Towards an Alternative Canon of Millennial Pop

While regular readers might reasonably remain in some doubt as to who is “real” among The Hinternet’s authors, only those without much in the way of an occipital lobe could ever take “Sam Jennings” for a pseudonym of anyone else — he is just too different from the others! We fear this difference may be the source of some conflict between the members of our staff. Mary Cadwalladr in particular was heard to say just this morning: “What do you mean you’re bumping my piece on the Staple Singers? So you can run Sam’s on the ‘Canon of Millennial Pop’?!” To which she added, while making air-quotes: “sic”. But whatever. Any legitimate publication is a big-tent operation, a circumstance that cannot but lead to some friction, so we’ll just have to let Mary fret, while Sam glows. (Meanwhile Edwin-Rainer prefers to explain Mary’s hostility to Sam’s music-critical excellence as in part envy, in part the expression of a “cougar crush”. We wish Edwin-Rainer had had the sense to keep that conjecture to himself.) But notwithstanding the interpersonal dramas here at our editorial offices in Quimper, the official editorial line is this: to stay out of Sam’s way and let him do his thing. —The Editors

Late last year, I spent the better part of a week combing through episodes of the old MTV program 120 Minutes, which ran from 1986 to 2000, and all but defined what “alternative” music was, in its heyday. Despite being a worthy term—a name for a literal radio format and a Billboard chart—there’s always been something unwieldy and dumb about “alternative” as a musical category. We know the usual story: the Velvets and Iggy Pop get raw, invent punk; punk gets dumber/better in the Seventies; gets arty and weird in the Eighties; then in the Nineties the whole underground finally blasts itself upwards into the mainstream, via the missile Kurt Cobain (a great pop musician, never let anyone tell you otherwise), and reigns for a decade or so, under that unwieldy, dumb epithet: “alternative.”

A subsequent story says that from there the old punk spirit haphazardly resurrects, in the revanchist rock of the early Aughts (see: The White Stripes, The Strokes, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs; Toronto and NYC; “indie sleaze,” “garage rock” et al., ad nauseam). Then it goes off the rails. By the 2010s, alternative stations are playing Imagine Dragons, classic rock stations are playing Nirvana, and MTV is more famous for Snooki than the moon-man. The Gen-X Slacker is superseded by the Millennial Hipster, poptimism reigns triumphant, and “indie” supplants “alternative” as the meaningless descriptor du jour, as in: “I prefer indie music, like Lana Del Rey.” (Lana, whose Born to Die is admittedly important to any alternative Millennial canon, was released on Interscope Records, a subsidiary of Universal Music Group: not indie.)

Music!

Now, that second paragraph’s too simple—I’ll get to why. But the first? Alarmingly, one of the things I discovered watching 120 Minutes was just how expert the alternative media men and women of mid-period MTV were at constructing a context for the music they brought to televisions all over the world. As early as 1992 (just one year into the world’s brief courtship of Cobain & Co.), 120 Minutes was larding its year-end countdowns with a considerable history of the new insurgent underground, in terms exactly like what I just wrote above. Solid music journalism, blended with an obvious commercial imperative, yet also straddling the real cutting-edge of a youth culture that needed a mirror for itself. To watch 120 Minutes now is to gaze into that mirror: you see how, for a moment, a door was opened, and a lot of formerly subterranean stuff escaped into the world. A lot of it was dross, sure. More often, another convenient new market category for the major labels to exploit. People had to sort through all the Collective Souls and Blues Travelers and 4 Non Blondes to get to the best stuff. But a lot of groundbreaking music got through, too.

These days it’s hard to imagine a broadcast on a major channel, reaching millions of people, putting artists like Kate Bush, Sonic Youth, Public Enemy, Björk, or PJ Harvey on normal people’s televisions, interviewing these artists while playing their videos. It’s hard to imagine any established and highly-trafficked channel like that whatsoever, let alone one that could quickly organize a canon of the not-quite-popular, vaguely-counter-cultural mass-art of its time, the way 120 Minutes did. For someone like me (born in 1994, a few weeks after Cobain’s suicide), it’s hard to watch the program without feeling truly sad. Not only were things seemingly more diverse and open, those people understood exactly what they had. They knew they were curating something different from the mainstream—a genuine alternative—through which a generation of kids would experience something other than what the Billboard Top 40, or else their parents, might’ve shown them.

So of course I got to thinking: if only my own generation (young Millennials, elder Zoomers) had had something comparable! Because it seemed to me, pretty much from the time I started high school in 2008, that there was an alternative, though no one ever called it that. In the late Aughts and early 2010s (stretching across both Obama terms, more or less), there was something akin to an emerging alternative. Often it was heavily electronic—a music, or even just a general vibe, which could only have been created by a generation in thrall to the infinite cratedigging properties of the Internet, handed an unprecedented democracy of accessible synthesis and cheap production software. Except that there was virtually no central place, no kept gate like 120 Minutes, via which all this foment might be properly gathered, curated, and beamed out towards any widespread youth culture. Pitchfork tried hard, and there was a time when their lovely snobbishness really did seem capable of setting a canon for this era of alternative Millennial music. But that vague dream was scuttled as soon as the publication sold out to Condé Nast in 2015 (and it was a sell-out).

Much ado has been made recently about the usefulness, or pointlessness, of the term “poptimism.” Kelefa Sanneh had his hedging moratorium in the New Yorker last summer. Freddie DeBoer writes a piece a month about it. W. David Marx tangled with the term throughout the 300-odd pages of his Blank Space book last year. I fully accept the contention that when Pitchfork changed, it changed in a defanged and generally poptimist direction. Rolling Stone went that way, too—and went harder. Many others followed suit. Presumably, the reigning argument in music journalism since the later 2010s was that the field is still far too white and male and rock-obsessed, and that genres like hip-hop, R&B, and high-charting pop were still overlooked in favor of more overtly “album-oriented” genres (though I’ve never really bought this characterization when it comes to Pitchfork). Still, I remember these sentiments being fairly common even back in 2012, and well before that. There was a lot of Tumblr-woke, campus-social-justice ferment feeding into the journo-sphere, and this led to a lot of passionate thinkpieces about how Rihanna should be taken as seriously as Radiohead—that kind of thing. Plenty of people wanted to seem very hip, and non-elitist, so there was a lot of circuitous talk about how major-label pop and rap should be treated softly, in the highest possible intellectual-academic register, with much less time spent condescending to obscure or difficult artists. It was exhausting from the start, and only it helped to hobble music journalists, in the end.

But I’m not here to parse out that particular rhetorical battle—only to consider my proposed Millennial alternative. This is where I think “poptimism” does become a useless idea, since the music I have in mind (much of which was assuredly “Pitchfork-coded” for a time), was unique. Though the ever-poptimizing world of music journalism never remarked on it, or even seemed to realize it. What had made the underground music of decades past “alternative” was its oppositionality. The mainstream trafficked in cliches and plasticky sounds, using the newest technologies to smooth out edges instead of experimenting. Meanwhile, the underground deliberately courted old avant-garde styles of shock, weirdness, queerness, noise—or just general aesthetic discordance. It was resolutely not pop, and didn’t aspire to be. It might want to be more than pop, or broader than pop, or perhaps anti-pop. But it was not the same thing as that which, in the mainstream, was understood broadly as just “pop.”

Though much of the great alternative music of the late Aughts and early 2010s still fits those distinctions—particularly where niche internet subcultures were involved—a lot of it simply doesn’t. This was what I found so exciting about it, what I thought was really new, especially when compared with the general history of the mainstream vs. the underground. It struck me, perhaps around 2010—certainly I knew it by 2012—that, in an inversion of all previous eras, there was a boom of less-than-popular artists who were in fact making our best unapologetic pop music. Now it was a faction of the underground which aspired to make the huge, triumphant pop music of its times, and was doing so, while the mainstream doddered on, pumping out the worst glitzy, infantile crap any generation had ever been subjected to. Had there been anything resembling a 120 Minutes for the era, anything beyond the endless decentered diffusion of the World Wide Web, a few worthwhile sites, and a few good festivals, this might have been articulable. It might even have been collectively available to a significant number of people as an idea, a style, or a genuine counter-culture.

In a sense, this is a eulogy.

There were precursors to this internet-native alternate underground vision. Many were genuine independent artists, at least initially—though some weren’t. The main wave of the best Millennial alterna-pop (roughly 2009-2018) was similarly split. Though there were plenty of artists on the major labels who belong in this loose canon, most of the interesting stuff bubbled up much less dramatically, online, before going bigger. A lot of it was made up of independent bands, duos, or producers on great historic indie labels like 4AD, Domino Recording Co., Sub Pop, Captured Tracks, Jagjaguwar, Polyvinyl, XL Recordings, Modular Records. And a lot of it started within emerging niche microgenres with ridiculous names, like vaporwave, chillwave, witch house, or hypnagogic pop—deliberately hazy, nostalgic music that toyed with what Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds kept calling “hauntology” (to varying degrees of accuracy). But then sometimes it was just outright pop, better and richer than anything the mainstream was offering.

The first precursors I’m thinking of include Cut Copy’s first record Bright Like Neon Love (2004), the best of Hot Chip, Annie, Robyn’s self-titled album (2005), and LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver (2007). Nothing like the overly sleek mid-Aughts rock bands (Bloc Party, The Killers, Franz Ferdinand) they shared festival billings with; yet also nothing like the folky (Bon Iver, Fleet Foxes) or arty (Arcade Fire, Grizzly Bear, Dirty Projectors, Animal Collective) bands whom they shared year-end best-of lists with. Rather, these were artists working at the confluence of electronic music and pop, savvy musicians who had absorbed things like house music and hip-hop, beginning to fuse together something as accessible as it was smart. Gothenburg geniuses The Knife are especially relevant here. Though they were too weird (and frequently too harsh) to really cross over, their influence has hung around for decades. Listen to “Heartbeats,” and you’ll hear one of the first examples (in 2003!) of an electronic pop that feels unmistakably 21st-century. It’s hard to imagine that the 1990s were only four years in the past, impossible to think of “Heartbeats” as having existed in anything but the present millennium. It still sounds tremendous. Classic.

Perhaps the first major turning-point in this foment came in 2007 with MGMT’s first and only good record, Oracular Spectacular. Nowadays their music is the kind of thing that shows up in films when people try to do a Naughties period piece (see: Saltburn), and their highest Spotify stream counts are in the billions. MGMT had a relatively big success at the time for the kind of group they were (indie-coded but really on a major label), and Pitchfork itself didn’t quite approve. “Kids” ended up on Gossip Girl, went to #91 on Billboard, becoming a kind of sleeper anthem. The record itself went to #38 on the album charts. These days I find the record charming, often dated, except for those justifiably beloved singles: “Kids,” “Electric Feel,” and especially “Time to Pretend,” which is one of the great Millennial pop songs. I felt as much when I first heard it: finally, here was something that didn’t sound like any other era, that belonged to the young people of its own time. Plus it sounded great. Though that hardly mattered in 2007: “Time to Pretend” didn’t even crack the Billboard Top 100. I still harbor a fantasy where it was as big a hit that year as “Irreplaceable” or “Umbrella”— good pop songs to be sure, but ones that now sound completely of their time, while “Time to Pretend” feels outside it. In fact I might just be hitting on one main difference between truly great Millennial pop and the stuff mass audiences were listening to: it signifies its time, but isn’t trapped by it.

This fantasy of mine is, essentially, where my present canon begins. Since there’s nothing which actually separates a song like “Time to Pretend” from the big hits of its time, only that it was produced differently. Yet it’s just as anthemic, memorable, catchy, and totally accessible. But it has little to do with the flattened-out, dumbed-down, dynamic-free landscape perfected by mega-producers from Max Martin to Benny Blanco. Not only is it nearly impossible for an artist to crash the pop charts in this century without the backing of the industry’s biggest monopolies—would audiences really know what to do with something like that if they heard it? Audiences need to listen to something a lot in order to get used to it, and eventually to prefer it. The whole scheme of the music industry relies on the assumption that audiences are essentially passive and will accept whatever is given to them. One of the dirty tricks of the “poptimist” turn in music journalism is that it gives audiences tacit permission to accept passivity in the name of fighting snobbery. But every snob has always wished the radios of the world could be filled with songs like “Time to Pretend,” instead of songs like Jason Mraz’s interminable “I’m Yours.” Yet mass audiences—unfortunately, painfully—have tended to prefer the latter. I often suspect it’s simply because they’re so rarely given an actual alternative. (Then again, in 1965—a year that gave us “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Norwegian Wood,” “My Girl,” and “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag”—the number one song was a little ditty called “Wooly Bully” by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs; maybe things never change.)

Across 2008 and 2009, there was more of this new alternative pop. The extraordinary first Crystal Castles record stood at the less-accessible end of the spectrum; The xx’s (mostly anodyne) debut stood at the most-approachable one. Phoenix’s “1901” became the next song in this nebulous stream to crack the charts (peaking at #84). I also count Passion Pit’s great singles “Sleepyhead” and “Little Secrets”, and Empire of the Sun’s “Walking on a Dream,” which particularly enchanted me when it came out. Put aside the band’s stupid costumes and dumb album covers, and here was another huge pop song, successful in the U.K. and Australia but not the States, which wouldn’t reach a mainstream audience until it was featured in a car commercial years later. In fact, this kind of music breaking out via some TV show, commercial, or later Tik-tok virality, is another theme of the alternative music of the era. This always stunned me, since I understood from the moment I heard it, “Walking on a Dream” was the kind of song previous generations surely would have recognized as an inescapable hit. In 2009, I remember walking around, actively wondering why this unstoppable, essentially perfect electropop song wasn’t everywhere. When I think of 2009 today, I don’t think about “Poker Face,” “Use Somebody,” “Boom Boom Pow,” “Love Story” or any other mega-hit of the year—I think of “Walking on a Dream,” which said so much more about being young, yearning, and alive at that time, than any of those empty songs ever did, and sounded better doing it.

From there and onwards, into 2010, came the first classics of that unfairly-lampooned genre “chillwave.” This included Small Black’s “Despicable Dogs” and Toro Y Moi’s “Blessa”; Wild Nothing’s “Chinatown,” and, of course, Washed Out’s “Feel it all Around.” Here was another completely new, unmistakably internet-derived Millennial creation: vague, psychedelic, like a warping, smeared memory of an older time’s pop music—but resolutely contemporary. Most of it still sounds great, and none better than Neon Indian’s first record, Psychic Chasms (2009). Listening to its first single, “Deadbeat Summer,” which flips a Todd Rundgren sample into one of the purest pop songs of the era, conjures up for me only more fantasies of that alternative pop world. Again, there’s nothing even remotely inaccessible about it—it’s totally accessible, infernally catchy, even if it comes from a slightly more sun-baked and woozy dimension. “Deadbeat Summer” is precisely the kind of thing a Millennial 120 Minutes might have introduced to those millions of weird kids, desperate for a refuge from the nonsense spanning the charts.

In 2010, Arcade Fire released The Suburbs and ended up winning the Grammy for Album of the Year, one of the last times that award went to anything deserving of it. I saw them live not long after, and the experience of witnessing “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)” with the full stage show they had going then, made me feel as if this alternative vision might actually go somewhere. That it might turn into a proper vibe, or a culture, or anything, really. “Sprawl II” is another of the best, grandest pop songs of the era. The same year, I bought Tame Impala’s first record, Innerspeaker, an out-and-out rock album that blew The White Stripes, The Strokes, and every other “alt” band out of the water. LCD Soundsystem released their near-perfect third record that year, This is Happening. I also remember discovering tracks from the first Best Coast record and Beach House’s blissful Teen Dream, as free downloads on iTunes (if this doesn’t date me, I don’t know what else will)—all of which felt completely fresh. Though I could hear plenty of clear touchstones and influences in that music, I’d still never heard anything quite like it.

But more than anything, 2010 brought Robyn’s “Dancing On My Own” to the world—the anthemic pop song of its time—and it still astounds me to this day that it didn’t even crack the Billboard Top 100. Go listen to it again, and ponder just how on earth that track didn’t become the biggest song in the world. Robyn was the pop star that should have been: a million times more soulful and cooler than anybody. “Dancing On My Own” should have been her breakthrough. The music video alone feels like a different vision of the decade that followed: dreamier, capital-r-Romantic, less trashy, less empty. Unless you were plugged into that particular strain, what you got from the mainstream was, frankly, a lot of junk, with some occasional hip-hop or R&B classics mixed in. But this is the point I keep hammering: what was that strain? Who was there to define it, curate it, and show it to enough people to matter? It’s typical of the digitalized experience of my generation that the mainstream was continually narrowing, divided up between the same repetitive stars, while the internet diffused everything else into niches too specific for most people to know about. If you didn’t encounter something like “Dancing on My Own” through a music blog or on a TV show years later, then you simply had little chance of encountering it naturally.

In 2011, Nicholas Winding Refn’s movie Drive was released. I’ve heard people call it a cult classic in recent years; frankly it’s nowhere near as good as it seemed at 17. But the soundtrack—with songs like Kavinsky’s “Nightcall” and College’s “A Real Hero”—made it the first film of the decade to feature up-to-date electronic pop music, and fit in exactly with the alternative styles I was observing. That year, Neon Indian released “Polish Girl,” M83 released “Midnight City” (which did chart, eventually), and the first James Blake record came out. Great, classic pop music, all. But the real revelation that year was Lana Del Rey’s “Video Games.” Though she’s obviously hugely popular today, when “Video Games” came out she was still a cipher, who until just before that had been performing under her real name, Lizzy Grant. Her first massive record, Born to Die, wouldn’t even be released until 2012, at which point “Video Games” would just crack the charts, peaking at #91, as the record shot her into legitimate stardom. Still, the mere presence of that mysterious song in 2011 seemed seismic, another vision of an alternative to all that glitz and autotune and over-the-top “soul” numbers. But in this case exquisitely coy, ironic-but-not-ironic, certainly Romantic. Like all that hazy underground pop, it was doing something interesting and productive with Millennial nostalgia.

The wave only accelerated into 2012. Though the year belonged above all to Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d. Cityand Frank Ocean’s channel ORANGE, we also had songs like Tame Impala’s “Feels Like We Only Go Backwards,” Blood Orange’s “You’re Not Good Enough,” Solange’s “Losing You,” Grimes’ “Oblivion,” Chromatics’ “Cherry,” and Purity Ring’s “fineshrine.” These were massive pop songs which, again, took years to actually reach large audiences. But there were even more egregious examples of tracks which a healthier, saner world would have turned into hits: Chairlift’s “I Belong in Your Arms” and Sky Ferreira’s “Everything is Embarrassing.” Both sparkling examples of gorgeous pop-that-might-have-been, the Millennial equivalent to the biggest synth-pop anthems of 1980s England. Ferreira’s perennially-delayed career was one of the saddest results of this era’s inability to figure out its most promising pop figures—one that still feels like a loss. Her first and only record, Night Time is My Time (2013) sounds like a distillation of the era, and was produced almost entirely by Ariel Rechtshaid, who that same year helmed Vampire Weekend’s Modern Vampires of the City, much of Charli XCX’s debut True Romance, and the Haim sisters’ first record—all examples of indie-coded major-label acts trying to approach pop success from an alterna-pop vantage.

2013 also brought the first real examples of successful popstars finally capitalizing on this vague alternative sensibility: Lorde’s debut record Pure Heroine and Drake’s “Hold On We’ve Going On,” both of which still sound much more at home in alternative territory than they ever did alongside Imagine Dragons, Macklemore, the Lumineers, Katy Perry, or Bruno Mars—the most-played artists that year. I myself still have trouble believing something like Lorde’s “Team” (the first Top 10 hit clearly influenced by The Knife—coming exactly one decade after “Heartbeats”) came out the same year as “Thrift Shop.” That year also brought CHVRCHES’ wonderful “The Mother We Share,” Disclosure’s debut record Settle, and the accidental leak of several demos by the mysterious British producer Jai Paul. Not officially released until 2019, these rough tracks should have ushered in a new wave of their own. That didn’t happen, though more than a few great producers and singers since then have had a clear unspoken debt to Paul’s experiments.

To listen to “Jasmine” or “BTSTU” now is to hear the Millennial alternative reconstituting itself again as genuine future-music: a mutant, genreless advance that could only have come from a fluid, internet-native producer. But then to listen to “Str8 Outta Mumbai” is to hear one of the most pathbreaking, original, and undeniable pop songs of the 21st century. In less than 3 minutes, Jai Paul crams together things never interlaced in a pop song before—earwormy vocal hooks, tablas, strafing arpeggiators, absurd noise-gates, percussion that sounds like a cash register. By the time the final verse gives way to that extraordinary Bollywood sample, he’s taken you through a series of sounds so new they still sound futuristic. I’m beginning to repeat myself. But still: this, too, should have changed the world.

2014 brought two of the greatest electronic-pop records of my lifetime, Caribou’s Our Love and Jessy Lanza’s Pull My Hair Back. It also brought the first real cresting wave of dreamy indie rock beginning to achieve its own kind of accessible pop. Perennially twee Canadians Alvvays put out “Archie, Marry Me,” a generational sing-a-long classic; Mac DeMarco released Salad Days, maybe the most outright pop record yet made by a tiny bedroom-based artist. In the years since then, that record’s “Chamber of Reflection” has gathered up more than a billion streams—just as songs by Tame Impala, Beach House, and many other once-alternative artists, whose haphazard viral success came years after their best work. Some R&B or hip-hop artists belonging in the same alternative stream—Frank Ocean, Tyler the Creator, FKA twigs—emerged eventually as genuinely popular artists on their own. Yet others like Solange, How to Dress Well, Ravyn Lenae, dvsn, Kelela, Kllo, and Nao, who all made excellent critically-praised records, never managed to do the same.

I’ve already mentioned how Pitchfork’s selling out to Condé Nast in 2015 eventually transformed its ability to argue for this music. Pitchfork had always been limited in how much contour and context it could give; by its middle years, it tended to get lost in criticizing microgenres and over-apologizing for its erstwhile snobbishness. But it could be a genuine champion for a lot of this music, premiering music videos and promoting certain smaller artists. Its move towards hosting and curating festivals in Chicago and Barcelona created one of the few actual venues where the shared vibe of so many disparate artists could be set on actual display. When I attended in 2014, the lineup included an ascendent Kendrick, Earl Sweatshirt, St. Vincent, pre-fame Grimes, Cloud Nothings, Real Estate, DIIV, Sharon Van Etten, Empress Of, tUne-yArDs, Danny Brown, SZA, Isaiah Rashad, FKA Twigs, Kelela, and others. It was hard not to feel that a widespread alternative to the mainstream (one that embraced indie rock bands, singer-songwriters, electronic musicians, and rappers alike) was on its way to being properly expressed.

2015 and 2016 marked the high point of the wave. Frank Ocean’s Blonde and Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly were both watershed moments, transforming many audiences’ expectations that R&B and hip-hop could handle genuine and committed artists with highly specific visions, without losing popularity. Even more important to my eyes were songs like Thundercat’s “Them Changes,” Japanese Breakfast’s “Everybody Wants to Love You,” or Ravyn Lenae’s “Free Room”; records like Neon Indian’s VEGA Intl. Night School, KAYTRANADA’s 99.9%, Porches’ Pool, and Empress Of’s debut record Me. All of this was the kind of adventurous pop music a healthier era would have elevated to the top of the charts. Above all, there was Jamie xx’s first record, In Colour, which summed up the era, projecting a stadium-sized utopian vision of electronic music, pop, and hip-hop brought together in the warmest dance music I’ve ever heard. It’s still difficult for me to listen to the album without dreaming of that fantastical alternate past, where it might have poured out of every car, bar, and nightclub, soundtracking a generation. Difficult not to feel this past would have been much, much better than the one we actually got. Rose-tinted glasses, to be sure.

There were other artists who carried on some of this spirit and sound through to the end of the decade, particularly indie artists: Sharon Van Etten, Alex G, Angel Olsen, Men I Trust, Mitski, Soccer Mommy, Phoebe Bridgers, and The War on Drugs all released songs that could have been hits in a different world. Charli XCX and Caroline Polachek kept making great alternative pop, and still do. My favorite track from the later mid-decade was one by the bedroom-pop musician Melina Duterte (recording under the name Jay Som) whose 2017 song “Baybee” proved just what all this music was pointing towards. Duterte was a self-sufficient indie artist on a small indie label, recording every instrument on her own, in her own home. And yet she had none of the old oppositional underground ethos of former DIY punk days. Instead, she’d set about writing and recording an effortless, smooth, hook-filled, timeless pop song—in her own particular way. And it really is another of the great Millennial pop songs: sounds like no other era, like no other decade, and certainly nothing like whatever was going on in the charts. In the Millennial 120 Minutes of my mind, “Baybee” would have been on constant rotation, and young people all over would have been learning just what they’d been missing, as they nodded along to the newest miserable Ed Sheeran soundalike.

So: what to make of all this? Is it really possible to propose a canon—since it’s diffuse and difficult to tie together, based on anything more than a vibe, or a personal experience of the music? I don’t believe most of these artists consciously thought they were proposing an alternative pop vision. Mostly, they’d grown up on the internet, with very few boundaries between the genres and decades of music they encountered there, and ended up wanting to make music that combined all the things they loved best. A few blogs and sites and music critics understood what they were doing, and argued for them: almost none—least of all the avowed poptimists—seemed to recognize these artists constituted the actual great pop music of their time. And as the 2010s wore on, even those few blogs and sites and critics increasingly abandoned championing any upstart underground visions (along with the defense of any ideals of artistic authenticity whatsoever), and celebrated victorious artists who savvily exploited their stardom, commercial success, and popularity. We’re now somewhere near the breaking point of that process, with seemingly nowhere else to go.

Still, I’m hardly the committed doom-monger I may appear to be. All throughout the Aughts and 2010s there was even more extraordinary music being made which didn’t fit into this loose vision of an alternate pop. There was tons of great hip-hop, experimental electronic music, folk, jazz, indie rock, etc. There’s still a stunning amount of great music being made in this decade, too: last year I encountered so many excellent new records, I didn’t quite know how to keep up. Almost none of those, however, reached sizable audiences, and remained far off from the kind of reach the biggest artists of our time have (though here I’ll admit I do feel that young pop phenoms like Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan, and Olivias Dean and Rodrigo are an enormous improvement over the days of Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Adele, Sia, and the rest). We face the same problem today, but worse: there’s simply no way to get an alternative across to a big enough audience to matter, no mechanism for putting across any different vision of the possibilities of popular music in our time.

In my own haphazard way, I hope that trying to articulate what bound together so much of my generation’s truly classic music—which only occasionally got the chance to compete against monolithic pop brands—might redeem it from being totally elided into history. I think there’s a lesson in it: frequently, the biggest music is not the best, and the best lasting music of an era might be completely neglected, might in fact need to be argued for. In nearly all departments, Millennials have generally sold out or professionalized too soon to make much great art. We were given more than our fair share of the worst hit songs ever made by human beings, while collectively we’ve contributed precious little of lasting quality to the worlds of theater, film, classical music, fiction, poetry, or the visual arts. But one thing we did right was popular music. For the first time in the modern era, what was once a counter-culture actually articulated a better, deeper vision of popular culture, showing just what was lacking in the desiccated mainstream its generation was sleepwalking through. If there’s one thing that might be able to shift the trajectory of contemporary popular culture, even slightly, it might be the recognition that this really happened—we simply haven’t named it yet.

Well, I propose that it happened, that there is an alternate canon, and this is something to build on. What’s necessary is to find a way to reach people again—crazy as that sounds—a project most music journalists seem to have little faith in anymore. Last year, Pitchfork ended its music festival for good; a few weeks ago the site itself went behind a paywall. It no longer considers itself important enough to be read by just anyone, let alone bearing responsibility towards any serious readership—it’s been absorbed into undifferentiated nothingness along with most of the internet. So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, adieu. Perhaps whatever comes next to take its place can learn from its mistakes, and admit that while it got half the story right, it never went far enough, never fought for the best, or advocated any genuine alternative vision. The music had to do that on its own, even when there were only scattered groups of people to listen to it. It’s up to fools like us to make sure that never happens again.

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