Lead guitar in Annuals was handled by Kenny Florence, a gregarious, almost antic nineteen-year-old with a baby face and thick black hair closely cropped. The six members of Annuals also played together as a band called Sedona, a sort of indie-bluegrass affair led by Kenny with Adam on drums. In fact, it was while on tour as Sedona, in the van, that they got the call from a record label that had discovered Adam's Annuals songs on MySpace. Now Sedona lingered in the background while Annuals got its turn. "Annuals is our main project right now," Kenny said, "but we plan on putting out lots of different albums with lots of different styles and lots of different ideas. . . . We're planning on pretty much just like—I don't know what the word is—exploding people's brains with all of the projects that we're doing, you know?"
"The intention is to get a dynasty together, I guess," added Adam. They spoke in the half-ironic tone affected today when expressing great dreams. In the meantime, Kenny still lived with his parents, while Adam roomed with bassist Mike Robinson. "In my mom's basement," interjected Mike. "Can't lie."
"Can't afford a fucking apartment, man," said Adam.
"We're still climbing the hill," Mike said philosophically.
Kenny, Adam, and Mike had been playing together since their early teens, when they had a punk band called Timothy's Weekend. That was in 2000, they said—2000!—and suddenly the youth of these guys struck me. They played with the sophisticated sound of bands five or ten years older.
"We've been probably playing music together for the same amount of time they've been playing," Kenny pointed out.
"We just got a head start, that's all," offered Adam. He added that they hadn't even listened to Arcade Fire, Animal Collective, or Broken Social Scene until the comparisons started. His own influences, he said, tended toward the older: Paul Simon, Brian Wilson. "They're just trying to compare us to bands that are current, you know?" he said. "There's not really anyone else they can compare us to." He paused. "I think."
THE HIPSTER CONSENSUS
In The Long Tail, Chris Anderson saw the Internet as taking us out of a "watercooler" era—when we "listened, watched, and read from the same, relatively small pool of mostly hit content"—into the "microculture" era, when "we're all into different things." Anderson's conclusion on this score is predicated on the basic economist's view of human nature: we each have preexisting tastes and preferences, and we use our market choices to satisfy them as best we can. As a medium, the Internet is indeed unprecedented in its ability to sustain fan bases around anything, and thereby segment us around narrow interests. But as we saw in chapter 1, the Internet is also an unprecedented medium for the bandwagon effect, which sways large numbers of people not through some atomized personal choices of each but through each being influenced by the herd behavior of the rest.
The phenomenon that Anderson described is certainly happening, for much the same reasons that our profusion of cable-TV channels has made it impossible for any show, even the Super Bowl, to garner the overwhelming market share that could be achieved in the days of only three networks. More choice translates into more fragmentation. But I would argue that the Internet is working in two contradictory ways on the cultural landscape, and that the interaction between the two forces—the "Long Tail" effect (toward ever splintering niches) and the bandwagon effect (toward more clustering around the same thing)—is a complicated and intriguing one. Think about just this wrinkle: through the Internet, our "microcultures" all now have "watercoolers" of their own, and the social pressure within those cultures to rally around common cultural products can be far greater than in the old, offline world. Also: our "microcultures," being available online to membership by everyone at all times, can become magnets for huge followings—at which point, arguably, they are not so "micro" anymore. This has certainly become the case with indie rock, which is more broadly popular by far than it was during the hardcore or college-rock days, and perhaps even more popular than during the corporate-marketed "alternative" rock heyday of the early 1990s. It has become the musical lingua franca of an entire demographic of not just college students but a large chunk of educated urban twenty- and thirty-somethings, whether in New York or San Francisco or D.C. or Seattle. They all vote Democrat, too, and in this regard they reside in the "urban archipelago," is a very smart essay in Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger called the urban liberal consensus just after the heartbreaking (for us) 2004 election. But more remarkable than this nationwide political consensus is the nationwide cultural consensus that has sprung up within or alongside it. Far from splintering into ever narrower niches, this cultural consensus has extended its reach through the Internet, constituting a sort of universal urban middlebrow.
One might call this the hipster consensus, to use the somewhat unfortunate term that (for better or for worse) has come to denote these educated young Americans; and no cultural genre defines this consensus more than does indie rock. And if this hipster archipelago is a virtual community, it is building up its own virtual institutions, which use the Internet to harmonize the far-flung members, to allow these thousands of disparate agents to maintain a near-instantaneous and deceptively easy unanimity. Pitchfork serves as one of these institutions, as [is] the Gawker Media network of blogs (which includes the aforementioned Idolator, as well as Gawker in New York, Defamer in L.A., and a handful of other, non-geographically aligned offerings). But perhaps more intriguing than either of these is KEXP, a real-world public-radio station in Seattle that attracts a significant portion of its listenership online. Its three prime-time DJs play almost entirely indie rock, with selections that (broadly) mirror the lineups, themselves converging, of the nation's indie-rock clubs. And indeed, a list of KEXP's top-twelve cities for online listenership reads like a hipster-archipelago roll call (albeit weighted understandably westward):
FIG. 2 - 1 : KEXP STREAMING CITIES
- Seattle
- New York
- Minneapolis
- Portland, Ore.
- Chicago
- San Francisco
- Los Angeles
- Washington, D.C.
- Vancouver
- Denver
- Atlanta
- Austin, Tex.
(Numbers 13 and 15, curiously enough, are Beijing and Guangzhou, in China.) Although it should be stressed that the actual online tribe of KEXP, like that of Pitchfork, is relatively small—62,000 unique visitors per week—it nevertheless functions as a crucial pollinator of sounds, injecting the same new bands at the exact same time into similar social groups around the world.
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