2026 Mix 14: A song of the year still shines after a few weekends, plus pop as the new indie(?) b/w mild teenage reminiscence and an indie block stuck at the end
Бруд song is very good and, along with the Orielles, reminds me of a band I've been listening to a lot, Queenadreena. The new Nicole Dollanganger is also very good in this way.
So much - KatieJane Garside's career is amazing, I only heard about Daisy Chainsaw a few weeks ago, and now I'm addicted to Queenadreena, Lalleshwari, Ruby Throat and liar, flower as well - the latter have released some wild Internet metal reminiscent of QA, in 2020 (My Brain is Lit Like an Airport) and 2025 (monolithic ego)
Mark Sinker: "here's what i'm objecting to, cast as a fable: [band xyz] arrives in our purlieu, announcing that it comes as envoy of the emperor ['We are influenced by Television']"
Mark's objection is brilliant, and I recommend everyone read his entire comment, and followups (tho I find the phenomenon more benign – and mundane – and lovable – than Mark does):
Ah thank you for that thread, I’ve been meaning to go back and engage with Mark on “influence”
As I tried to write something about this I was less irked and settled into benign/mundane/lovable because I can’t be as hard on my teenage self as I get older and I remember my own lists and (mental) flowcharts. I still make them, but I don’t keep the sense of play and contradiction subterranean, things to be obscured or resolved, something like that.
My LVW decade's end piece for the '00s ("Microwaving A Tragedy"). Piece is an experiment that often doesn't work, but the two best paragraphs (I think of them as my Ann Powers paragraphs) are the consecutive Bob Dylan/Taylor Swift paragraphs, search "Like A Rolling Stone":
Taylor – not particularly knowing she's doing so – is pulling something out of the cultural cosmos – the romantic hero! – or she's inhabiting it, or it's inhabiting her. And I'm talking about genuine influence (in the sense of the power of the type that she inhabits/is inhabiting her) and genuine lineage (it's a type that *evolves*); whereas I couldn't care less if this validates her to some reader. Some third-rate Taylor imitators might inhabit/get inhabited just as much as Taylor, and good for them, and others may not at all (and good for them, too). Anyway, Dylan didn't invent the type, and he'd been acting it out on every record prior to Highway 61.
(By coincidence Clare's been reading Hamlet, a play I only remember in bits. But surely Taylor is more Hamlet than Ophelia, though I guess that both H & O have been cut off from their parentage, w/ no direction home, though I don't remember the play well enough to know if Shakespeare thinks this is the advantage (being cut-off, set loose) that Dylan does.)
To reconcile "being cut-off from parentage" as an *advantage* (when you ain't got nothin', you got nothin' to lose, and a world to gain), on the one hand, with "lineage" on the other hand:
Actual knowledge of previous and current occupants of your so-called ancestry – once upon a time you dressed so fine in your grandparents' cut-offs, and you still are – so the direction the old-style cut-offs kinda sorta provide [this actual knowledge of your historical predecessors, of Taylor's historical predecessors (disregarding whether or not she herself has or wants such knowledge)], while it (the direction) is neither homeward nor a guaranteed way forward (as Nietzsche and Chuck Berry warn, you may be stuck in an eternal Mobile, with Memphis but an ever-shifting fantasy), it functions as something of a model that we can refer to both for when it works and for what it highlights as no longer working. So the James Dean coat may no longer get you past the door person, whereas the Lil Pump jacket, while announcing an apparently different disaffection, nonetheless, as a new coat of disaffection, garners not dis same old semblance of affection, but *dat* more up-to-date affection. (Even though Lil Pump's "i Shyne" got the *fewest* likes of any of my entries in #TheTenX5, its being last suggests it is actually the most novel or challenging, hence first).
What's also missing – I think, but maybe I'm wrong – from this lineage-building as you describe it is an actual punk inversion where you're getting out from under the supposed *major* *artists* like the Stones and the Beatles and Elvis so you're instead claiming to take inspiration from Johnny Burnette or the Blues Magoos or Sonny Bono or Phil Ochs or the Holy Modal Rounders or Deep Purple or the Raincoats or Poison or Quarterflash or the Melvins or Lois or (too bad Kurt Cobain is not alive so we could get his list); or if I were starting a band now (which would probably be terrible) I might go for Miso rather than Hyuna or for Lil Pump rather than Playboi Carti or for Lisette Melendez rather than Madonna. Or I *would* go for the Stones but for "I Wanna Be Your Man" and "She Said Yeah" rather than "Jumpin' Jack Flash" (except I'd be half-lying since I really would go for "Jumpin' Jack Flash" but for the drone ending rather than the riff) or "No Reply" rather than "Tomorrow Never Knows" (but at some point I'm not only lying but what I'm doing is copying MC Pipokinha but trying to give it the spirit of "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction," and it doesn't work; but I'm still unapologetically about the Stones and Stooges whom I'd imitate by avoiding their notes, but they're way better than Madonna or Britney, sorry). I think hyperpop maybe tries to do an inversion by going for Farrah Abraham and Heidi Montag but often shows that hyperpop is a lot worse than Farrah Abraham and Heidi Montag. In my mind I'm more a DJ than a musician and more a writer of words than either. and no one bothers to ask me whom I'm copying.
But then Britney's *Blackout* is one of my favorite albums, not that I ever listen to albums, but I'm pretending to myself that *Blackout* is actually a Stones album. I'm babbling at this point.
"an actual punk inversion where you're getting out from under the supposed *major* *artists*"
That is what is the oddest about the indie conventional wisdom* in hindsight, it was a very unpredictable approach to "major artists" where sometimes you're inverting the punk inversion and other times you're taking the inversion at face value -- or maybe turning the inversion into a new boring hagiography. What I understood much later was that this is a pretty natural thing to do and it happens to any community that is trying to make a claim for itself *as a community* ("we are the true indie people"; "we are the real pop appreciators"). My beef with just-so stories about music history or impact or whatever else tends to happen in the specifics -- when a specific story doesn't match the music or when the history gets something deeply wrong.
*I wish I had a better word for this, which I mean as a sort of affect for opinions held by lots of people who believed lots of different things. I refer to it as "speaking authoritatively" in the post, but it's more of a sense that other people reading will get what you mean even when what you mean isn't at all clear (or is wrong)
Бруд song is very good and, along with the Orielles, reminds me of a band I've been listening to a lot, Queenadreena. The new Nicole Dollanganger is also very good in this way.
Ooh Queenadreena is great -- much to explore there, too bad I missed their 2000 alb during that year's album tournament
So much - KatieJane Garside's career is amazing, I only heard about Daisy Chainsaw a few weeks ago, and now I'm addicted to Queenadreena, Lalleshwari, Ruby Throat and liar, flower as well - the latter have released some wild Internet metal reminiscent of QA, in 2020 (My Brain is Lit Like an Airport) and 2025 (monolithic ego)
‘Even Though The Darkest Clouds’ is another absolute rocker https://liarflower.bandcamp.com/album/geiger-counter
LINK ONE
Mark Sinker: "here's what i'm objecting to, cast as a fable: [band xyz] arrives in our purlieu, announcing that it comes as envoy of the emperor ['We are influenced by Television']"
Mark's objection is brilliant, and I recommend everyone read his entire comment, and followups (tho I find the phenomenon more benign – and mundane – and lovable – than Mark does):
https://koganbot.livejournal.com/115862.html?view=951446#t951446
There's a pretty strong parallel to what you say you and current fans were/are doing on behalf of latter-day faves via "lineage."
Ah thank you for that thread, I’ve been meaning to go back and engage with Mark on “influence”
As I tried to write something about this I was less irked and settled into benign/mundane/lovable because I can’t be as hard on my teenage self as I get older and I remember my own lists and (mental) flowcharts. I still make them, but I don’t keep the sense of play and contradiction subterranean, things to be obscured or resolved, something like that.
LINK TWO
My LVW decade's end piece for the '00s ("Microwaving A Tragedy"). Piece is an experiment that often doesn't work, but the two best paragraphs (I think of them as my Ann Powers paragraphs) are the consecutive Bob Dylan/Taylor Swift paragraphs, search "Like A Rolling Stone":
https://koganbot.livejournal.com/204931.html
Taylor – not particularly knowing she's doing so – is pulling something out of the cultural cosmos – the romantic hero! – or she's inhabiting it, or it's inhabiting her. And I'm talking about genuine influence (in the sense of the power of the type that she inhabits/is inhabiting her) and genuine lineage (it's a type that *evolves*); whereas I couldn't care less if this validates her to some reader. Some third-rate Taylor imitators might inhabit/get inhabited just as much as Taylor, and good for them, and others may not at all (and good for them, too). Anyway, Dylan didn't invent the type, and he'd been acting it out on every record prior to Highway 61.
(By coincidence Clare's been reading Hamlet, a play I only remember in bits. But surely Taylor is more Hamlet than Ophelia, though I guess that both H & O have been cut off from their parentage, w/ no direction home, though I don't remember the play well enough to know if Shakespeare thinks this is the advantage (being cut-off, set loose) that Dylan does.)
To reconcile "being cut-off from parentage" as an *advantage* (when you ain't got nothin', you got nothin' to lose, and a world to gain), on the one hand, with "lineage" on the other hand:
Actual knowledge of previous and current occupants of your so-called ancestry – once upon a time you dressed so fine in your grandparents' cut-offs, and you still are – so the direction the old-style cut-offs kinda sorta provide [this actual knowledge of your historical predecessors, of Taylor's historical predecessors (disregarding whether or not she herself has or wants such knowledge)], while it (the direction) is neither homeward nor a guaranteed way forward (as Nietzsche and Chuck Berry warn, you may be stuck in an eternal Mobile, with Memphis but an ever-shifting fantasy), it functions as something of a model that we can refer to both for when it works and for what it highlights as no longer working. So the James Dean coat may no longer get you past the door person, whereas the Lil Pump jacket, while announcing an apparently different disaffection, nonetheless, as a new coat of disaffection, garners not dis same old semblance of affection, but *dat* more up-to-date affection. (Even though Lil Pump's "i Shyne" got the *fewest* likes of any of my entries in #TheTenX5, its being last suggests it is actually the most novel or challenging, hence first).
What's also missing – I think, but maybe I'm wrong – from this lineage-building as you describe it is an actual punk inversion where you're getting out from under the supposed *major* *artists* like the Stones and the Beatles and Elvis so you're instead claiming to take inspiration from Johnny Burnette or the Blues Magoos or Sonny Bono or Phil Ochs or the Holy Modal Rounders or Deep Purple or the Raincoats or Poison or Quarterflash or the Melvins or Lois or (too bad Kurt Cobain is not alive so we could get his list); or if I were starting a band now (which would probably be terrible) I might go for Miso rather than Hyuna or for Lil Pump rather than Playboi Carti or for Lisette Melendez rather than Madonna. Or I *would* go for the Stones but for "I Wanna Be Your Man" and "She Said Yeah" rather than "Jumpin' Jack Flash" (except I'd be half-lying since I really would go for "Jumpin' Jack Flash" but for the drone ending rather than the riff) or "No Reply" rather than "Tomorrow Never Knows" (but at some point I'm not only lying but what I'm doing is copying MC Pipokinha but trying to give it the spirit of "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction," and it doesn't work; but I'm still unapologetically about the Stones and Stooges whom I'd imitate by avoiding their notes, but they're way better than Madonna or Britney, sorry). I think hyperpop maybe tries to do an inversion by going for Farrah Abraham and Heidi Montag but often shows that hyperpop is a lot worse than Farrah Abraham and Heidi Montag. In my mind I'm more a DJ than a musician and more a writer of words than either. and no one bothers to ask me whom I'm copying.
But then Britney's *Blackout* is one of my favorite albums, not that I ever listen to albums, but I'm pretending to myself that *Blackout* is actually a Stones album. I'm babbling at this point.
"an actual punk inversion where you're getting out from under the supposed *major* *artists*"
That is what is the oddest about the indie conventional wisdom* in hindsight, it was a very unpredictable approach to "major artists" where sometimes you're inverting the punk inversion and other times you're taking the inversion at face value -- or maybe turning the inversion into a new boring hagiography. What I understood much later was that this is a pretty natural thing to do and it happens to any community that is trying to make a claim for itself *as a community* ("we are the true indie people"; "we are the real pop appreciators"). My beef with just-so stories about music history or impact or whatever else tends to happen in the specifics -- when a specific story doesn't match the music or when the history gets something deeply wrong.
*I wish I had a better word for this, which I mean as a sort of affect for opinions held by lots of people who believed lots of different things. I refer to it as "speaking authoritatively" in the post, but it's more of a sense that other people reading will get what you mean even when what you mean isn't at all clear (or is wrong)