Selling Out or Moving Up?: Why Hipsters Need to Shut Up

Well, the header at the top of my blog says "Weighing in on independent and alternative music," which means I'm not obligated to solely reviewing music. I'm entitled to the occasional rant or two about the industry as a whole, aren't I? I think so.

The car that launched a career (and itself)

This was inspired by a great Adweek article about the rise of indie bands being used in big brand advertising. It talked a lot about how the Chevy Sonic commercial played a role in Fun.'s success, which I touched on in my review from last week. I have to say it felt pretty good to scoop Adweek (kind of).

Hipsters around the country will probably read this article and be up in arms about the rise of indie bands being used in ads, but I say good for them. Accusations of "selling out" get out of hand. I kind of touched on my opinions regarding selling out a little bit in last week's review of Fun.'s Some Nights (I'd put a link here to it, but are you really too lazy that you won't scroll down a little bit?), but here are three reasons why people should be hesitant to use the term sellout:

1. There are plenty of good indie bands out there and they deserve recognition.

Bands are in the music business to entertain people. No right-minded frontman dreams of playing for ten people at a bar like the Zooey Deschanel's character from Yes Man. He dreams of playing for a packed house at Madison Square Garden. Musicians want to play for a large crowd and gain a large following. How can they do that without a little radio play or a Cheer Laundry Detergent branded music video? No band is realistically going to gain a following with a Myspace page and a Bandcamp site. They can certainly start that way, but bands like Fun. and Strange Talk had a lot more going for them than just that stuff.

A blog post involving hipsters
and beer couldn't be complete
without a PBR reference

2. Indie bands need beer money.

Somebody needs to pay the bills. Indie bands don't make very much just playing local gigs. People that go into music as a career need to make a living. As much as I respect someone for working two or three jobs just to support doing something they love, something's gotta give eventually. The hipsters that accuse bands of selling out in the first place probably aren't eating Ramen three times a day trying to get by. Plus, beer isn't cheap. How do you think they're able to support their play-music-and-party-all-night-lifestyles that hipsters glamorize so much? But in all seriousness, small shows don't put food on the table. Bands need to make money, just like everyone else.

3. Good music on the air will drown out the generic pop music that you complain about so much.

The only thing that hipsters complain about more than bands selling out is Top 40 radio. More indie pop on the radio means less Katy Perry, Britney Spears, and Lady Gaga on the radio. Penetrating the market with good music means less airtime for bad music. Simple as that.

As much as I don't like Green Day, Mike Dirnt summed up my view on selling out when he himself was accused of selling out in 2001. He told reporters:

 "The fact was we got to a point that we were so big that tons of people were showing up at punk-rock clubs, and some clubs were even getting shut down because too many were showing up. We had to make a decision: either break up or remove ourselves from that element. And I'll be damned if I was going to flip fucking burgers. I do what I do best. Selling out is compromising your musical intention and I don't even know how to do that."

Music is an art and musicians are artists. I don't think that one should give up "musical intention" for money. That, to me, is what selling out really is. Making money, getting on the radio, and having people know who you are is not selling out. Selling out is what the Cheetah Girls did in that Disney Channel movie (no worries, they came around in the end).

If there are any hipsters out there that want to contest me on this, feel free. You can stop listening to your favorite band because they got on the radio. It's a free country. Just don't complain about it to me.

Fun. : Some Nights

Q: What do you get when you cross Nate Ruess' voice and T-Pain's overuse of auto-tune? 

A: A failed experiment, entitled Some Nights.

I've been looking forward to the release of Fun.'s (I've been arguing with myself about how you punctuate the possessive form of a name that ends in a period for a while and this is what I came up with) new album that debuted a couple weeks ago for a while now.  I've been a fan of Nate Ruess' first band The Format for a long time and was upset when they broke up in 2008.  Around that time, I must have just missed all the press about his new project that started up the next year, because I was at a Motion City Soundtrack concert where a little band named Fun. was opening.  They put on a great show and left me thinking "Wow, that sounds a little like The Format.  They're pretty damn good."  A quick Google search after the show told me that Nate Ruess teamed up with Andrew Dost of Anathello and Jack Antonoff of Steel Train, released an album, and started touring all within a year and a half of The Format breaking up.  Busy dude.

I downloaded Aim and Ignite, their first album, when I got home and loved it.  I saw them live again last year when they headlined a tour promoting the album and they put on another great show.  Their sound, vaguely reminiscent of an indie-pop Queen, translated very well live and they had a powerful, fun (pun intended) stage presence.

After a lot of build-up on the Twitter-verse before Some Nights was released, I couldn't help but get a little excited.  The release of their first single "We Are Young" on Youtube built my anticipation up even more, especially when I found out that they teamed up with soul-infused vocalist Janelle Monae.  The song was a little bit more mainstream sounding, but still had the Fun. flavor that I had come to love.  The song got huge very quickly, largely due to the fact that a lot of mainstream radio stations had picked it up, a Glee performance of the song (this admittedly irked me a little), and a well-produced spot in a Super Bowl ad for the Chevy Sonic.

Good for them.  I'm not one of those pretentious hipster indie-listeners that accuses a band of "selling out" when they start making money (isn't that the point, anyways?).  I think selling out is just when a band changes their sound just to fit the mold.  I don't think that Fun. really sold out.  They always had a poppy sound that was fit for radio.  I do think, though, that they failed with this one.

There are a couple of gems on this album: "We Are Young" is a good song (so hipsters can just shut up when they start complaining about hearing Nate Ruess' voice on the radio), "Some Nights" works well (though I don't give it a complete pass, but I'll get to that in a second), and "Stars" has a great balance of high and low moments.

Now that I've given the album the couple props that it does in fact deserve,  I've got to get the biggest gripe I have about this album that causes the entire album to just fall apart: Nate Ruess's voice shouldn't be auto-tuned.  In fact, I don't really think anyone that isn't a mainstream rapper should be auto-tuned (and that's even a stretch).  There isn't a single time on the album where the auto-tune adds to the songs that it's in.  Even in the songs I said I liked, the auto-tune detracts from the parts that it's in.  I find myself skipping entire songs at a time as I'm listening to the album again, just because there's too much auto-tune.  

Obviously, it wasn't added because Nate Ruess needed it--he's got a great voice.  I don't think it was added to make it more mainstream, because mainstream music doesn't use it the way that Fun. is trying to.  My theory is that they thought it would make a new, unique indie-pop sound.  It certainly is unique, but it also sucks.

Sorry Fun.  I know that you're probably very proud of this album, but it just doesn't work.  I still like you as a band.  Nate, you'll always have a special place in my heart.  I'm still going to see you for the third time when you come to Minneapolis in April, but that doesn't mean I like your newest album.

Here's an acoustic version of "We Are Young" that gives you a good idea of what Nate's unaltered voice is capable of:

Atlas Genius : Trojans

So, why choose to start reviewing indie music with a single instead of a full album?  Well, it either says something about my backwards-personality or it says something about the song.

I'll just give you the answer: It says something about the song.

This band has impressed me in a couple ways.  They reached the top of Alt-Nation's Top 18 without even releasing an album. Scratch that, they reached the top of Alt-Nation's Top 18 without even releasing an EP.

I'll tell you why the song works.  Everything about it is so simple.  The instrumentals are simple, but catchy.  The lyrics are simple, but smart.  Even their Facebook page is simple (their cover photo and profile picture are just "Atlas Genius - Trojans" on just white space and their posts hardly ever go over ten words).  No music video.  And no cost.  Yeah, that's right, you can pick up the download for free on their website.

But I digress.

It's difficult to compose a song this simple and poignant, yet make it work without any other songs on an album or EP to back it up.  Atlas Genius are plenty busy working on their first official EP and, though I eagerly wait for it, this one song will keep me plenty busy for a while (and I don't say that often--I'm definitely a listen-through-the-entire-album-from-start-to-finish type of guy).

Here's a great acoustic version for your listening pleasure:

Reviews? We don't need no stinkin' reviews! (We've got Pitchfork)

Hello world.  I'm James.  It's nice to meet you.

Before I begin diving into reviews, I wanted to give you a background as to why I chose to start reviewing indie music.  Like it says in my "about me," I'm an ad student at the University of Minnesota.  The real reason I'm giving you this tidbit about myself is to let you know that I'm not a music expert.  Why should you care about my opinion then?

I'll answer that with another question:  Why do you care about anyone's opinion?  Why is it that 1,887,475 people (at the time of this post) follow Pitchfork on Twitter?  Why is it that Pitchfork's opinion can make or break Arcade Fire's career?  Ryan Schreiber was just a regular guy with opinions like you and me.

I'm not trying to knock on Pitchfork.  I use it all the time and it's a great site.  That being said, I have a couple of problems with it being hailed as the place to get music reviews (and, to note, these are problems that most similar sites have as well).

The biggest one is inconsistency.  How can Cold War Kids be described as a "non-descript brand of blues" and charged with riding the coattails of The Black Keys when a band like Bear Hands is praised for sounding like MGMT?  The logic baffles me.  I can't blame them for their inconsistency, though.  They have Pitchfork-only-knows how many reviewers writing for them.  Trying to create consistency when you have tons of different people putting their insights on one site as a single voice is impossible.

I think that this inconsistency is not only the result of numerous writers, but also their review process.  Using numbers to review music is, in my personal opinion, problematic.  Quantifying music is impossible because music is inherently subjective.  Believe it or not, some people hate the Beatles.  Does that make their opinion any less valid than mine?  No (please don't leave angry comments saying they have a voice too, John Lennon fans).  What's deserving of a 7.9 as opposed to an 8.4?  I don't think there's really an answer.

And that's why I won't give any.  There's a reason that I'm not going to score the albums I talk about.  I think it's stupid.  I'm going to weigh in and give my opinion on albums and invite you to do the same.  I'm going to tell you what I think of an album and that's it.  That's what the Indie 5000 is going to be about.