Yeah Yeah Yeah, That Bottle's Empty
Flashback begins! Welcome back to the spring of 2002. I'm at the Empty Bottle in Chicago, watching The Dishes (interview here) open up for the Mooney Suzuki. I don't remember too much today about the concert, but I had the foresight to write up a brief review in a LiveJournal entry from April 2, 2002:
The Dishes will forever be compared to the Donnas simply because theyāre āchicks who rock"....Kiki [one of the two guitarists in the band], for the record, was a huge Rush fan in high school, so at her last show, we talked about that. Musically, they also invite Donnas comparisons, but thereās no matching names or T-shirts, and no come-hither-cos-weāre-underage gimmick. Their guitar playing has just as much Dead Kennedys influence as it does AC/DC. In short, they rock, but the crowd didnāt seem to be too enthralled by them as they were saving their energies for...
The Mooney Suzuki, who give their shout-outs to Detroit by reaching back to 60s-era garage rock and the MC5, only with a lot more speed. All band members dressed in black, with a couple of them sporting shags that would have made the Beatles or the Stones, circa 1966, really envious. Not a single band member could keep still; they ping-ponged on the stage, oļ¬ of it into the crowd (and being the Empty Bottle, which can hold 300 on a good night, thatās saying something), and managed to climb on their amps and swing from the light tresses. Even the drummer would come out from behind his kit and display this cobra statue, which I didnāt get, but the crowd ate it up....Not a bad way to spend $8 (along with a few dollar Huber Bocks to consume).
I'm sure the cheap Huber Bock played a part with my fuzzy recollections of the shows, but here's the interesting part. I have better memories of what immediately happened after the show, which I neglected to write down at the time, as opposed to the concert itself. Someone at the Empty Bottle stepped up to serve as post-concert DJ, and their choice of music was the just-released1 debut EP of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. There were only five songs on this 13-minute EP, so I heard it loop twice before I finally left the venue. A couple women in the crowd made it a point to conspicuously dance to this EP, all while making sure nearby folks could see their handmade Yeah Yeah Yeah patches they had sewn upon their messenger bags or denim jackets. It felt just a bit performative for me, even if I didn't have the exact term in mind at that time.
A couple days after the Dishes/Mooney Suzuki show, I started seeing more Yeah Yeah Yeahs references online. People were posting one of their then-five songs as part of their LiveJournal entries, or on more musical-forward sites like MySpace and Makeoutclub. Given the rather thin gruel of a five-song EP, that wasn't much to base one's love of this band. Instead, as I reflected a few years later, there sure seemed to be a performance at hand that had nothing to do with the concert I saw: it was less about loving the music and more about being seen as loving the music.
I reflected on this moment in a LiveJournal comment from August 1, 20082:
...the consumption factor as the prime motivation of hipster identity, which I noticed back in ancient times--that is, 2001. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs had just released a heavily-hyped debut EP, and within a couple weeks, I couldnāt get away from hearing it at various clubs in Chicago or seeing homemade buttons or patches on clothing. A groundswell of support for YYY, or a badge to show oneās "in-ness" with the scene? I viewed it as the latter, and just as quickly as YYY came up, they were discarded when the next hyped band (Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Arctic Monkeys, etc.) comes along, allowing one to dismiss YYY as being sooooo 2003.
Flashback ends!
The above reminiscence came to mind while reading a recent newsletter by First Floor, "The Established Canon Of Good Taste Is For Old People," written by Spain-based music critic Shawn Reynaldo, who puts forth a rare "get-ON-my-lawn" manifesto to his fellow music journalists and critics. Younger observers of the music scene aren't being given a fair share to participate by the current crowd, which guards its diminishing outlets with tension and fear. By shutting these younger folks out, it's not a surprise to see they are creating their own paths that may seem off-putting to the current set, such as relying heavily on social media or social influencers for output. The older crowd looks sideways at the younger crowd using TikTok or Instagram Reels; meanwhile, the younger crowd looks upon the older crowd's longform writing and 90s-era memories with boredom and an inability to relate. It seems as if each side is effectively gatekeeping the other.
At the time I saw those Yeah Yeah Yeahs patches in 2002, music journalism was at the tail end of what Reynaldo refers to as its "salad days," right around the time when print media was still dominant, when newsstands had a mixture of American and British music magazines covering many scenes, and also when online blogs started to make waves with their musical reviews. The transmission of who would be The Next Big Thing could have come from many sources, feeding upon each other in varying rates of speed. For the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, both the British printed press and upstart American blogs joined hands to tout their debut EP, serving in a way similar to social media influencers. Come to think of it, you could also view the Empty Bottle DJ and the dancers as influencers, as they both left an impression upon me nearly 25 years after the fact. They were intermingling the hipness of the band with themselves, a fact I recognized in 2008 during the height of the hipster movement, when taste-making was its own identity creation. Of course, I wouldn't have noticed the handmade patches or understood the looped album if I didn't already possess some awareness of them beforehand--I can point to a couple of older LiveJournal entries from late March 2002 where I also name-dropped the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. *removes mote from own eye*
Okay, my eyes are cleared of junk now. Back to the writing....Reynaldo understands that 2026 is a far cry from the early 2000s, so holding onto the journalism model from that time does little favors for anyone else. Print media is practically dead for current-day musical coverage, online media dominates but has both shrank and calcified with time, social media has its own hurdles to cross, and the few older folks who have survived this long cling tightly to their outlets lest they get swept away. What I was amused to read was the one outlet Reynaldo champions as letting in younger voices: Pitchfork. Yes, the Pitchfork of 2026 that's owned by the large CondƩ Nast publishing firm, not the early 2000s blog started up in Chicago. Reynaldo points towards Pitchfork's hiring of Kieran Press-Reynolds as a positive sign of letting younger critics on the turf of older folks. My amusement was somewhat colored by a recent entry in the Rabbit Holed series that Kieran publishes on Pitchfork, as it read to my eyes to be almost a parody of hipster music blogs from 15 years ago. All these references to obscure bands from Estonia, Irish zoomer rap, and South African gqom hybrids can't be legitimate, right? Well, this is where I sit corrected.
Possibly due to having such strong parental influences, Kieran has come about their genuine love of numerous musical scenes without it coming across as trying too hard or as knowing self-parody. On a very similar vein, the news journalist Sham Jaff has been publishing a weekly newsletter, What Happened Last Week, which has from its inception had as a theme that "...the world is bigger than what most of us are shown. My goal has always been to help you burst your Western-centric bubble," and to that end, every newsletter concludes with a film clip or music video from "the Global South." Both Kieran and Sham are keenly aware of numerous musical scenes outside of the English-speaking world, some of which are influenced by American musical output, others by updating native musical scenes to the current era, and others wholly cut from original cloth. They both understand that how music is made and distributed has changed drastically since the Yeah Yeah Yeahs debut EP came out in 2002, along with how today's music has wider paths to reach listeners far away from where it originated. In spite of how I initially read Kieran's article, what they cover better illustrates how there's more a lateral flow with musical scenes today, versus waiting for validity from on-high to come down via print media back in the early 2000s.
Earlier, I had said there were forms of gatekeeping being practiced by the young and old. I'm not sure that can be avoided, or even if it should be. Whether casting a wide net like Kieran and Sham are doing, or espousing how great the Second Summer Of Love was 20 years after the fact, or drunkenly dancing to a five-song EP in 2002, they are all markers of showing off your musical taste. So, too, are filming Instagram Reels reacting to a new album, or writing long pieces on vaporwave on your Substack. All of these count the same, and they all can be misunderstood by audiences for reasons of age, format, or simply ossifying your musical life. Perhaps my view of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs dancers is one I've misunderstood all these years, as they were likely grooving without apology to music they enjoyed. If so, then I owe these long-ago dancers an apology, just like how I owe Kieran an apology for the Hipster Runoff comparison.
"Itās not that they donāt care about good taste; itās that the predominant ideas about what constitutes good taste have been formed without their input, and until that changes, theyāre not just going to take some old peopleās word for it." With that last sentence, Reynaldo ends his piece. His main point is one that I should hold onto, as the younger music critics should get onto your lawn, and accept that they will have valid reasons to think of music differently than older folks like myself. Let them explore and expound upon what interests them, and who knows? What they find may interest you.
A small amount of background history is necessary here. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs had self-released their debut EP in late 2001, but the re-release by the Touch & Go label in April 2002 garnered it significantly more attention. Despite its brevity--again, five songs in 13 minutes--many printed and online music publications were proclaiming the band as The Next Big Thingā¢. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs were seen as both another successful entry in the early 2000s garage rock revival--also see the Hives, the White Stripes, and the Von Bondies--and another facet of the resurgent New York City music scene that included the Strokes, !!!, and Interpol.↩
The dates in my 2008 comment were wrong, as in both cases I should have said 2002. The sentiment holds up better than my calendar accuracy, though.↩