2010s alt-pop and the return to innocence
aka why was everyone dancing on the beach wearing face paint
i don’t want to do a big preamble about what things were like in 2010 because i already did that for the last essay detailing this time period. this phenomenon is more generalized to “indie pop” rather than a specific microgenre within indie pop, so that’s at least a little bit easier to explain. these were bands like mgmt and empire of the sun who were making pretty digestible pop tracks that were, yknow, maybe a little bit weird or dark in theme. we can loop in a few more bands too if you want, but the main gist is festival not-quite-headliners. portugal. the man comes to mind, as does edward sharpe and the magnetic zeroes. (the latter i cannot stand due to how incredibly twee they are, the former is perfectably tolerable.) all the sort of bands who a few years after they hit what i guess you’d call their primes ended up having one of their songs used for a kia sorrento commercial and got quite a bit bigger but not yet mainstream. most of them post-sorrento commercial would later release albums that were much more straightforward bad pop; some of them resisted the urge and got weirder.
the thing that (apart from sound) groups these types of bands together for me is their insistence on an aesthetic that imitates a return to innocence; a focus on youth, running around in ragged clothes, beaches, day-glo facepaint. there’s very much a sense of pageantry and performance. however, unlike the examples of that from the past - hair metal, 90s divas, the elaborate staging of grand ole opry style country - this evokes more of a homemade feeling, a primitivity that seems accessible to anyone with access to some shitty clothes and a camcorder. it also, critically, looked fun; there was a draw to running around half-naked on the beach, presumably on some type of psychadelic. drugs, and the aesthetic of drugs, were definitely a big part of the picture. and since we’re talking about 2006-2010, people were mostly talking about weed, molly, and lsd/mushrooms; good feelings-type drugs, not downers like xanax or lean. drugs that made you want to get close to people, drugs whose visuals were bright and primal.
my favourite touchstone of this era is the Fountain of Youth video by Boy Crisis. boy crisis is victor vasquez/kool a.d.’s first band, a mostly regrettable indie pop outfit that milks the “ironic boy band” angle for all it can. it’s synth-heavy, very cheesy. mr vasquez is the lead singer (very, very strange for anyone who got into das racist in like 2010). Fountain of Youth is probably their best song, at least in my opinion: danceable, with a nice synth in the verses and a pretty frenetic, heavy prechorus that moves into a very fun and ear-wormy chorus. its lyrics are pretty much horny nonsense that suits the music pretty well. its video, however, is very interesting. essentially: a group of early 20somethings in facepaint and vaguely “tribal” clothes (that look like faux leather scraps picked up from the local michael’s) hold a ceremony in an open-air abandoned area. they paint the faces of the boy crisis members, who are brought in to the ceremony on a sort of wagon/litter combination. they are fed a hot dog ritualistically. the boy crisis members perform their song. there are skinny white girls in bikinis that look mysterious. there’s some very simple choreography and dancing; stuff like waving one’s arms slowly to the beat, stepping from side to side. the scene changes to nighttime for the last chorus, and someone in a fur bikini (yes, seriously) starts dancing next to the boy crisis members seductively-ish. there’s a montage of more ritual-type-stuff; smoke flares, tiki torches (this was pre-charlottesville, so no unfortunate connotations here), bowing, people being tied together á la “witch burning”, the boy crisis members being poked gently by sticks.
all in all, it looks pretty bad to modern eyes; lots of “weird for the sake of being weird” vibes, lots of weird cuts and montages that don’t seem to add anything to the situation. a downright gratuitous amount of allllmost but not quite cultural appropriation; this was about the time where Native groups had really started being listened to when they fought against depictions of things like war bonnets being worn by people who were not supposed to be wearing them. I think it captures a sort of aesthetic zeitgeist. people were starting to chafe under the introduction of microtechnology as smartphones were beginning to become more and more ubiquitous. the millenials were beginning to move into the job market en masse, fresh out of university/high school and suddenly disillusioned with many of the demands of society. there was this palpable yearning for a different time, one that was less complicated, less demanding, less political. a yearning for freedom in a society that felt constrictive.
we didn’t know how bad it could get. in retrospect, all this yearning business feels naïve. the early 10s were downright idyllic compared to the present; sure, the problems we have now still existed, but they seemed quieter, less constant. the economy had absolutely tanked in ‘08, and we’d assumed that things wouldn’t- couldn’t get worse. i mean, obama was president! gay marriage had just been legalized in the states! it was still the start of a new millennium; the internet had opened up so many possibilities (and had more than three websites). the drug of choice was still mdma. a party drug, not a drug to lie down and cry with. i don’t think people even really did ketamine or benzos at the time. it wasn’t fashionable. it wasn’t fun.
additionally, part of the cheesiness-in-retrospect is likely due to the beating of this aesthetic into the dirt through overuse. remember that a lot of bands who used this sort of imagery got big through car commercials. there was no way that a little bit of the vibe wasn’t going to filter through and influence more established pop acts; consider coldplay’s “paradise” and most of kesha’s first album. a lot of the aesthetic has also moved into US rave and festival culture, as well, which you can see very clearly through the coachella issue of people wearing appropriated headdresses. its gradual shift into a part of popular culture, albeit just a chunk of popular culture, also signaled its fall from grace. it’s not immediately clear if its shift was what caused its downfall, or if it was destined to be dated by design. either way, the feathers-and-facepaint look became irreparably associated with mass consumption “hippies” and people who still took E but only listened to like steve aoki. (no offense to steve aoki, i’m sure he’s fine.)
well, what happened to the bands that popularized it? most of them broke up or moved on. as they got older, as the decade began to sink its teeth in, as the party drugs began to move in a more downer direction, their aesthetics settled down and became more straightforward. mgmt, for example: their most recent album as of this essay, “little dark age”, is a brooding pop ode to getting older, death, and the artifice of online. its visuals are stark and moody; there’s no smoke, no beach, no dancing around a campfire. for instance, the title track’s music video has explicit nods to the cure and that style of goth culture, as well as 70s horror movies and exploitation cinema. it’s much more focused on looking backwards than looking forwards; the hope has been replaced by a sombre memento mori.
the change is not surprising. we as a culture have transformed from hopeful upstarts to jaded workhorses, tired of always being on call, tired of never having enough money to pay for things we desperately need, tired of chasing the carrot on a stick towards the life that we were promised by doing well in school, going to university, getting a degree. our culture is one of fatigue and of the slow march towards death. our culture is one of nodding off on a troubling amount of xanax at your friends’ house while someone plays super smash bros brawl at a competitive level on the crt tv they found in the trash. our culture is of looking back and not only not recognizing the hope of yesteryear, but being actively embarrassed by the fact that that hope ever existed, now that we know what we know.
it may be a depressing shift. i for one am glad though that we have the evidence that it wasn’t always like this; that for a moment, there was enough innocence in our perception of the world to create things that shimmered and smoked and seemed to exult in their faux-intrinsicality. art that tried to dig back to a primordial time of humanity, but only wanted to show the fun bits; the dancing, the sex, the drugs. ignore the difficult things, it tried to say. right now, this is all there is.