Postcards from the wrong side of history

The triumph of poptimism taught me it’s hard to know which way the winds of history will blow

Maya Dehlin Spach / Staff

At my high school in New York in the 90s, there were basically three kinds of people: the kids who listened to the Top 40 station Z100, the ones who preferred Hot 97 playing rap and hip-hop, and those (like me) who listened to 92.3 K-Rock.

One station wasn’t the limit of my musical horizons, of course, or anyone else’s. I heard what was playing on the other stations and sometimes dipped into classic rock radio. I watched VH1 and MTV. Back then we had snobbish Record Store Guys to sell us music that wasn’t on the radio. My friend Tim got into some cool stuff via his older brother.

But given the physics of terrestrial radio, K-Rock was a useful signifier. If you met a kid from another N.Y.C. high school or even the suburbs or N.Y.U., he’d have a go-to local FM radio station. What you listened to said something about who you were, and I was an alternative rock person.

The world changed with the arrival of the internet, and by the time I was out of college and living near U Street in D.C., the importance of radio was fading. But indie rock music was still an incredibly important part of my life. I was seeing shows at the Black Cat and the 9:30 Club and smaller venues like DC9 and Velvet Lounge most weekends.

By the heady days of the 2000s, I was aware that my guitar bands were no longer the most popular music around. But I felt almost unquestioningly confident that it was the real music of our time.

It’s a distinction one takes for granted in many other modes of art. The number one movie at the box office last year was “Inside Out 2,” which was not a bad movie. But the best movie of the year was “Anora,” which was 65th at the global box office. If you tell me that you disagree and actually the best movie was something else, I’ll listen and we can agree to disagree. But if you’re telling me that any of the five highest-grossing movies of the year (“Inside Out 2,” “Deadpool & Wolverine,” “Moana 2,” “Despicable Me 4,” and “Wicked”) were better than “Anora,” you’re telling me you have terrible taste and absolutely everyone who is remotely serious about movies will agree with me. Obviously nobody is going to look back twenty-five years from now and think that “Moana 2” was an all-time classic. With “Anora,” they might.

And to me that’s what being an indie rock fan was. We were, musically speaking, the people with the good taste. The people on the right side of history. Until eventually it all came crashing down.

The poptimists defeated rockism on the battlefield of discourse just as I was aging out of the “going to lots of shows” and “caring a lot about new music” phase of life. Now, as an uncool middle aged dad, I’m not just old and out of it — the stuff that I thought was the cool good shit when I was young and cool has been tossed on the dustbin of history. I of course heard (and enjoyed) “Love Story” when it came out. But it sincerely never occurred to me at the time that in the future serious people would consider Taylor Swift to be a more significant artist than The Kills, Lykke Li, Metric, or TV on the Radio, who put out my favorite albums of that year.

I was on the wrong side of history.

The commanding heights

Our self-confidence and self-regard were bolstered by two factors.