The 2000s Indie Bracket
It’s time, y’all.
Also, look up what you need to look up via this Google Sheet!
Me making an omlette before my BFF & I went off in search of the best ever death metal band in Denton (2005).
A few weeks ago, I completed my first semester of my Ph.D. in music education. I know, right!? Amazing! Hence why you haven’t seen much going on here, really not all year. Sorry for that.
But this? I’ve been working on this goofy project for a long time. I thought, what if there were a doofus-y bracket where people could vote for their favorite indie rock band of the 2000s?! Everyone wants a piece of that sweet leftover Y2K anxiety and some Garden State flashbacks, right?! I came up with the bracket in April of 2020, as a way to pass time in the early & foolish days of the pandemic. Maybe I was missing March Madness, or at least the associated bracketology & conversation that always comes with it. My days in that season consisted of teaching my kid to read & write and making teaching videos, (many of which I proudly stand by today, and also use in my new classroom!) so this was a welcome distraction.
Then, on April 24th, 2020, I was made redundant by my school, where I’d just started in August of 2019. To say it was a heart-breaking experience only made worse by not getting any other jobs after a summer’s worth of interviewing is putting it lightly. Thus, my fun little exercise in nostalgia was put on hold.
Until now!
Hi, this was me in September of 2005. I was fun.
Speaking of nostalgia, one of the more fascinating things I’ve learned about in my social psychology of music course this fall was the “reminiscence bump,” (refer to Janata, Tomic & Rakowski from 2007, Koppel & Rubin from 2016, and/or Krumhansl from 2017) or the correlation between musical taste and the music of one’s youth. Lord knows that I’ve got a soft spot for lots of 90s music, but even more so, I don’t think I’ll ever get my head out of the indie rock haze I spent a good portion of the 2000s in.
The 2000s were a bizarre time in the entertainment industry. The post-911 media landscape was a garbage fire, mired in recession that swung back throughout the world in 2008. There was still a ton of shifting as a result of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and the music industry was operating under the shadow of war & jingoism. Despite what news media wants to say about that time, there was a good amount of anti-war protest music that appeared (one of my favorites from indie rock bracket band Metric!). Aforementioned media conglomerates simply made sure that music didn’t make it onto the radio — the Chicks formerly known as Dixie were a prime example of that — and MTV had all but abandoned music videos by then. Those of us who were of age have strange memories of that time, but under the high gloss superficiality of Laguna Beach and the oversaturation of Toby Keith, there was so much great art being made then.
The 2000s also felt like the last time the music a kid listened to was a definitive feature of their personality. At least, that’s what I observed. I graduated high school in 2001, so it was less of a big deal then, but nonetheless. Those music fan (aka “x-head”, as per Bansal, Flannery, and Woolhouse, 2020) stereotypes carried over to adults, even to the college level. Being a hipster at the time was much less a sin than being “scene,” especially at the dawn of MySpace. At the risk of sounding pretentious, I’ll say that I was a little too old for emo when it fully surfaced into pop culture. (And having been an obsessive teenage Smashing Pumpkins fan, I could trace that influence throughout early Aughts emo, and was not particularly interested in hearing much of it rehashed.) I was, however, very interested in revisiting the 80s, as were most indie rock bands of that era.
I hate to be a person who even utters the words “kids these days,” but with the advent of streaming, kids seem to no longer define their personalities and social groups by musical genres. They have the access and opportunity to listen to whatever they want, and to discover Phil Collins as they please. They are probably better off for it. Research also indicates that there has been a bridging of the gap between “highbrow” and “lowbrow” music for the last 30-40 years. Authors of that paper (Peterson & Kern, 1996) credit some of that to a society that increasingly values education, which, from the perspective of a teacher, I don’t really observe that keenly, but okay!
Here I am in Sweden, 2003, having just waded into that lake.
I am not an historian, and even if I was, I don’t know that I could quantify that the 2000s were particularly any worse or any better than any other decade. That’s not what I’m aiming to do.
I am finding myself lost in the nostalgia of that time, and I was there hardcore in March & April of 2020. Mostly, I’m drawn toward remembering the feeling of figuring out who I was and what I valued. I made this bracket because I was feeling bored & sad & really really really wishing I could go to concerts with my friends, like I did up to four times a week circa 2004. Therefore I’ve been listening to this playlist a lot throughout the entire pandemic.
I won a scavenger hunt at the Athens Popfest in 2007, in part helped by Matt from Bunnygrunt, who I had to hug on camera. Also I definitely took these photos on a disposable camera and got them on CD as well as in print.
I also try to imagine what it would have been like to have a pandemic in 2004, and I shudder to think. But at least at that time, we all had “Hey Ya!” to unite us. (And I’ll go to my deathbed genuinely believing that song is the top pop song of the entire decade, no need to bracket it.)
Above you’ll find the playlist. And then the voting.
No I’m not going to explain how I came up with the seeding or the various quadrants. The NCAA doesn’t really, either.
Arcade Fire performing live in 2005
Quadrant 1: Post-Emo
Arcade Fire
Rilo Kiley
Stars
Vampire Weekend
Animal Collective
Bright Eyes
Tegan & Sara
Frou Frou
Phoenix
Peter, Bjorn & John
The Go! Team
The Moldy Peaches
stellastarr*
The Sounds
Band of Horses
Electric Six
MIA in 2009
Quadrant 2: Arts Major Dance Party
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
MIA
Metric
Broken Social Scene
Franz Ferdinand
Modest Mouse
Fiery Furnaces
MGMT
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah!
The Unicorns
Deerhoof
The Libertines
Radio 4
The Blow
Architecture in Helsinki
Scissor Sisters
Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie performing in 2008
Quadrant 3: Future Folk-ish(-ish)
The New Pornographers
Death Cab for Cutie
The Walkmen
The Decemberists
TV on the Radio
LCD Soundsystem
Bloc Party
Bon Iver
Mates of State
Camera Obscura
Jens Lekman
The Rapture
Grandaddy
Ratatat
Santigold
Art Brut
Very early image of Meg & Jack of The White Stripes, red tint
Quadrant 4: BRO!
The White Stripes
Arctic Monkeys
The Shins
The Strokes
Sufjan Stevens
Regina Spektor
The Mountain Goats
Of Montreal
The National
The Black Keys
Blackalicious
The Ting Tings
Interpol
The Hives
Dizzee Rascal
The Futureheads
So, yeah, there we have it. Please go to my twitter to vote. Let’s have fun staying inside & remembering the old days during my favorite week of the year.
And here’s one more picture of me, maybe definitively 2000s? Anyway.
Another photo of me, looking cynical & unimpressed while someone puts up a rock on hand sign. Orlando Fringe, 2009.
Sources cited:
(I doubted this for a very long time, but I hope that the sweet summer child in the above photos would be proud of the almost-middle aged teacher, scholar, wife & mom she became.)