Today is an exciting day in Stereogum world, and especially for me personally, because today is the day my debut book went up for pre-order. It's called SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: The Complete Cultural History Of The Indie Rock Explosion, and it'll be out Aug. 26 via St. Martin's Press. I'm so unbelievably stoked for you to read it.
So, what is this book? In multiple senses, it's about how indie rock went pop. Such Great Heights takes a big-picture look at the way "indie" music and the attendant culture transformed over the course of the 21st century, evolving from an insular subculture to an aesthetic descriptor so flexible it was applied to Taylor Swift's folklore. I start by establishing what "indie rock" meant by the end of the '90s; then, following alongside my own journey with the music, I trace how the public-facing version of indie transformed throughout the first two decades of this millennium, illuminating how indie rock changed the mainstream and how the mainstream changed indie rock.
There are chapters about how disco-punk and the New Rock Revolution got the indie kids dancing, how The O.C. and Garden State kicked off Hollywood's indie rock feeding frenzy, how indie folk led us to Mumford & Sons, how Pitchfork and blogs like this one developed into a star-making pipeline, the impact of iTunes and Myspace, the connections between bloghouse and "indie sleaze" fashion, the indie rock audience's sometimes awkward relationship with rap, the rise of the "indie" pop star, and more. We end up in the 2010s, as streaming and social media irreparably alter the Big Indie ecosystem and a new generation of indie artists takes hold, perhaps to start the cycle all over again. Along the way, there is discussion of coffee shops and indie dance nights, of Urban Outfitters and Bonnaroo, of (sorry) hipsters and (sorry) poptimism. I don't think there's been a more comprehensive look at the trajectory of indie music over the past quarter-century.
The narrative I'm telling played out over many years, via countless MP3 downloads, TV and movie moments, and live concert experiences — but also through hundreds of articles and blog posts, many of which have become dead links. As someone who lived that story and knew it intuitively, I felt like it deserved to be pulled together into a less ephemeral, more permanent historical document. I especially saw the need for a book that follows onward past the Big Indie blow-up of the 2000s to its 2010s aftermath.
Snippets of my own personal story are threaded into Such Great Heights. If you are a regular reader of this website or just a longtime fan of indie music, I suspect you will see a lot of your own experience reflected back in it too. Pre-orders are incredibly important to the success of a book, so if this sounds like something you'd like to read, please buy the book now. Think of it as getting yourself a present six months in advance. Thanks so much for reading this and for supporting Stereogum; without this platform, Such Great Heights most definitely would not exist.
