And Then There's This_ How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture - Bill Wasik [25]
One might call this the “hipster” consensus, to use the somewhat unfortunate term that (for better or for worse) has come to denote these educated young Americans; and no cultural genre defines this consensus more than does indie rock. And if this hipster archipelago is a virtual community, it is building up its own virtual institutions, which use the Internet to harmonize the far-flung members, to allow these thousands of disparate agents to maintain a near-instantaneous and deceptively easy unanimity. Pitchfork serves as one of these institutions, as does the Gawker Media network of blogs (which includes the aforementioned Idolator, as well as Gawker in New York, Defamer in L.A., and a handful of other, nongeographically aligned offerings). But perhaps more intriguing than either of these is KEXP, a real-world public-radio station in Seattle that attracts a significant portion of its listenership online. Its three prime-time DJs play almost entirely indie rock, with selections that (broadly) mirror the lineups, themselves converging, of the nation’s indie-rock clubs. And indeed, a list of KEXP’s top-twelve cities for online listenership reads like a hipster-archipelago roll call (albeit weighted understandably westward):
FIG. 2-1: KEXP STREAMING CITIES
(Numbers 13 and 15, curiously enough, are Beijing and Guangzhou, in China.) Although it should be stressed that the actual online tribe of KEXP, like that of Pitchfork, is relatively small—62,000 unique visitors per week—it nevertheless functions as a crucial pollinator of sounds, injecting the same new bands at the exact same time into similar social groups around the world.
The week I met Annuals, during the CMJ festival in New York, KEXP played host to a series of studio appearances by what one could only call, without any cynicism, some of the new bands of the season—Bound Stems, Hot Chip, White Whale, Forward Russia, Tokyo Police Club, What Made Milwaukee Famous—as well as appearances from such admired older bands as the Shins and the Apples in Stereo. (Annuals had already recorded at the station in Seattle, a few weeks beforehand.) The day I visited, the show featured a Norwegian electronic band called 120 Days. In a blond-wood-paneled anteroom, the audience sat on folding chairs while behind the studio window the band gamely tried, as synth acts must, to give off the appearance of “rocking” while they attended to their machines. All of them strained to lurch about kinetically as they tweaked the knobs on their Korgs.
Midway through this arid demonstration, I retreated to sit down with John Richards, KEXP’s morning-show host and probably the most listened-to indie-rock DJ in the nation. Richards has a slight build, an elfin face, and dirty-blond hair parted down the middle. Now in his mid-thirties, he had started as an intern at the station (under its previous name, KCMU) and worked his way all the way up to drivetime. His taste is bulletproof; I find myself constantly checking the real-time playlist during his online broadcasts to catch the names of the bands. When I asked him about the “virtual community” of indie rock, he knew just what I was talking about. He brought up the band Tapes ’n Tapes, a breakout act of spring 2006 (Pitchfork review: 8.3 out of 10) that perversely had not even attracted much of an audience in its own hometown of Minneapolis until it was picked up by the various blogs and by KEXP.
“A listener in Austin told me about it,” Richards recalled. “I sent somebody off to find the music—‘Find this right away,’ I said. . . . We got the demo from the band within a week, and started playing it.” The trick in breaking bands, Richards said, is repetition. “Cowbell”—Tapes ’n Tapes’ first hit, a driving raw thing—“was the song I was hitting constantly. And just kept hitting it, and hitting it, and hitting it, and then all of a sudden you saw their hometown suddenly react to a station playing their band. And then it just grew