{"id":3769,"date":"2017-10-25T15:40:44","date_gmt":"2017-10-25T22:40:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/?p=3769"},"modified":"2017-10-25T15:50:29","modified_gmt":"2017-10-25T22:50:29","slug":"the-legacy-of-90s-indie-rock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2017\/10\/the-legacy-of-90s-indie-rock.html","title":{"rendered":"The Legacy of ’90s Indie Rock"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>[contextly_auto_sidebar]<\/p>\n

IF you live long enough and write for a living, there’s a pretty good chance you will end up “curating” — to use the current term – your own youth. That’s what happened to me when I tried recently to make sense of where “alternative” or indie rock was 20 years ago today.<\/p>\n

I see it as a cultural high point, and its making — as well as unmaking — remain fascinating to me. Still, the process of historicizing the music of my 20s (esp for younger readers) was strange indeed.<\/p>\n

Our sense of popular culture, especially the bits that unspool while we are young and impressionable, is always bound up in part with our personal stories. In my case, I graduated college a few months before Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” exploded all over the radio, inaugurating the indie heyday. By 1997, I was nearing the end of my 20s, and ended up moving from New England to California.<\/p>\n

The albums that came out that year — Built to Spill’s Perfect From Now On<\/em>, Sleater-Kinney’s Dig Me Out<\/em>, Elliott Smith’s Either\/ Or<\/em>, and those are just a few from the Pacific Northwest — showed the indie tradition maturing in a pitched, exciting way. Belle and Sebastian has just released its US debut, and Pavement was still at its height. For the first time, music of my generation, and not late-Boomer bands, dominated my listening. And then it all started to fall apart.<\/p>\n

Here<\/a> is my new piece in Vox.<\/p>\n

And here<\/a> is a song from one of my favorite albums of 1997.<\/p>\n