Such Great Heights
The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion
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4.0 • 6 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
AN INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER
The definitive history of twenty-first-century indie rock—from Iron & Wine and Death Cab for Cutie to Phoebe Bridgers and St. Vincent—and how the genre shifted the musical landscape and shaped a generation
Maybe you caught a few exhilarating seconds of “Teen Age Riot” on a nearby college radio station while scanning the FM dial in your parents’ car. Maybe your friend invited you to a shabby local rock club and you ended up having a religious experience with Neutral Milk Hotel. Perhaps you were scandalized and tantalized upon sneaking Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville from an older sibling’s CD collection, or you vowed to download every Radiohead song you could find on LimeWire because they were the favorite band of the guy you had a major crush on.
However you found your way into indie rock, once you were a listener, it felt like being part of a secret club of people who had discovered something special, something secret, something superior. In Such Great Heights, music journalist Chris DeVille brilliantly captures this cultural moment, from the early aughts and the height of indie rock, until the 2010s as streaming upends the industry and changes music forever. DeVille covers the gamut of bands—like Arcade Fire, TV On The Radio, LCD Soundsystem, Haim, Pavement, and Bon Iver—and in the vein of Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties, touches on staggering pop culture moments, like finding your new favorite band on MySpace and the life-changing O.C. soundtrack.
Nerdy, fun, and a time machine for millennials, Such Great Heights is about how subculture becomes pop culture, how capitalism consumes what's “cool,” who gets to define what's hip and why, and how an “underground” genre shaped our lives.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Stereogum managing editor DeVille debuts with a comprehensive and colorful account of the rise, fall, corporatization, and partial revival of indie rock. He traces the genre's roots to 1990s grunge, and charts a rise fueled by internet fan communities and music sites like Pitchfork that catapulted unknown bands to fame. Soon artists like the Killers were riding that wave to success, while such shows as The O.C. popularized artists including Death Cab for Cutie, incentivizing bands to adopt a "softer, friendlier" sound. As indie rock expanded, diversified, and crept further into the mainstream, it forfeited a "coherent sense of identity"; by the 2010s, DeVille writes, indie had come to signify "so many things" that it effectively meant nothing. He also highlights the internet's complex effects on the indie ecosystem—while the shift to Spotify and other streaming services crushed many bands' revenue streams, the late 2010s also saw such artists as boygenius use their own platforms to bypass industry gatekeepers. Though excessive references to Pitchfork can sometimes make this feel more like a history of indie music journalism, the breadth of DeVille's knowledge is impressive, and his analysis of what subcultures both lose and gain when they enter the mainstream is astute. Readers nostalgic for the days of the Postal Service and Passion Pit should take a look.
