INDIE IN THE ALGORITHMIC AGE 2015-2019 brings my ongoing chronicle of the history of indie rock/alternative music up to the recent past, and as such becomes my first historical playlist that I believe will be very nostalgic for Gen Z listeners.
This playlist is basically the story of what happened when this culture entered the streaming era and TikTok became a factor in expanding the audience for, in a lot of cases, totally random songs.
There’s an interesting dynamic in this set of songs – a lot of relatively famous and critically-beloved artists with modest streaming numbers, and a bunch of fairly anonymous acts who have some songs with truly mind-blowing Swift/Drake-level numbers for 1-4 songs. Maybe this is just my skewed perspective being a bit older, and more rooted in the media? Or it could just be the new version of how in the 90s some acts could have a song or two blow up on MTV/alt-rock radio but not develop a large following.
There’s some other things going on here too. You get some R&B crossover with the likes of Steve Lacy, Thundercat, Blood Orange, and Frank Ocean. Female solo artists such as Mitski, Clairo, Phoebe Bridgers, Angel Olsen, Maggie Rogers, Faye Webster, Courtney Barnett, and Lana Del Rey become dominant figures, along with women-led bands like Alvvays, Japanese Breakfast, Big Thief, Khruangbin, Wolf Alice, Crumb, Waxahatchee, Haim, and Weyes Blood. And of course, there’s a ton of chill psychedelic dudes following the lead of the wildly influential Tame Impala and Mac DeMarco. And amidst all of this, you have the likes of Beach House, Radiohead, Björk, Stephen Malkmus, Kim Gordon, Wilco, Jenny Lewis, Destroyer, The New Pornographers, Thee Oh Sees, Vampire Weekend, and St Vincent asserting themselves as vital legacy artists.
🔺 Spotify
🔴 Apple
🟥 YouTube
This is part of a long series of playlists I’ve made chronicling the lineage of alt-rock/indie, starting all the way back in 1965. If you’d like to catch up on this series and investigate other moments in this timeline, there’s a full directory in this back issue of the newsletter. Please pass it along to anyone you think would enjoy diving into this history! I know I definitely would’ve loved to have something like this when I was younger.
Fluxblog 493: a history of alternative music in 41 playlists
This is a roughly chronological collection of my playlists sketching out the lineage of, broadly speaking, alternative rock. It’s an ongoing project, so if there’s an area you’d like to have explored, please comment. I’d personally rather not cover emo or hardcore though. This is a public post, so please share this with whoever you think might appreciat…