Someone responded to my recent post about my old rooftop in Williamsburg saying that it made them jealous for not having experienced Brooklyn during the peak indie years. And it made me realize (with some horror!) that we’re nearing the point where people might start romanticizing what went on in Brooklyn in the 2000s/2010s ala a sort of 1960s Haight-Ashbury…which is something I honestly hope doesn’t happen.
I’m nowhere near eloquent enough to write the post-mortem, but I have this pet theory that the indie decade was born as a reaction from 9/11 teens/20-somethings to what they experienced in the Bush years that followed. It feels forgotten now, but by 2004, there was a massive nationwide surge of anti-war sentiment among young people. Every week was another protest, a rally, a vigil, a boycott. It became unthinkable that Bush would get a second term and the wars would continue – which is, of course, exactly what happened.
When it did, I think it caused a sort of generational apoplectic shock. That so much passion and work had ultimately resulted in ZERO change made it very clear that your voice simply did not make a difference, even when people we knew were dying.
So in contrast to the hippie era, in which mainstream culture and art went hand-in-hand with a fight for societal change, Brooklyn/indie culture felt like the opposite: a retreat into a walled, controlled kingdom where everything was predicated on being small and restrained and insular.
Really, that’s the key word I think of when I look back at the spirt of Williamsburg: small. Everything was so preciously, exactingly small. Small-batch chocolate, small-batch hot sauce, small-batch pickles.
Bands were small, and so were expectations of success. It was like the most important thing was to appear as effortless and uncontrived as possible. You look back at band pics from the era, and it’s remarkable how alike they all look in their mundanity. Songs followed suit in being about small topics, about the most minor of blips of insecurity or unrest in relationships.
It was like everything was muted and restricted, especially emotions and ambitions. If you liked something, you often had to frame it as being ironic. It’s not surprising that drug use was so rampant, the easiest way to instantly counteract all of these pressures.
Making things worse, for the first time, all the negatives of a gate-kept scene were turbo-charged by the unbridled nuclear potential of social media and blogging. Now, instead of having to wait a month for the latest issue of Rolling Stone to see if your album got a good review (which was lame anyway), now you’d know if you got that coveted 9.0+ from Pitchfork within 24 hours of its release.
Rather than having to rely on printed zines to make the rounds at shows to keep you updated on the latest from the scene, blogs and social media spread news, gossip and show reviews with up-to-the-moment urgency, quickly learning that the negative drove far more traffic than the positive.
It’s frustrating, because make no mistake, something special was indeed happening during this period, one of those glorious of epochs where a single geographical point becomes the epicenter for an explosion of creativity and creation. Except this time around, it was a more akin to a black hole, predicated on pulling everything in – and letting little out.
So what came of this experiment in the end? Of course, the long term success stories, unsurprisingly, were the bands that broke the #1 commandment on the indie rock tablets and developed a brand. You had to be subtle about it so as to not be called out, but it was as simple as having something that could easily be talked about beyond the music: a style of dressing, a good logo, a repetitious aesthetic, a lore, archetypal band members, an ethos.
Those are the bands that still seem to be touring successfully today. Everyone else who played by the rules? Times are tough.
All of which is why it’s so hard for me to find much romance in looking back on this era.
To be clear, it was a lot of fun at times! It was neat to be buying broccoli at Tops on the Waterfront (RIP!) and and see Kyp Malone a few feet away in the fruit section. Or to be standing in line at the post office right behind Franz Nicolay, who I’d just seen play with the Hold Steady the previous night.
I remember scouting in Brooklyn Heights, and hey, there’s Rostam from Vampire Weekend biking by with his keyboard strapped to his back. Or turning a corner and seeing Flight of the Conchords being filmed at my local coffee shop.
But the reality was never, ever as romantic as I’m sure it’s easy to imagine. I remember one time, there was a knock at my apartment door during a building-wide roof party, and I immediately recognized the guy standing there as a musician in one of the biggest bands of the time. Not the front man, but a well-known member. “I know you…” I stammered, trying to digest the very surreal moment. “Yeah, can I use your bathroom?” he asked.
So now he’s in the bathroom, and a bunch of his friends come in to find him, because apparently, he just got dumped. So they all sit at our kitchen table and begin one of those neverending “you’ll find a new girl / she doesn’t deserve you / you’re famous” drunken commiseration sessions, and man does the allure of the indie rock life quickly collapse as you’re listening to all this for an hour and just hoping they’ll wrap it up so you can go to bed.
A mutual friend later shared that the musician was particularly down because, since he didn’t write the songs, he got way less in terms of money and had little say in the band’s direction. The friend said that he was planning to quit the band, though in 2026, after several tepidly received solo and side projects, I see that he remains a member in good-standing.
Relationships in particular during this period felt fleeting and shallow, and it was fairly rare for people to be in anything long term. I knew a girl who had once dated a drummer in another extraordinarily successful indie band. The guy was still infatuated with her, and would send her emails from the road about how he loved her and wanted to get back together. Buuut he couldn’t kick his pesky habit of sleeping with groupies, and ultimately, it never happened.
And yes, it’s cool when you find out one of your roommate is dating a guy from that 90s pop-punk band you loved in high school! Less cool when you’re late for work because he’s taking a long morning crap in your 4br loft apartment’s only bathroom!
It was fun. But looking back, I find myself mainly mourning the an insane concentration of talent that came together to build and create, only to be stymied by its own self-policing ethic. And I wonder how things might have been different if there had been more optimism for the world, an acceptance with being gushingly passionate, and an unbridled belief in growth over limits.
And the irony. My god, why did everything you liked have to go through that fucking filter of possibly being ironic? Why wasn’t it OK to simply like – or even love! – something for what it was? What was the risk?
It reminds me of the song “Ballad of a Thin Man” by Bob Dylan, in which he eviscerates an aging music critic for not understanding the emerging hippie movement. “Because something is happening here but you don’t know what it is,” Dylan sneers with inflamed condescension.
Dylan was right to castigate the critic. But all these years later, when the aims of the 1960s movement clearly have fallen far, far short of their ideals, isn’t it fair to say that Dylan too had no fucking clue what was actually happening?
All of which is to say: it is the folly of every generation to romanticize an era they never experienced. But don’t fall for the trap. The good news is that there are ALWAYS places where rents are cheap and art communities are fermenting. Rather than dwell on dead history, seek them out and be part of the next movement. And if you’re going to look to the past, do so to to learn from its mistakes.
In the case of the “peak Brooklyn” era? As the old spooky story goes, the killer was indeed calling from inside the house – but turns out, it was us all along.
