili Gonzalez all had international families with a footprint in Europe before their fame. Chili's grandfather founded Akon and owned an apartment in Paris. Nothing comes from nowhere, and Canada has always been a global place. Barclay does admit this pattern at one point and offers that having non-Canadian parentage or being born outside of Canada somehow freed artists like Starz, Metric, Broken Social Scene, Caribou, and Sam Roberts from a particular kind of Canadian humility that might otherwise have kept them playing small. What he's really saying is that of all things, hubris and confidence, which are decidedly more stereotypically American than Canadian qualities, were correlated with a lot of Canadian star success in this era. To really hit the big time, Canadians had to go for it just like a ballsy American would. Some of the value in these success stories also speaks to the importance of how musicians needed to see others succeeding as a way of knowing what was possible. Maybe Godspeed You Black Emperor getting an NME cover truly was all it took to increase other artists' confidence that recognition and conventional success might be possible for them to achieve. Indie musicians needed mentors and expanders around them, just like everyone else who is interested in growth. Along the way, it was important also not to be dragged down by envy of each other and hold tight to an open mind that could learn from your peer's success instead of wanting to cut them down. Sam Roberts tells stories about Tall Poppy syndrome in the scene around Montreal, confronting people who challenged his success with a why you and not me attitude that was ugly and became toxic. Tegan and Sarah developed a sense of humor about building their career in arcade fire's shadow, they had to believe that another Canadian band's success would eventually float all boats and at least present a learning opportunity. Canadians also have to recognize that for some homegrown artists, their success was due to exposure on iconic American platforms. Kathleen Edwards' career took off after two successful appearances on David Letterman, and through her entire career she sold four times more records in America than Canada. We all owe CBS some thanks for helping to build up one of our national treasures. Along with these blind spots, Barclay romanticizes the audience for indie music in Canada as if everyone was cut from the same cloth. He describes a generation of kids born in the 1970s who were raised on the pride and cultural protectionism of Pierre Trudeau, and on the entrepreneurship and free trade policies of Brian Mulroney, a musically curious generation raised on much music, a generation who grew up watching Degrassi High and the Kids in the Hall, to internationally successful shows beloved because they were dorky and unique and Canadian, not in spite of it. Other kids born in the early 80s might remember Brian Mulrooney for his fight against acid rain. Some of us didn't have cable until in high school. Some of us never saw Degrassi or didn't understand the kids in the hall. It's hard to say if people loved the Wedge and Jaunovision and ready or not because they were, as Barclay says, dorky and unique and Canadian, or simply because they were there, and they were ours, with little in the way of alternatives. If we could have accessed MTV and afforded a subscription to it in my house, that would have been absolutely amazing. My very coolest friend in high school had a massive satellite dish in her front yard that allowed us to access Nickelodeon and Showcase and HBO and all kinds of otherwise unavailable content that we craved. Canada's typical media landscape was incredibly small in the early 2000s, and it was kept smaller by government restrictions. Barclay keeps imagining the purity of Canadian musicians as if they were hermetically sealed by national pride, and he does the same thing to their audience. On how money flowed through the indie system or not, Barclay's work does offer some rare glimpses of economics in the Canadian indie music scene, and how much money a successful artist could expect to make through this golden age. The puzzle of artist income is truly mysterious. Our friends who are musicians seem to go through really big highs and lows, needing to bank occasional payouts, and then get day jobs to sustain the stretches of time between touring or playing festivals or recording new work. The first kind of income Barclay covers is government funding that went to support road crews, tour expenses, video production, and more that would increase exposure for bands. Broken Social Scene, Metric, Dallas Green, and his original band Alexis on Fire all received over $500,000 in the 2000s towards these costs. Those funds were paid directly to services and not the actual artists. Then there were opportunities to license work, sometimes directly in Hollywood. Though these figures could also be modest. When AC Newman gave permission for Kevin Smith to use Letter from an Occupant in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, the payout was about $5,000. Jay and Silent Bob made $33.8 million at the box office and remains a cult classic. Then the Canada Revenue Agency might come calling. After Starr's 2004 album Set Yourself on Fire sold more than 100,000 copies in Canada, Amy Millen had the highest tax bill she'd ever paid. She said we paid three times what we made in grants. Album sales, otherwise, are a reasonable indicator of income. In Canada through the early 2000s, an artist might make $1.30 to $2.60 per album sold. By the end of 2005, Andre 3000 of Outcast was telling several outlets that Feist's Mushaboom was his favorite song of the year. Her album, Let It Die, sold more than 400,000 copies worldwide and toured for 33 months. Feist's follow-up, The Reminder, was selling 2,000 to 7,000 copies per week, on track to reach well over 350,000, and then after her Apple commercial, The Reminder ultimately sold over 1.5 million copies worldwide. Funeral by Arcade Fire sold 500,000 copies in its first year. Other success stories are far more modest. Sam Roberts EP Brother Down sold 60,000 copies, and Failure by Kathleen Edwards sold 100,000 copies between the US and Canada. Truly independent bands certainly didn't do it for the money or the volume of album sales. Unsigned artists might hope to move a few hundred albums at most, and maybe recoup the costs of producing music. Regional touring acts could reach bigger audiences and sell a few thousand CDs through local indie record stores and mailorder. Mailorder. That's so quaint. Indie bands who got signed to a prominent label like Merge or Matador in the US could hope to sell maybe 50,000 copies of an album, and that number would have been considered a great success. $50,000 times $1.75, if you assume a decent record label deal, is about $87,500, which equates to $140,700 today. That's a fine number, though it's a one-shot payment that needs to be followed up on with a subsequent album and continuing radio play, touring, and merchandise to become a living wage. In Toronto, the average price of a home in 2005 was around $250,000. $87,500 would have been the typical salary for a senior manager, project engineer, or pharmacist with advanced degrees. Unfortunately, there was very little steady money in the arts, even for bands that were a relative success. On how the story of Canadian independent music might not be so special after all, Barclay identifies a few things that were not uniquely Canadian. Widespread internet access, for example, came to dorm rooms and desktops just in time for millennials to hit university. Just in time for Peaches and her particular appeal, digital pornography was suddenly everywhere, along with the rise of fourth-wave feminism that encouraged women to be clearer and more open about sex as a way of claiming power for ourselves. Vice magazine and the Polaroid-driven ad campaigns from American apparel came from Canada. The children of baby boomers across all of North America hit their 20s listening to the strokes, feeling nostalgic for 70s porn, watching dirty videos and being liberated from slut shaming. These were not uniquely Canadian trends or experiences. Barclay also argues that 9-11 and the Second Iraq War had a unique impact on Canadian musicians who used their work to express a challenge against authority and the military-industrial complex. Canadians did take a particular delight in our nation's refusal to participate in Iraq and felt vindicated later in holding back when the evidence to justify an invasion proved to be so shaky. We had Naomi Klein and Adbusters, and we were brimming with the recent thrill of seeing McDonald's be vandalized at the G20 summit in Ottawa. However, there were far more actual Americans who were affected, killed, shaken, or otherwise impacted by the Second Iraq War that their own actual country was waging. Canadians could watch from the sidelines feeling snide about George W. Bush and his administration. Meanwhile, Americans had family members and friends actually dying overseas, leaving home to train, mounting large scale protest movements, writing investigative journalism that revealed political corruption, and paying for the tangible costs of Iraq and its consequences. Whatever impact 9 11 and Iraq had on Canadian artists was far deeper and stronger. On the American musical scene. Green Day, the Wu-Tang clan, the Dixie Chicks, and Bruce Springsteen all created work through 2003 to 2005 in direct response to 9-11, its aftermath, and war in the Middle East. Whatever Canadian artists had to say about it must have sounded like a distant footnote. Barclay also points to the impact of cheaper and more accessible digital studio recording technology that was easier to use and sounded better than the classic Task Camp Four tracks that launched the Lo-Fi movement in Indie Rock 20 years earlier. Though there were a few software engineers creating digital studio programs in Quebec, Pro Tools and Cakewalk dominated most recording studios and were not Canadian products. American indie musicians used and benefited from these platforms too. Finally, Barclay points to the rise in online platforms for cultural criticism and tastemaking like Pitchfork and the AV Club, the former having undeniable power to make or break the future of a band based on the quality of their reviews. Despite the survival of Chart magazine and its continuing availability online, there was no sealed wall that kept Canadians from looking at, listening to, or talking about American bands. Even Chart devoted ample space in its coverage to American music releases and tours performing on Canadian soil. When its online archive begins in 1999, Chart included reviews of Metallica, Kid Rock, and Slipknot. Thanks to YouTube, it is also possible to watch The Wedge again and enjoy a particular episode where cross-border influences truly do collide. While Pavement encourages people to talk to strangers in all their eternally delicious awkwardness, a tour promo for Brighten the Corners when they were visiting Toronto also reminds us that its lead track included a reference to Canadian Getty Lee, proving how cross-border influence could work both ways. On all of Barclay's points about what made for a renaissance in Canadian indie music, nothing he observes wasn't happening across North America at large. And there is another fixture of Canadian psychology too, a deep reluctance to admit that whatever is going on with us might not be that special. If anything, Barclay's work proves what a small town Canada is. The national indie music scene thrived through close connections between people rather than some massive cross-country network of like-minded artists. Members of Godspeed You Black Emperor happened to live in an apartment that was co-owned by Patty Schmidt, host of Brave New Waves on the CBC. Peaches and Feist lived together in an apartment above Come As You Are on Queen Street, and Brendan Canning of Broken Social Scene lived above Soundscapes on College. Jason Beck, who was later known as Chili Gonzalez, his grandfather, started the engineering company that built the CN Tower. Richard Reed Perry from Arcade Fire sang on a Sharon Lois and Bram album as a kid. Leslie Feist grew up in the same neighborhood as Rush. Multiple members of Metric, Broken Social Scene, and Stars went to high school together at the Etobicoke School of the Arts. As grown-ups, Kevin Drew and Joanne Goldsmith's house near Queen West and Gladstone Avenue became a social hub for dinner parties, jam sessions, and ecstasy trips where all people around the Broken So Scene scene were welcome. Aaron Riches of Royal City kissed actress Neve Campbell when they went to elementary school together in Guelph. And Robert Munch wrote Aaron's hair after meeting him as a young hippie kid during a classroom reading. We could go on. Canada, it's a small town. And yet, the entire world is sort of this way. Matt Damon and Ben Affleck met in high school drama class. Donald Trump is directly related to the Heinz family, and yes, that Heinz family, the ketchup people. Robin Williams and Christopher Reeve attended the Juilliard School together. Nick Cage, Sophia Coppola, and Jason Schwartzman are first cousins. Whitney Houston's mom was a backup singer for Elvis Presley. Never mind Canada, the whole world is a pretty small town. There can be a dark side to small world thinking also. Close-knit communities have the capacity to produce a lot of envy when friends succeed outside of an established social bubble. On working in Montreal in the 90s, Sam Roberts said it was an insular place. We had to fight for every inch. When Blinker the Star or Godspeed or Brand Van3000 or Melissa Auftermar or whoever managed to get a foothold in somewhere, it was highly motivating for the rest of us. There'd also always be talk of shitty music or how some record exec was conned into signing so-and-so. Deegan and Sarah experienced their own version of this envy too. In their words. We played Coachella for the first time that year, and we played before Arcade Fire. When we were finished our set, the crew was like, okay, get off now. Like, get out of the way. We're about to be legends. The whole album cycle, I just felt like, god damn it, like I was living in the shadow of their exciting career. If Arcade Fire is the avatar for ultimate Canadian independent success, it was achieved through an American label. Merge had, and still has a boutique reputation similar to Subpop and Matador for delivering a certain quality standard. The label's credibility could guarantee that certain radio programmers and critics across the US would listen to Arcade Fire releases and help with the band's rise. Much of the buzz around Funeral came from Pitchfork as well, which bestowed on them a 9.7 review that related the album to a heavy generational movement. Pitchfork described listeners as overwhelmed by frustration, unrest, dread, and tragedy. We managed nonetheless to build our defenses in subtle ways. For Pitchfork, funeral was a rallying cry. Though they were lauded as being fiercely independent, Arcade Fire's success followed a fairly conventional path. They played clubs and then larger venues, attracted the attention of tastemakers and critics, released a buzzy album, and then started to play arena shows and won a Grammy for a long-anticipated follow-up with lots of radio play and celebrity fans that by that time included Bruce Springsteen and David Bowie. Arcade Fire is not so much a uniquely Canadian success story as a uniquely strong success story from the world of indie music. That this band emerged from Montreal was less defining as their ability to write compelling songs and put on an amazing live show. You didn't need to be Canadian to accomplish those things or to appreciate them. What are the lessons that Barclay offers then in this massive survey of Canadian independent music? For one thing, creative people often have global origins and trajectories. It's hard to make money as an artist, no surprise, and particularly so in the post-streaming music business. Artistic communities are small towns even when operating in the heart of big cities. Tight-knit networks can create incredibly strong relationships and can also foster a lot of envy. And I hate to say it, but Canadians might not be as exceptional as we like to think we are. Viewed more positively, being broad and having a global footprint elevates your work. Digital services present opportunities too, to be rediscovered by new generations. Embracing new technology will always give you an edge. And it is always good to have friends who can host great dinner parties and spend time together in 3D. As Feist sang on her strangely disavowed debut album, it's cool to love your family. And really, don't Canadians have more in common with Americans than we would ever like to admit? So let's turn a page and see what Chris Deville has to say. In his work Such Great Heights, Chris Deville tells the tale of America's indie music scene from the early 2000s up to the present day. Compared to Barclay, he travels through a way longer scope of time and covers a greater number of bands who enjoyed more sheer volume of sales and greater levels of celebrity in under half as many pages. Deville is a classic American, efficient, effective, and to the point. He begins with the very fitting question: what is indie? And the answer is tied deeply to identity with a nod to the dynamics of power. As in politics, he says, so much of this discourse was about posturing. Popular music was a way to figure out who we were, but also how we wanted to present ourselves to the world. And as with the two-party system, the new metal versus teen pop binary was an extremely reductive lens for identity. I love that Deville also sees a parallel between music and politics as cultural instruments. He situates us in a very particular musical and generational moment for late Gen Xers and early millennials. Kurt Cobain was dead. An obscure website called Pitchfork gave Kid A a perfect score in the year 2000, and their other best of lists included quirky band names like Modest Mouse and Yolatengo. Unlike Barclay's habit of relentlessly adulating everyone in his book, Deville is clearer about his argument. He wants to revisit how exactly indie music blew up, morphed into a kind of prestige pop music, flew too close to the sun trying to become actual pop music, and returned underground in the streaming era. Underneath all of that are points about who gets to define what is cool, and how does coolness become uncool so quickly when the wrong people, quotation marks, start to like those things. Also, here are considerations of how technology impacts creative production, how culture thrives on variety, how the meaning of a simple two-syllable word like indie can morph over time, and how what starts as an insular subculture can become the new norm. Along the way, Deville traces the history of hipsters, our generation's word for discerning tastemakers who have existed and led the way in every generation ever. Anyone who has tried to define themselves as being a cut above, a cut beyond, or showing thought leadership in corporate words, should be interested in these stories, because the pattern of what makes something cool and seem cutting edge really hasn't changed in a very long time. Deville sees how much of the indie music rise in America was tied to very practical things. If the magic ingredient in Canada was cheap rent in Montreal and the West End of Toronto, in America it was a change to college radio frequencies. In 1978, responding to complaints from more professionalized public radio stations that low wattage college stations were interfering with their signals, the FCC forced college stations to make the leap to 100 watts or shut down. When many decided to upgrade their signals, college radio gained a megaphone to amplify communities that were not represented on commercial radio. After years of fermenting, pavement emerged as the ultimate avatars of the new indie sound. Their 1997 interview on The Wedge on Canadian Soil captures perfectly their sardonic existence, dripping with cool and palpable discomfort at just existing. In Deville's words, the simplest explanation of indie rock is music that sounds like pavement, without ever reaching the scale of success that happened for Nirvana. Their lead singer Stephen Malkmus describes pavement's ability to make music from the simple art of noticing things. Because, in his words, just being our age group in our country and just being an observer, you encounter a lot of unusual behavioral patterns amongst the other members of your society. So if you just keep your eyes open and you know how to talk to strangers and talk to people, then you don't need to necessarily hunt for a weirdness. It'll definitely come up. Indy was interesting. Indy was weird. Indy appreciated the quirks in life. Indy offered a very strong sense of superiority wrapped up in baggy jeans, vintage sneakers, and soft t-shirts. Indy had an edge that said something about your ability to be discerning in the world. It was a signal to peers that you were aiming for a cut above and something different than the norm. And it extended backwards through the timeline of influences, too. As some bands were accused of ripping off the sounds of 70s rock, that only inspired indie kids to discover Steve Miller and Led Zeppelin and Jackson Brown for the first time. Indie may have always been more corporate from its early days than its aspirational fans ever wanted to admit or directly knew. The strokes emerged from a corner of New York that had nothing to do with Times Square, as Deville writes. They were turning the building blocks of indie rock into low-fidelity pop music and releasing it through a Sony subsidiary. Yet straddling this zone between genuine, gritty, local, and aspirational was the perfect place for a hipster to be. Mark Grife described this very well in a 2010 article for New York magazine, saying that the hipster is that person who in fact aligns himself both with rebel subculture and with the dominant class, and thus opens up a poisonous conduit between the two. So many of us as students bought copies of No Logo and Vice and Adbusters and dabbled in the remnants of a working class culture that we and our parents most likely did not know or remember anymore. The rise of Pap's Blue Ribbon, trucker hats, and Smash Burgers rode in on a wave of 1990s irony that metastasized into mainstream kitsch. At the same time, we weren't thinking about the class implications of choices like this. We were just chasing after whatever seemed cool as a way of signaling our own smartness. We were probably being insufferable jerks. Deathcap for Cutie may be the ultimate American example of going from indie to mainstream and never looking back. Their first album sold over 50,000 copies simply by spreading word underground and across college radio. Then this character named Seth on the OC started to spotlight underground musicians as part of a storyline. There was a practical and cynical side to this OC feature because licensing indie music was more affordable than syncing major label hits, and many indie bands were game, despite some initial hesitation about featuring their music in a high school melodrama. Just like cheap rent in Montreal and new FM transmission signals, working with the OC offered a chance to gain exposure. Even though, according to devoted fans, the worst thing that could ever possibly happen to an indie band would be getting popular. The Deathcab OC relationship was almost as bad as the Shins Garden State relationship, except that the latter played out in Hollywood and was coupled with creation of the ultimate manic Pixie Girl. The 2004 film Garden State exposed indie bands like Iron and Wine and The Shins to huge legions of new audiences. Deville writes, inevitably, the people whose fandom was intertwined with a superiority complex were irked to now be grouped in with normies who lacked their knowledge, taste, and sophistication. Deville tells a similar story with his take on arcade fire. He relates how Americans too were obsessed with funeral at the time of its release. At first listen, Americans heard all kinds of familiar reference points in this music. He writes the album combined bits of hip indie touchstones like Neutral Milk Hotel, Modest Mouse, and Bright Eyes, none of which are Canadian, by the way, into raw and overpowering sounds sparked by genuine grief. Arcade Fire was not talked about as the world's next great Canadian band. Reviewers often identified Wynne Butler as a Texan and pointed out Regine's Haitian ancestry before talking about Montreal. And when that beautiful city was mentioned, it was often as a standalone place, rather than Montreal as part of Canada. Deville reveals how permeable the barrier is between being Canadian and simply being musical, and how much success might flow from having your ears and mind and voice open to the world instead of limited to your own backyard. DeVille is way more specific than Barclay about how technology impacted the music scene in the early 2000s. In the wake of Napster, file sharing services like Morpheus and Kazaw created a new math in consumer minds that could now compare the opportunity to download an album or wait for a friend to rip it against the significant financial decision to buy a physical copy. With the stinks raised on whether or not a purchase of music was truly necessary, aggregator sites like Pitchfork became touchstones and guideposts for taste as never before. Their opinions not only indicated what was cool, but also what was worth paying for. The cost of physical media compared to digital downloads, though they were illegal, now drove a need for reviews and aesthetic guidance to justify investment. The average CD cost $20 in 2004, which is equivalent to over $31 today. After Pitchfork's extremely high reviews for broken social scene and metric albums helped to solidify a fan base for these bands in America, there were few other companies that personified cool more than Apple at the time of their feist ad. Her bangs, her sparkly jumpsuit, the dancers, all of it cemented her as officially famous on a scale that would not have been possible in Canada alone. However, more exposure at a greater scale came with a cost. Very soon, the appealing qualities of indie rock that went mainstream tipped over into a new kind of adult alternative music. Nothing was more uncool to a hipster than seeing their more basic friends and relatives embrace an artist they used to love. Indie stars like Deathcab, Arcade Fire, and Feist, as well as more singer-songwriter acts like Gillian Welch, Rufus Wainwright, and Amy Mann all got swept into this bin. As Deville says, the more your music appealed to Grey's anatomy viewers, the less chic it seemed. Indie went mainstream in nightlife too. HM's launch in North America brought fast fashion to our doorsteps and an infinite variety of clothing to go out and be seen in. The hipster wardrobe was quickly commodified and sold to the masses by urban outfitters and American apparel. Few Canadians likely knew at the time that American apparel was led by a Canadian, even less knew about his questionable HR practices. Canadian customers shopped at American Apparel because it was cool, not because it was Canadian. Here was a Canadian-led corporation that was only a raging success story because they went to America to scale, while literally having the word American in their name. No one, except maybe a few remaining Modrobes fans, stopped to ask where were all the Canadian-made clothes. They were nowhere. Canadian t-shirt and sportswear manufacturers simply had not caught up with changing tastes for younger consumers. Duftrany did. Compared to Barclay, Deville moves along a wider timeline that brings us much closer to the present day. He goes through the story of Best Coast, Tame Impala, and Beach House all the way up to Jack Antinoff as a member of Fun in New York City, with We Are Young winning a Grammy for Song of the Year. The through line then from Indy to Taylor Swift. Doesn't need to be spoken out loud, as with him in the picture, we know she is also there too. By the mid-2000s, Deville describes a very clear template that was established for how to enter the music scene and consciously appear as an indie darling. You could be a stompclapper or a bearded banjo player. Deville describes this as a transformational era, one that saw the word indie finally obliterated beyond all meaning. MGMT is an example also of indie artists that reached a certain degree of scale and fame and consciously pulled away. They remained independent in spirit and were rewarded with a return to relative obscurity. It shouldn't be surprising then that you can't have it all. You can't remain indie and at the same time get popular. Those two things are a paradox. Except for the rarest of unicorns like Arcade Fire, it was not the norm to retain a fiercely independent spirit and also enjoy popular success. DeVille even traces the rise of Carly Ray Jepsen, who is a Canadian and funnily enough receives no attention in Barclay's book, even though her rise roughly coincided with the fame timeline of late Arcade Fire. Deville is the one, not Barclay, who reminds us about Jepson's emergence on Canadian Idol and her popularity in America, to the point that the release of her album Emotion was covered with great anticipation by the New York Times. In one last shout-out to a remaining guitar band who is also Canadian, Deville mentions Japan droids, which Barclay does not. The lesson here is that good Canadians need not read books exclusively written by other Canadians to get a helpful dose of our own cultural storytelling. Americans see us too, and they have noticed, and they are capable of writing about us and our music alongside theirs. The omnivorous appetite and greater scale of America yields a book by Deville that somehow shares a wider scope, longer timeline, and bigger range than Barclay's microfocused work. Deville concludes that the brief rise of indie music in America was enough to attract some Grammy love for the scene, but not enough to stop the music industry from replacing Indy's would-be crossover stars with similar artists who boasted hits, not hipster clout. This observation simply describes the eternal cycle of pop culture, cultural production, and decline. This well-worn pattern didn't make an exception for indie music. A cool new thing is enjoyed by tastemakers. That thing gets adopted by more and more people, and in the process it changes. The rough edges get sanded off with wear, and the trade-off for that dilution is a greater spread and adoption and influence. So does culture move forever and ever. Deville is simply observing this pattern in a uniquely focused period of time around a particular genre of music that was called indie. If you are a Marxist, this is the same cycle of class construction and aspiration towards social movement and upward mobility that the bourgeoisie aspires to so hungrily. Hipsters were omnivores, straddling oppositional states and tastes. In Nitsu Abebe's concept of the game, bourgeois people compete to critique anything that smacks of being bourgeois in a race to set themselves apart, and in the process, they end up sounding a lot like the ultimate hipsters. In a 2013 report, the trend forecasting collective K-Hole described mass indie culture, which mixes weirdness with normalness until it levels out. When normies adopted mass indie culture as their own, it led to the proliferation of hazy IPAs and the Grammy-friendly version of indie rock that ultimately yielded Mumford and sons. Hipsters, who defined themselves as different and cutting edge, rushed away from all of that because there's a limited amount of difference in the world, and seeing that become mainstream only made the ability to differentiate yourself all the harder. Hipsters are plagued with an anxiety that there is no new terrain left. That becomes a catalyst for change. In Deville's words, the transformation of indie rock into pop, the permeation of indie aesthetics into mass culture, the stretching of the word indie beyond all meaning, was just another step in the eternal conquest of cool, an instance of capitalism doing its work on any subculture that was big enough to generate market value and get noticed by corporate executives. Deville lands at the end of his indie survey by finding some comfort in being able to appreciate music and culture as a web where holding simple awareness of the links between things can itself become an exercise in tastemaking and identity creation. If we can all agree that the connections between musical artists, influences, and relationships also extend across the Canada-US border and really all through the world, Deville and Barclay should be set for a beautiful friendship someday. And we can hold on to some hope that the lessons of music can apply to the world of politics. The cycle of tastemaking and coolness is its own form of power. What rises up and appears to reign for now will not last forever. It's worth considering what's left in the wake and remaining open to whatever the next big thing will be. What can we take from this as leaders and builders and people that are trying to keep evolving every day of our lives? Well, growth has a cost. As you shift and change through life, trying new things and taking on new opportunities, old things may no longer fit or be comfortable. What is familiar now may need to fall away, and that's okay. The tall poppy syndrome around Montreal's tight-knit indie scene is one example of how sometimes you need to get out of the community you know, or at least adjust your relationships there. As you grow, you may face envy from people who are not prepared to support your work or just don't understand it. You may have to come to terms with something like the practical reality that so many Canadian musicians have needed to work through for generations now. That in order to scale and find an audience and make any money, you might just have to leave. Lesson number two. Credibility is complicated. Selling out is no longer the insult it used to be. We call this expanding now, or just claiming your power. These days, you do you, and if you want something, you go for it. But in the early 2000s, artists experienced sincere discomfort at the thought of being bland, being too predictable, being too corporate, too normal, or too boring. The coolest culture offered alternatives to the point that this became a mainstream genre of its own. Deciding what your own credibility would look like in all of that was very difficult. For some it meant staying small, refusing big corporate contracts, or remaining on local and indie labels that could never market music like the majors. For others, it meant passing on lucrative licensing and advertising deals. And for other artists, credibility meant following the potential in your work through the entire very natural and well-worn cycle of obscurity, adoration, popularity, and diffusion. To survive that path with some sense of self still intact might be the biggest trick of all. And finally, honest work endures. The things you are creating today, whether they are tangible products or new ideas or just your influence on other people, may have a far longer tale than you realize. Even the most obscure music can live on through soundtracks, nostalgia tours, fan covers, appreciation by the next generation, or even unexpected blow-ups on TikTok. Just ask Julie Duaron about that, whose song August 10 from her 30-year-old debut album took off suddenly last year, nearly out of the blue. Doing your own thing, striving for independence, is not only about your gut feel at that moment in time. It's about the future life and legacy that may lie ahead for your work once it is brought into being. And that is a kind of potential worth celebrating. Long live the free.