Dirty Projectors, Fleet Foxes Elaborate on “Bad and Boujee” Indie Rock Comments

The conversation started last night by Dirty Projectors’ David Longstreth and spurred on by Robin Pecknold of Fleet Foxes about the current state of indie rock has continued through the afternoon, with Longstreth, Pecknold, and other artists elaborating and weighing in. Writing on Instagram, Longstreth referenced Migos’ current chart-topping hit to pose the question of if the genre is “both bad and boujee?” He asked if indie rock these days is “Bad in the basic sense of like, musically underwhelming … and boujee in the word’s negative sense: refined and effete, well removed from the raindrops and drop tops of lived, earned experience?” 

Pecknold weighed in via Instagram comments, saying as part of a longer message, “to me there is always a vast expanse of feeling being explored by everyone engaged in music and it’s all valid in that it defines a feeling or creates a new one, for whatever group or groups have their ears turned on that music.”

Longstreth has now elaborated further on his statements with a new Instagram post, as well as several tweets. And Pecknold has continued the conversation on Reddit. 

hey everybody, ‘indie’ is a community that i def consider myself/dirty projectors to be a part of. 80s/90s indie rock is the first music that showed me that i could make music and be a part of a community that way. most of my music-making friends make ‘indie rock’ and if i had to guess i’d say that the DP album that’s about to come out on domino records will be filed under ‘indie rock’ in our local record stores. so to the extent that the post was something more than a jokey riff on fake critical theory language mixed w migos lyrics, the concept of ‘indie’ is personal/important to me. i was getting kinda navelgaze abt my band’s context, wringing my hands over the way the term has been co-opted by wack spotify playlists, garageband presets etc. c’est la vie i guess … def wasn’t trying to put anybody on blast — esp younger bands, who are doing amazing shit in a super unprecedented cultural context. whitney is my favorite band in many years, i don’t know how they do that!?! abt 2009. it’s ironic to be nostalgic abt the alleged newness of something that happened 7 years ago! feel like there’s been so much mind-blowing and fresh music since then. in all diff scenes & genres. but also, as a number of people on the thread have said: innovation isn’t everything. emotion seems pretty timeless &universal, and that’s the core of music right? i feel like in the context of 45, filling old traditional forms w new messages of resistance is gonna be a strong way forward!

A photo posted by @davidlongstreth on Feb 10, 2017 at 10:51am PST

On Reddit, Pecknold wrote, “I was trying to say that music doesn’t have to be progressive to be enjoyable. I never said my music was ‘cutting edge,’ that’s not my goal as a musician.” He also said, among other things:

• It was a defense of those artists / indie rock, I was saying that music doesn’t need to be progressive to be enjoyable. The points I tried to make were fully unitarian. And if people aren’t allowed to use big words to light-heartedly mull over small, innocuous subjects, you might as well shut down the university system entirely.
• Can someone hit me with a jpg for “tfw ppl call you pretentious for saying unoriginal music is enjoyable and that all expression is valid”

Other artists, including Sadie Dupuis, Waxahatchee, and Cloud Nothings, shared their views on indie rock, as well as Longstreth and Pecknold’s initial discussion.

music twitter is mad about a roundtable of frontmen, meanwhile i won’t even look at the table if frontmen are the only people seated

— sadie dupuis (@sad13) February 10, 2017

extremely grateful that i am making music in this era, so many cool, hardworking and fucking talented people are killing it. it inspires me.

— waxahatchee (@k_crutchfield) February 10, 2017

nothing makes you look more out of touch than declaring something dead/not as good as it used to be

— Cloud Nothings (@cloudnothings) February 10, 2017

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