This article was written by The Zillennial Zine’s spring editorial intern Henry Ryeder. Find him on Instagram at @henryryeder. If you would like to share an article with The Zillennial, send us an email at thezillennialzine@gmail.com.
I’ve never really enjoyed Pitchfork. Even outside my life as a musician, the website that started as a low-key music blog turned Condé Naste subsidiary has always felt out of touch. Its ability to make or break artists through the mid 2010’s notwithstanding (social media essentially killed that), Pitchfork’s trademark voice just bothered me. From the prose, it seems as though every writer on Pitchfork were awkward in high school, didn’t go out much while studying at their cushy colleges, and now find themselves with a digital bullhorn they weren’t expecting, nor are they using responsibly. I couldn’t possibly relate…
Despite my thoughts on Pitchfork, one of my favorite passages written in digital ink has to be from Sophie Kemp’s review of the Dare’s The Sex EP. If you’re unfamiliar with the latter (I envy you), I’ll go into detail on that Chat Roulette-meets-ChatGPT crap shoot of words in a second; my favorite paragraph didn’t even have to do with the music. Instead, Kemp was describing a generation “of people who are not really millennials but also not really zoomers, who remember 9/11, just barely, were preteens for the recession, grew up reblogging nose-bleed photos on Tumblr and smoking weed to Odd Future, and then graduated from college between the caution-filled eras of #MeToo and the pandemic.” If only Kemp could find a snappier term to describe that demographic…
The artist Kemp was reviewing is known as the Dare, the electro-clash project of Harrison Patrick Smith. Smith’s rapid rise up the ranks of elite New York prominence is stunning, if not particularly interesting. Donning a suit and tie, DJ’ing scuzzy lower Manhattan nightclubs that have turned into 1%-er afterparties (as they often do), and writing songs like Girls, Smith transformed into the Dare, becoming very successful very quickly. Does he deserve the hype?
Let’s take a look at some of the lyrics of Girls by the Dare, released on Republic Records, home to Taylor Swift and The Weeknd.
I like tall girls, small girls
Girls with dicks
Call girls
Girls who get naked on the ‘Gram
They say I’m too fuckin’ horny
Wanna put me in a cage
I’d probably fuck the hole in the wall
The guy before made
Come to your own conclusions, and listen to his entire Sex EP if you require more information to make your judgment, or if you’re looking to spend half an hour rubbing your eyes in migraine-level pain. Regardless of the music itself, the Dare’s done some pretty intense cultural barraging over the last year. A year ago, I hadn’t heard of him. Now, I wish that I hadn’t. That’s how most celebrity goes, but there is a particularly try-hard nature to the Dare. Reading his puff piece in GQ feels a bit like reading a 90-message-long email chain between Smith’s publicist and some poor editor’s assistant with the subject line, “Make him hot please?”
Whatever your thoughts on the Dare, his fate seems inextricably linked to the fate of a cultural pseudo-movement: Gen Z’s Indie Sleaze Revival. If you’re unfamiliar (again, I envy you), think all the good parts of the 2000’s (smudged eye-liner, drugs, skinny jeans) without any of the bad parts (the next morning.)
We can mark the unofficial birth date of the Indie Sleaze Revival to October 21, 2021, when fashion TikTok-er Mandy Lee posted a video titled, you guessed it, “Indie Sleaze Revival.” Lee asserted that “Indie sleaze took off in the early 00s, so following the 20-year trend cycle, this isn’t too far off.” Based on her perusal of Indie Sleaze Tumblr, Indie Sleaze Tik Tok, and for the love of God I hate using the phrase Indie Sleaze so many times, Lee calculated that a huge resurgence would occur among Gen Z.
The trend caught on…to a degree. Make-up tutorials, digital camera pictures from the 2000’s, and a newly formed interest in the music of that era (roughly 2001 to 2011) became well-searched and liked on TikTok, Instagram, and Spotify. The trend is real; I can personally attest to the amount of Gen Z musicians who are inspired by (and sound like) the Strokes.
But much like the motivations driving Smith’s rise to prominence, there’s a bit of a hollowness (and dare I say “Millennial-ness”) to the resurgence in the trend. Yes, fashion is cyclical, but fashion isn’t dictated by a formula, Mandy Lee’s “20-year trend cycle” is only as true as you make it. Legacy publications such as Vogue and Vice were quick to publish articles hailing the return of Indie Sleaze. It’s clear that many people that want the 20-year trend cycle to be real, and there are various reasons for that.
One, twenty years wasn’t that long ago. James Murphy was in his mid-30’s when he became LCD Soundsystem and is still touring around the world. Kate Moss is still in fashion headlines, and George Bush is still painting. Ok, maybe that last one doesn’t seem very Indie Sleaze, but an unattractive man made extremely famous by way of lying and nepotism? How much more Indie Sleaze can you get!? Needless to say, these cultural figures are still relevant, and even if it weren’t good business (which it is), a revival of their art and aesthetics for a new generation would certainly make them feel good. When you’re an intern in your 20’s, it might be difficult to push a cultural sub-movement based on your nostalgia. If you’re an editor at a powerful publication in your 40’s, it might be a bit easier.
Two, there has been genuine renewed interest in the time period. Lizzy Goodman’s great, if bloated, Meet Me In The Bathroom, an oral history of the New York music scene from 2001 to 2011, was released in 2016 and has only grown in prominence since then. A documentary version of the book was released in 2022, just about the time that the Indie Sleaze Revival started producing artists such as the Dare. And just a few months ago, high-brow drama Saltburn used its early to mid-2000’s aesthetic to illustrate…nope. Nope, it was there purely to illustrate.
There’s a final, and more sociological reason for the Indie Sleaze Revival. Though it’s only been twenty years, they’ve been eventful. Probably more importantly, they’ve felt eventful. The #MeToomovement, rise of global fascism, rise of 24-7 online living, and Covid-19 pandemic have radically altered our understandings of ourselves and our societies. It makes sense that we’d yearn for a simpler time, it makes a lot of sense that we’d yearn for a time that felt simpler; without the worries of the worries of social media and complicated sexual politics.
Yet myths about simpler times are just that: myths. Twenty years ago, the United States was embroiled in a catastrophic conflict in the Middle East, women were fighting for equal rights, and a novel virus was causing many to abhor our social relationship to public health. People got out of bed, made snide comments about their jobs, went to their jobs, went home, and maybe went out (if you were really Indie Sleaze, you could nix the job bit). If anything, the past is comforting because it’s a narrative with an outcome; we know the ending, even if we’re displeased with that ending. It’s similar to the appeal of the idea of apocalypse across the political spectrum: we might not like the idea of the world ending, but at least we know the ending!
Gen Z’s Indie Sleaze Revival feels like a genuine desire to relive a past era for various reasons, while some who lived through the Indie Sleaze era in earnest have a vested interest in keeping their work, youth, and products alive. In reading some articles about Gen Z’s relationship to Indie Sleaze by millennials, I found some fascinating perspectives. There was Naomi May in Stylist, who decried the misogyny of the 2000’s and outright called Indie Sleaze a “myth”…
“The true hallmarks of indie sleaze have been left firmly in the past, where they belong, while the faces that lead the charge have similarly grown out of their tumbling platforms and skin-tight denim. Today’s trends instead belong to 70s-inspired penny lane coats, sunglasses, crochet dresses and – gulp – Crocs, none of which were born of the era of indie sleaze.”
While I empathize with May’s take, I find her pedagogical tone a bit counter-productive. May’s obviously speaking to lived experience, but penny lane coats from the 1970’s hardly constitute a feminist alternative to disco pants and headbands. Also, Crocs was founded in 2002!
Another article I came across was written by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett for the Guardian. A bona fide Camden partygoer in the 2000’s (not to mention great writer), Cosslett talks of her complicated relationship to the idea of the Indie Sleaze era being recycled for its aesthetics, given the social mores of a decidedly patriarchal world. “It makes me laugh, because that’s what much of that scene boiled down to, really, male egos.” Cosslett goes on to implore that Gen Z remember the inherent darkness to the Indie Sleaze era: addiction, rampant misogyny, and body dysmorphia.
It’s not as if there weren’t fantastic femme artists and artists of color in the Indie Sleaze era, such as Karen O, Tunde Adebimpe, and Peaches (just to name my favorites.) But the vibe of Indie Sleaze to me, even as a child accidentally scrolling past MTV on my way to History Channel (shocker, I know), was overwhelmingly cis, white, and male. Like Cosslett says, so much of that scene lived or died by the male ego. Unfortunately for Gen Z, the male ego feels much more eternal than Indie Sleaze, which is important to remember when choosing what bits of history to dust off and try on.
But then I think back to the people profiting off of the Indie Sleaze Revival. Does the Dare even care about the weight of his own words in Girls to a generation of younger woman? Does he really think they’ll get his I’m joking maybe but if you’re ok with me being gross then that’s really cool schtick without internalizing it? Does anyone profiting off of Indie Sleaze care at all about what the second half of that phrase meant to the women of that time?
Almost definitely not. So bust out your Crocs, go down to Dimes Square in Manhattan, and convince the towering minds seated at the bar that Julian Casablancas wore Crocs at Coachella in 2002. I promise you, you’ll be the most interesting person there.
Do you think the indie sleaze Tumblr aesthetic is back? What do you think of it? Let us know in the comments below!
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