PicoBlog

Given that Steve actively listens to Phish, has written an entire book about musical rivalries and actually appeared on the Paul Finebaum Show, I’m as surprised as you are that “college football vs. the NFL” inspired the greatest conflict between my Indiecast co-host and I in 2023. I’ve tried to explain the former’s appeal through the lens of indie rock, that it’s scrappier, more regional, more open to innovation, more variance, more susceptible to backroom dealing; I love slowcore and Iowa football as subversive genre experiments, mesmerizing in their determined minimalism. Stuff for the real heads, nobody is having it forced upon them. But the Patriots and Panthers just fill me with the same dull loathing as tryhard mainstream fare like Tate McRae or that SNL skit about Troye Sivan. I have to care about those.  

Moreover, college football teams can literally have “critical acclaim” as their end game, less beholden to the simple metrics of wins, losses and titles as quantifiers of success. Tony Elliott could conceivably coach at UVA for the rest of his life if he promised a baseline of 7-5 and beating Virginia Tech every three years rather than once 20 years (fun fact, there have been as many Wrens albums as UVA wins against Virginia Tech since 2003). On Thanksgiving Day, you could have watched the Bears play the Lions or the Egg Bowl between Ole Miss and Mississippi State and the stakes are pretty similar, in that one team is jockeying for postseason position and the other for some vague sense of pride. If the Bears had won, it’d probably be forgotten by next week. If Mississippi State won, they’d be talking about it for the entire next year.

This is because college football teams are extensions of their parent institutions in ways that NFL teams (with the possible exception of the Packers) couldn’t possibly be for their home cities. A kid at Ohio State has a non-zero chance of running into Marvin Harrison, Jr. on campus, and at some level, they have a commonality in voluntarily choosing to go to Ohio State instead of, say, Purdue. And a head coach can manifest institutional priorities in ways that no professor or president could ever hope for; again, let’s take the Egg Bowl. By hiring Lane Kiffin (and, before that, Hugh Freeze), Ole Miss displays their proprietary confluence of good ol’ boy pageantry and rotten, late-capitalist cynicism. Mike Leach, consequently, was perfect for a place like Mississippi State in the same way he was at Texas Tech and Washington State, the embodiment of a rural stepbrother of a school that has to do things unconventionally just to be noticed (and lean a little weirdly libertarian). Now that they’ve hired someone from the Art Briles extended universe, forfeiting any moral high ground in the hopes that they achieve exponential growth like everyone else.

Or just look at the coaching carousel, where Texas A&M operated on a Scarface scale of delusion, whereas Indiana put themselves at a spiritual crossroads by even considering Jon Gruden to be their answer to Herm Edwards. These decisions have long term implications, they matter; perhaps there’s something to the parallel of eight-figure coaching buyouts and six-figure student loan debt, where both athletic departments and the student body end up paying for their misguided, future-drunk decisions for decades. Meanwhile, the Panthers are starting to clean house and it’s very possible that they end up making the playoffs next year. 

Steve’s general response is that all of this is negated by the sheer fact that the NFL features a far higher level of talent, that he’d rather see elite athletes en masse than a game mostly played by people who will probably be accountants or real estate agents in two years. I think this argument holds water when talking about the difference between college and pro basketball, but it’s neutralized by the NFL in numerous ways - the sheer number of players on the field makes it far more difficult for a transcendent individual talent to stand out, the NFL goes very much out of its way to promote parity through the draft and scheduling and all 32 teams are running minor variations of the same exact offense and defense.

Again, as with the indie and pop world, innovations come from the underground - the Wildcat, RPOs, Air Raid - as ways to compensate for financial or regional deficiencies. There was a thrilling period of time where it looked like the Giants might run the triple option, but now Tommy DeVito resembles a functional starting quarterback and Pat White and Colin Klein never truly got to cook. 

But ultimately, I think the “indie vs. pop” argument between college football and the NFL is best exemplified by looking at the recaps from Week 10. I started this piece a few weeks ago, so I apologize for the delay - but recall that seemingly every game was won by a walk-off field goal, incontrovertible evidence that each game was competitive up until the very end. What more could you want? But, given even the tiniest bit of scrutiny, it’s clear that every single one of these games kinda sucked - they sucked because seemingly 75% of the teams are starting a QB I vaguely remember from the 2015 Sun Bowl or whatever, they suck because there’s seemingly nothing at stake despite the same 75% of these teams currently being eligible for the playoffs at the moment, and they suck even worse when one of the remaining 25% is involved, because they will almost certainly overdraft a QB in the first 15 picks because they vaguely remind them of Justin Herbert and not, say, Lamar Jackson.

Which to say that, when I watch an NFL game this time of year, I’m wondering why the fuck any of the players actually bother.

I mean, they usually say something along the lines of “I’m a competitor,” and I imagine that an average salary of like $150,000 per game is motivating in itself, being that most NFL players are constantly fighting for their livelihood given the most unbalanced labor relationship in major sports (there’s a whole ‘nother piece to be written about the dissonance caused by watching the NFL despite its hard-right, pro-military, anti-union, pro-management politics). And so that’s why, in a league where even the swaggiest on-field players tend to be corny as fuck - Pat Mahomes has basically the same tastes as a Texas Tech SAE -- the one player I’ve legitimately admired is Vontae Davis.

I don’t know anything about him as a person and I vaguely recall him being a Very Good Player, but he’ll forever be a king in my mind because he did something I never thought would happen in an NFL game - he said “fuck it” and retired at halftime. What I forget about this game is that it happened in Week 2, which makes me respect it way more than if it came about in Week 11 of a 6-10 season. The Bills were down 28-6 at halftime, a week after they got absolutely destroyed by the Ravens in a 47-3 game started by Nathan Peterman. I’d say “imagine how motivated you’d be on a team that begins the season with Nathan Peterman as its starting QB,” but I suppose I know enough people who’ve worked for a publication owned by Jim Spanfeller, it’s probably the same.   

Anyways, it’s worth reiterating that he didn’t retire on a Tuesday or whatever, but halftime, when it could be discussed in real time during an actual NFL broadcast, Fiona Apple’s “this world is bullshit” speech-style. Predictably, it was taken as a Profound Insult to the Game by the average Around the Horn watcher who, like so many working class people in the country, have been brainwashed into a pro-management mindset that works against their own interests. I suppose we must invoke Homer Simpson’s take on quiet quitting here and indeed, the vast majority of people don’t like their jobs either, but they show up and do it anyways, for far less money and far less adoration. On a base level, they can understand the physical risk that comes with being an NFL player and the high likelihood that the average player will be out of the league in two years. But on that same level, they’re being paid millions to play a game that most of its fans claim they would give their lives to for a fraction of that price. 

Point is, this wasn’t too far from my mind while I profiled the Hotelier’s Christian Holden forThe Ringer - a piece that filled me with a low level dread from the moment it was greenlit. For one thing, Holden is one of the most intimidating intellects I’ve encountered in my journalistic career, though it’s not the sort of active form of intimidation I experienced when interviewing, say, Annie Clark. For example, my take on the “Housebroken” controversy was simply that the Hotelier stopped playing it because Holden got tired of explaining the song’s central metaphor to fans who interpreted the “we must keep our bitches in line” lyric in the most literal, bad faith way possible. Meanwhile, here’s how they explained it - our respective pieces were for very different audiences, but still.

Secondly, I’ll admit that my last two Hotelier profiles have felt like something of a mea culpa for the first one I did in 2014, which brought about an outcome I deeply fear any time I write something positive - a laudatory piece that its subject publicly discredits. This bubbles up literally any time I do an interview or write a review, since I feel it’s necessary to introduce some kind of tension in the piece - first impressions confounded, internal conflicts resolved - to give it a real sense of stakes, to distance it from pure PR copy. And sometimes I can’t help the fact that some artists get too high before we talk or aren’t familiar with the concept of “off the record,” and I get a frantic text from them saying, “you gotta cut that part, I can’t risk the police coming after me” (that didn’t happen with Holden, but it did twice, and both times, the artist in question ended up getting sober years later). 

Now, my first Hotelier piece was written back in early 2014 on Wondering Sound (say what you will about what J. Edward Keyes has become, but he was giving me the go-ahead on a lot of big picture emo stuff before anyone else did), so I can’t find it and I can’t even remember what things Holden took issue with. I vaguely recall that they did not think it portrayed them in an accurate light and they were not shy about airing that out; I spent the rest of 2014 in an awkward space of being the most vocal and prominent Hotelier advocate in the music criticism, knowing deep down that the band sorta resented that fact. We ended up hashing things out at a show later that year, but still…that’s always lingering somewhere in the back of my mind, especially as I see more and more of my peers forced to go private on social media after either the artist or (more often) their fans take issue with something either as subjective as a Pitchfork score or a simple genre description.

And since I was writing this piece for The Ringer and not, say, Wondering Sound, it had to appeal to a general audience. I felt an urge to portray the Hotelier as a kind of emo revival Andrew Luck or Andrew Bynum or at least a Larry Sanders, i.e., someone who wasn’t a major star but preferred to just chill and smoke weed instead. A talent almost more notably for what they left behind than what they actually did in the game. And really, I feel like it would’ve been dishonest, because nobody holds it against the Hotelier for calling it quits.

That’s because I’ve compiled damn near an entire subgenre of this kind of profile, interviewing emo revival artists who find or had found themselves at a point where they either break through or break up. You Blew It! (really, the standard for everything that came after), Balance and Composure, Foxing, even when I talked to a much younger band in Barely Civil during the pandemic, they laid it out in a pretty insightful way: they’re going to be broke at home or broke on the road, so why not do the latter and see the country with their friends while they’re still young? The implication being that there was no way they’d do this past the age of 30. 

These are some of the most popular bands to come out of that world, and that’s not even including Title Fight and Modern Baseball calling it quits to go to Columbia, or, in the case of Brendan Lukens…I’m not even sure. But even if the Hotelier managed to release a third consecutive masterpiece, there was no guarantee that they’d level up to a point where they’d be regulars on the festival circuit or a bankable headline act or whatever it takes for a band on, say, Secretly Canadian or Mom & Pop to put out albums four and five; with all due respect, just look at what’s happened to Foxing, who’ve unintentionally served as a foil for their tourmates by making ambitious, critically acclaimed and indie-friendly albums every few years that only seem to chip away at the audience they earned on their least representative work. Goodness endured the sort of reception that we’ve seen since the days of In Reverie or Wood/Water, i.e., alienating a decent portion of the old fanbase without picking up enough new listeners to compensate. And they certainly weren’t turning down Jawbreaker-type money to reunite. Would I prefer a new Hotelier or Christian Holden solo album to none? Certainly. But I also know what it’s like to talk to bands in similarly precarious situations telling me off the record, “if this album doesn’t break, I can’t keep going.” 

I suppose it’s a sign of progress that more people in this scene view those bands’ careers as a combination of the worst aspects of the worker drone and Vontae Davis Experience - they put themselves at tremendous emotional, financial and physical risk and there isn’t even a livable salary to retroactively justify the expense. Plus, Vontae Davis never has to deal with writer's block or merch splits; even on the most uninspired Sunday of his life, he knows exactly what the job entails, try and prevent the other guy from catching the ball and you’ll get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars. 

This also helped me understand Ed Droste and his career pivot. Over a decade ago, Grizzly Bear did a revealing interview with Vulture where Droste revealed that a sync license might cover rent for a few months, but that he was still living in the same 450-sq. foot apartment he occupied with his partner since 2006. Some had insurance, some didn’t and they were stuck between “scraping by…and comfortable enough.” Remember, this is around the time Shields dropped, so they’d been an indie A-lister for at least three years and Veckatimest sold about 220,000 copies. Only the most old-head Music Writer Discourse lifers will remember the term “full bennies,” but needless to say, not everyone was empathetic towards the band’s circumstances. 

Nowadays, Droste is a therapist - not the most secure profession on earth, even in Los Angeles, but apparently more sustainable than even being in an A-list indie rock band. I remember hanging out with a member of the Pains of Being Pure at Heart after he quit the band, and mind you, this was after two consecutive Best New Musics and being able to tour Japan and getting in a one-sided beef with Jay Reatard - you know, real 2009 stuff. He decided he was better off being the second member of Pains of Being Pure at Heart to join the team at Buzzfeed (side note, I’m a little bummed that Peggy Wang plays such a major role in Ben Smith’s Traffic and yet POPBAH are never mentioned by name). Holden confessed that they feared becoming a band along the lines of Perfect Pussy, a “remember some guys” footnote from 2014, but then again, they put out one album and now Meredith Graves has a real job as a music director at Kickstarter. I’m also told that Tom Krell of How to Dress Well and Samantha Urbani of the ultra “remember some Kent 285 guys” project Friends have similarly-flavored jobs, which leads to the possibility that the smart money is parlaying an indie rock project into a steady creative gig. 

All of which leads me to considering New Blue Sky. I assume the jazz and new age experts reviewed the content and not strictly their admiration of Andre 3000, even if my ability to suss out what makes one new age-y, ambient jazz album better than another is almost non-existent - the flipside of my experience knowing a hardcore or screamo album excels within its genre but I end up having to fill a 500-word count with endless variations of “it whips.” Look, I tried with that Pharaoh Sanders/Floating Points joint from 2021 and spent the whole time wondering when we get to the fireworks factory, so don’t ask me whether this thing is actually “any good.”  

But honestly, the actual content of New Blue Sky is virtually irrelevant, at least to me. The fact that it’s jazz or new age or whatever is far more important than its execution and you can just look at how the homey Sadie Sartini Gardner had to lock their account because of some CMS glitch that labeled the Pitchfork review as “rap” rather than jazz or whatever - let’s consider the horrible irony that they were hit with a bunch of transphobic replies from people who were, presumably, trying to defend Andre 3000’s right to define their own existence. On the day that review ran, a friend of mine who read Pitchfork obsessively in college and not at all in the time since (i.e., the average Indiecast listener, he’s also still very into the Go! Team) coincidentally asked if I still get Camp or Airborne Toxic Event-style hatemail these days. And I told him about how that sort of occupational hazard is a thing of the past and nowadays, it’s less angry emails from college kids at 2 AM and more like Colin Joyce getting death threats for their 6.4 PinkPantheress review. It’s a bummer that there’s still manufactured beefs between musicians and critics because at the end of the day, the amount of bullshit we put up with relative to the financial benefit means we have far more in common. 

What do I think about New Blue Sun? You might argue that most people who are listening to an 87-minute experimental jazz flute album at this time wouldn’t do so if someone other than Andre 3000 made it, which is probably true and also besides the point. Actually, the fact that it’s made by Andre 3000 is the entire point, because maybe this album is everything the Best New Music says it is, that it’s spiritual and soothing and whatnot. But as a sheer thought exercise, I’m inhabiting a place as fantastical as OutKast’s spottieottiedopaliscious and southernplayalistc reveries and only somewhat more tangible - a life where you can pursue your real interests because all of your material needs are met. Not worrying about what other people think. You know, liberation. 

It feels like Vontae Davis but also Michael Jordan playing baseball or Andrew Luck absolutely killing Jim Irsay’s xanny high or any number of Christmas movies where the high-powered lawyer quits her job and opens a reindeer-themed muffin stand. This is different from what the Hotelier did, which is satisfying in its own way, but more akin to the basic plot of Office Space or when Homer gets a job at Barney’s Bowlarama, opting out of the grind for a more humble, sustainable form of living. 

I was there at Coachella in 2014 when OutKast reunited for one of the most dispiriting shows I’ve ever seen in my life; keep in mind that the previous year, the Stone Roses headlined on Friday night and it was such a dud that they were swapped out for Blur on weekend two (which was only slightly more well received). That was also the year that Phoenix headlined on the heels of Bankrupt!. But those were met with indifference, and when Andre more or less disappeared halfway through the set, this was the first time I’d seen a very, very forgiving demographic actively register disappointment. 

Ten years later, I admire Andre’s performance in the same way that I admire Frank Ocean’s Coachella debacle back in April (though I do think this is influenced by the fact that I didn’t have to pay to witness either of them, I imagine it’d be different had the opposite been true). From the perspective of someone whose life was fundamentally altered by OutKast’s music, I selfishly appreciate that they’re not doing Coachella or Lollapalooza every other year, or, worse, hitting the House of Blues circuit like Wu-Tang or whatever.   

So yeah, I guess this loops back into the whole reason for doing this Substack/newsletter/idea dump. If you started reading this piece - and especially if you’ve gotten this far - you’re invested in my writing even if it’s in a non-careerist sort of format. To be clear, music writing is still essential for my creative and financial health, although I’m privileged enough to be at a place where I have to do less of it. And yet, while I’ve probably written less in 2023 than in any year since I started this thing, it’s also felt like more of a struggle than ever - beyond the encroaching awareness of my own obsolescence (not to mention seeing many, many 40-plus writers slowly lose their minds online), and a Sisyphean book proposal journey, my listening felt plagued by a never-ending calculus of “do I like this?,” “enough to pitch it?,” and “but who would actually publish it?” I always figured that I’d listen to more new music when I didn’t feel obligated to write about and the opposite turned out to be true.  

This really hit me when I was compiling my latest Year in Emo list for UPROXX - aside from a Stereogum Album of the Week piece about Home is Where’s The Whaler, I haven’t written at length about a single new emo album in 2023. I don’t blame any publications for passing on this stuff, but in an environment where every writer is just trying to find a niche that makes them useful, it’s hard not to personalize this trend as proof of being totally washed.

Then again, though putting together a Best Blog Rock Albums list for UPROXX took way more time than was probably necessary, the most washed thing I wrote in 2023 ended up being the one that got the best response. I’d love to shoehorn a Texas 3000 or Del Paxton review into the interregnum between year-end list season and 2024, but the people who support Indiecast - and we do have an audience, more so than a lot of music pods, it’s really heartening - would rather see me go long on Sun Airway or Serena-Maneesh. Hell, I’d probably rather do that right now.  

I dunno if The New Blog Era is upon us, but I’ve been greatly inspired by my peers utilizing the Substack/newsletter route - not just as a means of opting out of The Narrative and writing about what excites them, but as proof that you can bet on your own vision. I know most of them felt strange or uncomfortable about setting up a subscription model and I do too…but you know, cue the last verse of “Elevators (Me & You).” Hence, hopefully the rebirth of Something On, or whatever I might choose to call it going forward in 2024 - kinda like Andre, I’m hoping the brand loyalty can allow me to pursue my true passions, writing about emo albums that don’t require 600-word count reviews, writing about Big Indie stuff that I feel ambivalent about (and therefore would never get assigned), and, oh yeah, probably a lot of Remembering Some Guys. Next both is actually about all three, how some of my favorite newish emo-but-not-emo bands are actually carrying the blog rock torch. Hopefully something new every week after that. See you then.

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