In 2004, indie rock lost all meaning—so did selling out. But the last 20 years prove the genre's not dead; it's changing yet again.
offers up a few hauntological pangs for Lollapalooza 2004. That year the venerable music festival was supposed to tour sixteen cities, with a two-day bill—headlined by Morrissey, Sonic Youth, Modest Mouse, and a newly reunited Pixies on one day, and jam-and-jam-adjacent bands like The String Cheese Incident and Gomez on the other—that was meant to return Lollapalooza to its more “alternative” roots, after a shaky 2003 comeback had gone heavy on chug-rockers like Audioslave and Incubus.
In 2004, soundtracks briefly filled that curatorial void, as TV and movie producers pulled songs from their own iPods and started building entire scenes around their emotional beats. They even started writing the artists themselves into the scripts—as in arguably the year’s second-most important indie moment, when Natalie Portman promised that listening to The Shins would “change your life” inIt seems kind of ludicrous now .
This was the dawn of “blog rock,” and while the playing field that was leveled in 2004 ended up creating a glut of middling bands—a post-Strokes rush of countless The Somethings comprising what”—it also allowed some of the less commercial acts to sidestep the usual gatekeepers, without compromising their sound. Indie started to embrace a more diverse span of artists, many of whom took the genre to far weirder places.
The only downside, of course, is that most of these acts weren’t making any money. By 2004, there was now an entire generation that had grown up believing that music was a free and endlessly renewable resource. Within a few short years, the industry would give up trying to convince them otherwise.
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