Such Great Heights
(The Postal Service)
Not to be dramatic, but reading Such Great Heights by Chris DeVille felt like a near-religious experience. The author created suggested playlists for each chapter, so I diligently went through and created each one for myself on Deezer and listened as I read. In the corner of a room full of laughing friends on vacation in Michigan, I became my most anti-social self and put on noise-cancelling headphones to speed through the first half.
Then I consciously slowed down, savoring the rest in single-chapter bites over several weeks because I didn’t want it to end.
The writing about music is in turns beautiful and irreverent. Turns of phrase highlight the genuine love the author has for this music1, but he also never takes it too seriously. In fact, he pokes fun at the self-serious pretension that has always come hand-in-hand with indie music2.
DeVille also pokes fun at himself as part of that world: referencing the movie (500) Days of Summer), he writes, “it was as if she was validating my own belief that there is no greater expression of love than sharing my own exquisite taste” and describes guys like himself “who came to think of ourselves as protagonists and our well-curated media libraries as some kind of virtue”. Which, look… that is a particular kind of guy, and they usually aren’t that self-aware. We all know one. Some of us have unfortunately dated one.
But if I’m honest with myself, I too am that guy… my love language is sharing playlists (of my own exquisite taste) and my well-curated media library IS a virtue…
… ANYWAY, enough about me for now …
This book doesn’t shy away from the politics of indie. DeVille names the scene as historically white and male and often upper-middle class, drawn towards indie aesthetics partly as a way to find belonging and to differentiate oneself from the basic suburban masses. He talks about indie hip-hop and R&B, the way Black artists get labeled as one or the other, as opposed to pop or rock3. He talks about how and why white hipsters flocked to Black subgenres like backpack rap and Black artists like Clipse and Tyler the Creator’s Odd Future collective. He also talks (not enough, in my opinion, but some) about the treatment of women in indie spaces and how that has fortunately shifted in the past decade.
Such Great Heights irons out something that is near-impossible to articulate: what is “indie rock”? Turns out it’s near-impossible to articulate because the answer is sort of … nothing? Even if we break it into its parts, coherent meaning is hazy at best:
“Indie” is a term that once had some (limited) resonance as a musical genre and ideology, but through mainstreaming and co-option by corporate interests got diffused into … a vibe. The O.C. and Grey’s Anatomy borrowed the soundtrack, while Urban Outfitters and American Apparel sold the aesthetic, making “a hard-to-define bohemian lifestyle accessible to an entire generation of young people growing up in the cookie-cutter suburbs” (according to a Racked critic DeVille quotes).
And “rock”… well, it hasn’t all been rock music for a very long time. Alongside rock subgenres like blog rock and shoegaze, the book tracks indie genres like folk, electronic, hip-hop, and pop. DeVille masterfully tracks these musical traditions as they weave in and out of one another.
In his writing, DeVille manages something I’m so impressed by and envious of — he writes clearly about genre. I can never seem to wrap my head around genre in music, especially subgenres. It’s all just too complicated and esoteric and abstract. Much like identity labels, I find genre labels often more trouble than they’re worth. But of course, also like identity labels, they’re necessary to clearly communicate what exactly we’re talking about. Freak folk and stomp-clap are different. Power-pop and pop-punk are different. There’s fuzziness between every genre, but as whole entities, they are useful distinctions to make. DeVille’s book helped me appreciate that, as someone who is generally dismissive and lazy and quick to call any music I can’t quickly identify “genre-bending”.
DeVille’s writing isn’t just knowledgable though, it’s enthusiastic. As much as he pokes fun at the indie trends, he also gives credit to the genuine DIY ethos of a lot of it that made space for truly paradigm-shifting art. For example, DeVille says that Bon Iver’s debut album “sounded like [he] had conjured spirits in that cabin, like everything was recorded in darkness but lit up by a faint supernatural glow”. You don’t write something like that about art you’re disdainful of.
But DeVille also notes the album as “a harbinger of far more annoying bands that emerged in Vernon’s wake…a generation of performatively rustic hit-makers who shot to fame by stomping, clapping, and yelling ‘Hey!’”. Nothing is sacred in this book, safe from DeVille’s mildly-cutting humor,4 but it never once feels mean-spirited. In fact, if anything it’s fond. DeVille clearly loves this music and its history. He criticizes it in a way only a true fan can and, as a fellow true fan who lived through the rise and fall of many of these indie moments, that is so fun to read.
DeVille calls out the lemming-like way fans followed outlets like Pitchfork. I wasn’t a big Pitchfork reader in those days, but I did — in a lemming-like manner — follow the playlists of this one tastemaker online. Her name was Corinne and she had a page on HelloGiggles dot com, the lifestyle brand and website by then-indie darling Zoey Deschanel. I’ve said for years that Corinne (whose last name I do not remember, though I could probably easily Google if I felt like it) is single-handedly to blame for much of my music taste. It was through her I learned about so many of the artists named in the middle chapters of this book: from Kate Nash and Lily Allen to Beirut and Feist, from the New Pornographers and Broken Social Scene to M83 and Phoenix.
I hadn’t predicated quite how surreal it would feel for music and moments I remember so distinctly and on such a personal scale to be framed as history. Like MGMT, who DeVille describes as “more interested in becoming a brilliant weirdo cult band than stadium-filling superstars, and…already in the process of recoiling from music industry fame”… I remember seeing them perform at Northwestern’s on-campus music festival, Dillo Day, several years later and they were exactly as DeVille describes them: playing their biggest hit “Kids” and “only halfway taking it seriously”, clearly disdainful of their own audience.
This book taught me so much I didn’t know about the early history of indie music. It made connections between musical traditions I never would have considered. The author and the cultural movement are both about a decade older than me, so there are years and phenomena I inherently missed. I was too young for The O.C., so I didn’t feel in real time the mainstreaming of bands like Death Cab for Cutie and Modest Mouse.
In fact, I remember being driven away from the pretension of indie music around that time. An obnoxious boy from youth group loved Death Cab and thought that was proof of moral superiority. It put me off of them for several album cycles; it wasn’t until a decade or so later that I finally gave them a fair listen (turns out they’re great, who knew!).
My personal brand of indie pretension, however? was different and cool, of course. I remember being teased by my family on a high school roadtrip once because my dad asked if the song I’d queued up was “by that Icelandic lady” and my reaction was dripping with scorn. He was thinking of Bjork and this was clearly Lenka…
Reading this book felt like untangling the cultural history of my soul. I might as well have been reading a book by an expert psychologist laying bare my exact cocktail of mental health diagnoses. The way Chris DeVille’s writing shows love for the music and traces evolving tastes in largely the same way mine evolved — I felt seen and like a part of something bigger, in a way I didn’t necessarily at the time.
I didn’t have the community that he talks about bubbling up online. I wasn’t really reading Pitchfork and I’ve never seen Garden State. My friends were listening to Taylor Swift and Beyonce, All Time Low and Fall Out Boy, and (since I was too) I was happy to meet them there.
But on my Sansa and then Zune mp3 players and on my family desktop computer and then clunky laptop on my bedroom floor, I was listening to Neutral Milk Hotel and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Imogen Heap and the New Pornographers and Architecture in Helsinki. I felt validated when my friend’s cool older sister mentioned The Decemberists or when my cool older cousin mentioned Fleet Foxes and I knew about them already. But beyond that, I was happy just to listen. I wasn’t desperate to be at concerts (yet) or to talk about my favorite bands (yet).
I don’t think I ever needed loving this music to mean anything, but it turns out it kind of did.
What’s your favorite indie music? Were you listening to any of this stuff back then? Are you listening to it now? (I still am!)
<3 Isabel
P.S. Chris DeVille has a Substack with the same name as his book and it’s great: https://substack.com/@chrisdeville. He has all the playlists, plus some commentary, and I highly recommend:
“Gibbard’s sensitive vocals sounded like glowing neon in the fog”
“…IDM — ‘intelligent dance music,’ in case you wondered how that audience saw itself”; “people whose fandom was intertwined with a superiority complex”
which, to be clear, I am not saying that stomp-clap music should be sacred… my guy Chris and I are on the same page here …