Networks in Niches
In a bout of nostalgia this summer, I found myself frequently returning to a touchstone of my mid-adolescence, the self-titled and sole EP of a band called American Football. Despite (pretentiously) having two vinyl pressings and access to Spotify, I felt wistfully compelled to listen to it on YouTube. Plus my record player was broken.
Anyway.
Besides sonically transporting me, the related videos bar also called me back to those many fleeting, meaninglessly angsty nights after lacrosse practice. Animals by This Town Needs Guns. Hospice by The Antlers. The first two Death Cab for Cutie albums. Countless others, each soundtracks to homework, early forays into alcohol, getting my tiny tiny tiny teenage boy heart broken, etc. Traveling from video to video, node to node, delving deeper into the obscure but with solid, familiar footing never more than two clicks away.
This tangle of related indie rock albums I came to privately refer to as “emo YouTube.” Side note, the prefix is not to be associated with the horrendous early-to-mid 2000s radio pop-punk with high school notebook poetry lyrics that most people think of as “emo.” That’s the hair metal of the genre. That’s like saying Slayer and Winger are similar.
This particular musical rabbit hole is one of numerous on YouTube, and, as I now understand, also a network. Connections could be based on uploader, genre similarity, comparable release timeframes, etc. It got me to thinking, how exactly do people discover music? I know how I do: traveling down the aforementioned rabbit holes on YouTube and, more recently, Spotify; searching by tags on Bandcamp and Soundcloud; mentions on curatorial tastemakers like Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Needle Drop and Noisey; mentions on more democratic sites like Sputnik Music; more genre-specific sites, like Washed Up Emo, Dead End Hip Hop, or Invisible Oranges; Satellite radio; and of course the good ol’ fashioned ways, like going to a gosh darn concert or suggestions from a dear and trusted pal/confidant. Or some entwining combination network of all of the above.
But my curiosity led me to a quick google search, and a few infographics that essentially reiterated the same info.
http://www.hypebot.com/.a/6a00d83451b36c69e2017eeae5a159970d-450wi
Now these were all well and good, but didn’t necessarily hit what I was going for. There is the interesting connection that could be made between viral popularity and radio popularity, and the mutual influence they have on each other, but that’s too “big” for me.
So, naturally, I returned to emo, and a few specific articles on the supposed “emo revival” that’s been picking up steam since 2010 or so.
http://www.stereogum.com/1503252/12-bands-to-know-from-the-emo-revival/franchises/listomania/
http://pitchfork.com/thepitch/86-topshelf-2013-sampler/
http://pitchfork.com/thepitch/325-evan-weiss-emo-revival/
To whittle my question down, how exactly do people discover specific sub-genres? How did all these other sadsack saps get into emo?
Searching for any of the mentioned artists on Spotify makes the network immediately apparent. Just check the related/suggested artists tab. For example, seven of the artists mentioned in the Stereogum article not only share links to each other on Spotify, but each share four mutual other band links. That doesn’t even take into consideration bands that lie at second or third distances who also form pathways. Oh, AND five of those previous seven bands are mentioned in the second Pitchfork article. But after all, they do make music that’s more or less similar, so it isn’t exactly shocking. With some slight snooping, though, it’s easy to see how beyond that it goes. There’s bands that mention each other on twitter and Facebook, bands that go on tour together, bands that share a record label, bands that even share band members. It’s homophily to a hilarious degree, and all documented.
One of my favorite connections in this highly incestuous little web, though, is between Touche Amore (also mentioned by Stereogum and Pitchfork) and a band called Deafheaven, another music blog darling. They have little in common sonically, besides a shared use of the “loud-quiet dynamic” and being strangely life-affirming: Touche Amore makes blistering yet melodic hardcore on the more aggressive end of the emo spectrum, whereas Deafheaven is an atmospheric meld of black metal/shoegaze (among other things), heavy on lengthy builds both brutally bleak and beautiful, but well outside the parameters of emo. However, these two projects put out my personal second and first favorite albums of 2013, respectively. And, as it turns out, they share a label, Deathwish Inc., who are more so known for wildly abrasive, dark hardcore punk, rather than what either of these guys are doing. And, as it once again turns out, Deafheaven opened for Touche Amore in 2011. And finally, the guitarist for Touche Amore designed the cover art for Deafheaven’s first and second albums! Woah!
I wouldn’t describe any of these connections as at all surprising. However, in light of what we’ve learned in class, it piques a self-indulgent interest. How to get from A to Z, or how hours spent listening to whiny late ‘90s indie rock on YouTube fits within a larger socio-cultural complex. On a personal level, who I’ve met because I might’ve clicked a video one time when I was 14. On a larger scale, how geographically disparate and separate musical artists, in any genre, always seem to reach similar conclusions around similar times, the gist of any “movement” or “revival,” before and after the advent of the internet. It’s not the most high minded, I realize, but it’s at least a little eerie to think that what we decide to listen to during something as pedestrian as the walk to class, or what emotionally moves us, may just exist because two guys in Chicago in 1997 had econ together.
American Football reunited this summer after a fifteen year hiatus. I would say purely by chance, but I’ve learned that’s not the case.