I heard a coldplay song and felt something and now I lost my indie cred (a long silly essay on post-punk saturation)
yeah i made this
I’m not cool anymore. I’m sorry. I got another confession to make - I'm your fool. Something happened to me recently. One morning I woke up to find that every new band is called something like Tax Attorney, Postmaster General or Motion Recoil Dustbin and they all have songs either called FIZZ or The General Malaise of the Postman as he Slipped and Fell Beneath England’s Tallest Motorway Crossing. It's post-punk throwback on one end and Brexit Rock on the other. Back in my day we had simple legible band names like Car Seat Headrest.
The post-punk wave is out in full force for the kids who just stumbled across Wire and DEVO and one of the main takeaways they got was that IT’S COOL WHEN STUFF IS SHORT AND IN ALL CAPS. I’d like to think that post-punk is more than buying an offset Fender Jazzmaster/Jaguar and choosing a cool name and a loud drummer, but in most cases that seems to do the trick.
I don’t want to be too mean - as someone who grew up in Sheffield in the 2010s we were doing the exact same thing with post-punk’s less cool cousin Indie Rock. Back then it was black skinny jeans, Fender Strat or Old Vintage Japanese Guitar That Mac Demarco Would Play, and all the songs sounded like the worst Libertines or Bloc Party Deep Cut. The scene I cut my teeth in was suffering from what I called “Britpop Hangover” - reusing tired tropes of the Britpop 90s and Indie Boom of the 2000s, and achieving diminishing returns.
The big problem in drawing from those genres is that they were flash in the pan moments. They were short lived movements of intense popularity followed by a rush of obsolescence, which few groups managed to survive. What was once fresh became instant pastiche. The visual and auditory landscape of post-punk is different. It has always survived, as like many subgenres, it can thrive and be legitimised without popularity. It’s cool to know a post punk band no-one has heard of. A popstar/rockstar swagger can’t hold that same social currency. The clothes will never go out of style, and the sound and aesthetics of the music remain seemingly evergreen. So what’s my fucking problem? Shouldn’t I be into this if I didn't like what came before? I should, but there’s something that still gets to me. l It seems like this swathe of new acts picked up pretty much everything, but they forgot to write any actual songs.
I like a lot of what my friends and I deem Brexit Rock - bands like Black Country New Road and Squid made British guitar music interesting and potent again, but even then this spawned what a contact in London called “the posh Black Country New Road voice”. The same person described the post punk scene there as ‘loads of shite posh bands’ and I’m inclined to agree. There’s so much to be said about class and indie music but that’s another article. In Amsterdam it just feels like post-punk has become another uniform. The right clothes, the right guitars, the right song templates. The right heavy drum beat so that the Dutch teens jump up and down, and the right aggressively yelled mid lyrics.
I’m no novice to this - I've read Mark E Smith’s autobiography. So I went back to the sacred texts. At my bar job the clientele had to listen to DEVO and Wire and Sonic Youth all day. And I found out what I maybe always knew - this music is good. And the music is good because the songs are good. And the lyrics are good and weird and funny. Post punk is just a loose label for this music, but now we’re all wearing it like a badge - or a hall pass to forget to write decent tunes. Because writing good songs is hard. But writing shouty party music that wears the style of post punk and being cool (in this town) is relatively easy. And if it keeps going, we might end up with our own post-punk hangover, where post-punk will just mean kinda shit band but they look good at least.
As someone who likes Wilco, I've come to terms with the fact that I'll never be truly cool. But I never expected that after a week of my post-punk deep dive this would happen to me. That I would see a video on Youtube of Coldplay (a band I actively hated) performing ‘Fix You’ (a song I never really liked) live in Sao Paulo to millions of Paulistanos. And with all the musical nonsense of this article knocking around my head I would play that video on the train back to Amsterdam from a rough gig in Groningen three hours away. And I would see all those people singing along with Chris Martin who I always thought was a bit of a twat. And I would see him delivering the tune with sincerity and joy. And I would go, “fuck this is actually a great song they actually write good songs” and I would feel something.
And that’s how I lost all my indie cred. Sorry everyone.
