What Is The Modern Rock 500?
The text of my talk this Thursday at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
This is the text of my talk September 19th at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Free tickets are available here. Hope to see some of you there! For those who can’t make it, a recording will be posted to the website.
[Play Dave & Damian intro to 2023]
What you just heard was the first break in the 2023 Modern Rock 500. That year, the Cincinnati community radio station Inhailer came together with many former DJs from the internationally-renowned modern rock radio station 97X WOXY to broadcast the station’s signature annual countdown nearly 15 years after the station transmitted its last song over the internet at woxy.com. As in years past, the 2023 Modern Rock 500 ran from morning till night the Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday of Memorial Day weekend and counted down what WOXY staff determined to be the 500 songs that most defined the station’s identity. While the 2023 Modern Rock 500 only included songs the station played in its broadcast era (from 1983-2010), on Memorial Day weekend 2024, Inhaler broadcast their “Indie 500”, which brought the countdown up to the present day.
The Modern Rock 500 is in many ways a very unique institution, and we can learn a lot from studying it, both about music and about people. Musically, The MR 500 is an evolving playlist that tracks what “modern rock” is and how it differs from “indie.” As I’ll explain more fully in this talk, the “modern” in “modern rock” refers to its commitment to progressing past old-fashioned notions of rock purity, such as the one that motivated listeners at Chicago rock station The Loop to blow up a bunch of disco records at Comiskey Park in 1979. The Modern Rock 500 reflects WOXY’s commitment to the idea that “modern rock” included a broad spectrum of music, everything from spoken word, singer-songwriter, house music, blues, reggae, hip hop, alt country, and of course rock. I’ll pinpoint and play clips of a few specific songs the MR 500 uses to highlight this aspect of its modernity.
This sense of modernity is the main thing that distinguishes the Modern Rock 500 from the Indie 500. WOXY-style genre ecumenicalism was “modern” – that is, progressive and forward-thinking – in the context of a rockist mainstream that insisted rock was by and for white straight men, and must reject influences associated with women and queer people such as disco. But by 2024, that old rockism is way out of fashion. Situating the Indie 500 in the broader context of 2024 – including scholarship on the feminization of indie rock, Mitch Thereau’s concept of “Antonoffication, or the idea that pop stars like Taylor Swift have co-opted the sound of 2010s indie, and, of course, Charli XCX’s album/meme “brat” — I show how the Indie 500 is part of a broader emerging trend that uses references to modern rock’s past as a way to disidentify with an Antonoffied mainstream.
In this respect, the MR500 is an archive that brings into focus what’s happened to the musical tradition rooted in punk and post-punk over the last four decades, and suggests some reasons why it evolved in the way it did.
But the MR 500 is more than just music. As the clip I just played suggests, The Modern Rock 500 is also a 35-year-old institution. This institution followed WOXY from its FM broadcast in the Cincinnati/Dayton area to its web stream and later Inhailer’s, where it was heard around the world. This institution’s continued existence has a more powerful lesson that goes beyond music. When I first pitched this talk prior to the pandemic, I called it “What WAS The Modern Rock 500?,” because it had been ten years since the last one was broadcast in 2009. Since then, it’s been resurrected by a group of former WOXY DJs (led by Mike Taylor, Dave Tellman, and Damian Dotterweich) and the team at the Cincinnati-based independent community web radio station Inhailer. The Modern Rock 500 was WOXY’s flagship program, and its continued existence is one of the ways the WOXY community keeps it alive even after the station stopped broadcasting. The fact that this institution lives on, and WOXY with it, is a testament to and result of the station’s definitive philosophy: that true independence can be found only when you practice it with and for other people. As an institution, the MR 500 wears on its sleeve the commitment to independence that suffuses the evolving selection of music it broadcast each year. This idea of independence can guide us as we try to live independent lives and support independent media at a time when corporations are making that harder than ever.
What is WOXY?
Before diving deep into the MR 500 itself, I want to say a bit about WOXY. The MR 500 is nothing if not a reflection of WOXY’s values, so you can’t understand that institution without understanding the community that organizes it.
WOXY began its life as a radio station in Oxford, Ohio, in 1981, when Chicago-based media & advertising professionals Doug & Linda Balogh bought the struggling station. Broadcasting at an FCC-mandated 3000 watts and covering parts of the Cincinnati, Dayton, and Richmond, IN markets, the station was unintelligible to advertisers because it never got big market share numbers in any of those cities. That meant the station had a hard time making money.
In 1983 the Baloghs tried ignoring advertisers’ expectations and re-orienting the station to reflect listener preferences. After doing some focus groups in Oxford, they decided to adopt a then-new modern rock format because its inherent variety would give listeners their wish to hear “more new, less of the same” music over and over. As Doug Balogh told the Hamilton Journal-News in 2002, “We thought there were actual people who would want to hear new things and more things rather than hearing a few things more often.” For the first few months, WOXY basically copied LA post-punk pioneers KROQ’s playlists. But as the years wore on, WOXY would become the nation’s leading modern rock station, playing more songs and more different kinds of songs than even venerable KROQ. As SPIN magazine put it in February 1992, WOXY
Had 86 currents…added 12 new songs that week, and played only one track, Bjork’s
‘Joga,’ more than two dozen times…Now look at KROQ’s playlist for the same week. Only two new songs were added to the rotation…and KROQ pounded each of its top six songs more times than WOXY played ‘Joga’–a brilliant track the L.A. station had yet to add to its rotation.
As the 1997 back-to-school edition of the WOXY newsletter claims, the station “plays more new music than anybody!”, and SPIN’s data backs that claim up. By 1996, heavy rotation at WOXY was 25 spins per week, or about three or four spins per day. This commitment to “more” music is both quantitative and qualitative. As that same newsletter explains at the bottom left of the front page, “modern rock was born out of many different influences and styles, and it continues to grow and change by cross-pollination with other musical genres,” such as the blues, so-called “world music,” and reggae. The station had dedicated programs to those genres, as well as electronic dance music, comedy, and several weekly slots devoted exclusively to local music. As the SPIN article suggests, this strategy was a hit with more than just local listeners. Throughout the 1990s WOXY was recognized as the most authentic and innovative independently-owned radio station in the country, and the station’s international reputation grew exponentially once the station started simulcasting its signal online at woxy.com in 1998.
Though WOXY’s “more new, less of the same” approach began as an attempt to save a station that, by any standard approach to the industry, was doomed to fail, it succeeded in part because it echoes modern rock’s core value, the thing that makes it “modern.” Modern rock has its roots in punk and post-punk musics from the late 1970s. As Mimi Haddon argues, “the ‘post’ in post-punk…stands for ‘beyond’ or surpassing’ the punk genre, by both including women and opening a dialogue with other, previously maligned genres, such as disco” (7). Whereas punk could be understood as rebelling against glam’s excesses by distilling rock down to its core essence — like the three chords punk zine Sniffin’ Glue said you need to start a band — post-punk’s transgression moves in the opposite direction, exploding punk’s narrow focus on rock (and white men) to include genres that were then held in low regard by virtue of their association with Black and Latinx people, queer people, and white cishsetero women. In this context, to be modern is to progress past small-c-conservatisms and become more small-l-liberal. For example, from 1984-7, WOXY’s tag lines were “97X Dare to be Different” and “97X The Station Your Mother Warned You About.”. As Theo Cateforis writes in his book on New Wave, in the context of rock musics, “the modern is also ‘relational,’ rupturing with the immediate past” in “rebellion” (Are We Not New Wave?, 3). As these examples suggest, this rebellion is oriented in a particular direction: to progress, inclusiveness, and against hard and fast boundaries. In other words, the “modern” in “modern rock” is an orientation toward a more small-l-liberal future.
II. MUSIC
Musically, the Modern Rock 500 reflects this idea that rigid boundaries about who and what to include are bad, and that one should listen at liberty to music that itself takes many liberties.
Before I get into the actual contents of the MR 500, let me explain how these annual charts were compiled. Each year, staff took the previous year’s countdown and adjusted both the rankings and the contents to account for both evolving tastes and newly-released songs. Candidates for new entries were drawn from the previous year’s year-end countdown, called “The 97 Best Of.” That chart ranked the 97 best and most popular albums released that year, and was tabulated by combining two metrics: the number of weeks the song was in heavy/medium/light rotation on the playlist, and its performance in the weekly countdown of top 10 requests, called People’s Choice Countdown. As woxy.com music director Matt Shiverdecker explained, the MR 500 “was never trying to be anything other than representing the songs that built WOXY and were favorites of our listeners.” During a break in the first hour of the 2023 MR 500, woxy.com program director Mike Taylor calls the chart “97X’s greatest hits.”
So, what were these songs? First, I’m going to look at some overall trends to show how the MR 500 embodied the sense of modernity I discussed earlier, or what Program Director Mike Taylor called, “The defining aspect of a true modern rock station is ‘variety, and lots of it’.” Then, I’ll drill down into some specifics and highlight some individual songs that functioned almost as sonic mascots for the station.
The MR 500 debuted in 1989, six years after WOXY adopted the modern rock format. Its chart locates the format’s history in punk’s first wave—The Clash, the Sex Pistols, The Ramones, Elvis Costello, the Pretenders, and Talking Heads, who all appear repeatedly. The chart doesn’t include X-Ray Spex or The Slits, nor, with the exception of Laurie Anderson, the more avant-garde elements of the downtown scene. It gestures in hip hop’s general direction with Afrikaa Bambaataa (in Time Zone) and Blondie’s “Rapture.” Despite a relatively strict adherence to punk’s “No Elvis, Beatles, or Rolling Stones” orthodoxy, two kinds of antecedents punctuate the chart: rockers like David Bowie and the Velvet Underground/Lou Reed, and reggae’s Bob Marley and Peter Tosh. There are three women in the top ten: Siouxsie Sioux, Diana Iyall of Romeo Void, and Gillian Gilbert. There are twenty-five dance tracks, twelve reggae, five ska, and five hip hop tracks—though only one featuring a black person—as well as latin jazz and neo-swing tracks. The now-iconic black queer feminist anthem “Fast Car,” by Tracy Chapman, clocks in at 167. Eight local acts appear on the chart: three songs from The Bears, two from Adrian Belew, and three from Royal Crescent Mob. All the top 10 tracks are upbeat and danceable, putting pleasure in the foreground while keeping any discussion of politics in the realm of plausible deniability. As a statement of listener values or preferences, the ‘89 MR 500 comes out as a progressive, diverse, local, and independent break from the status quo.
Throughout the 1990s, the MR 500 shows, as a station newsletter put it, that “we know Modern Rock didn’t start with Nirvana, goes back past 1987 and includes styles that range from Rock to Reggae, from Punk to Pop to Dance and Dirge.” With the rise of corporate alt-rock radio providing a foil against which WOXY could define itself, the 90s MR 500s show a general pivot away from traditional guitar-centric rock songs and towards…whatever else. For example, the top of the 1993 MR 500 reads as a reclamation of new wave, as The Cure’s “Just Like Heaven” tops a list where “Bizarre Love Triangle” and “Rock Lobster” accompany it in the top 10 and the previous year’s #1, “I Wanna Be Sedated,” drops out of the top 10, and “Smells Like Teen Spirit” doesn’t even crack the top 30. Local music is another emphasis of the 90s and early 2000s countdowns, with Dulli- and Deal-fronted accts appearing alongside less well-known local artists such as Wussy, Over The Rhine, the Ass Ponys, and Miami University alum Mojo Nixon.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the presence of local Cincinnati-area music is one of the things that changes most after 2004, when the FM station was sold and WOXY began its life as an online-only broadcaster (the station had simulcast its FM signal at woxy.com since 1998). Nationally-famous groups like The Afghan Whigs and The Breeders remained, but the smaller ones dropped off the chart. In their place, the chart included more Black artists like X-Ray Spex’s Poly Styrene, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, and Soul Sonic Force. In this respect, the approach to the 1970s and 1980s began to reflect less 97X’s own approach at that time and more the “official” narrative coalescing around media like Simon Reynolds’ book Rip It Up And Start Again, and boxed sets like Rough Trade’s 25th anniversary collection. By 2009, which was the last year the countdown was broadcast on woxy.com, there were no people of color in the top 25, and there were half as many white women there than there were in 1989 and 1999. With broader diversity in the chart’s lower ranks but narrowed inclusion at the top, the 2009 MR 500 reflects one of the main trends we’ve seen in the 21st century music industry, where for example poptimism and omnivorous listening reign but nobody smaller than Taylor Swift or Beyonce can even afford to go on tour.
The 2023 Modern Rock 500 includes only songs that WOXY played either on air or online from 1983-2009, and its contents are more like the 2009 chart than the charts from the 80s or 90s. The Inhailer team have a great set of data visualization tools on their website that break this chart down by a number of variables:
The picture this data draws isn’t very “modern”–there’s not a lot of “more new, less of the same” in these top stats. There are some hints: Depeche Mode and The Stone Roses can lean towards dance music, and Radiohead has been known to use a synthesizer or two. But otherwise, with the exception of two women bassists – Kim Deal and D’Arcy – this is a bunch of guys with guitars (James Iha is the only non-white person here). Though this zoomed-out overview depicts a relatively un-modern rock picture, zooming in to the chart details brings the “modern” in the MR 500 back into focus. The top 25 of the 2023 MR 500 only had 5 songs that could be considered “90s alternative”, and the top 60 preserves the typically “modern” mix of genres including punk, reggae, synthpop, goth, EDM and disco, experimental pop, and industrial. Outkast’s massive 2003 hit “Hey Ya” clocks in at 295, proving that the MR 500 is unafraid to include the odd–and I mean odd–pop hit. Music theorists call the repeated note at the end of a march that reinforces the sense that the song is over a “stinger,” and in many ways the very modern 2023 MR 500 is this chart’s stinger: a repetition that emphasizes the conclusion of an era.
As a re-statement of core principles, the 2023 countdown highlights a collection of songs that define WOXY’s approach to modern rock and its history. These songs were popular when originally released but over time have been written out of orthodox narratives of modern rock’s most important songs. They come from a range of genres, but the one thing they all have in common is that they’re…different. Here’s a list that we can come back to and listen if we have time later:
The Disposable Heroes of Hiphopricy, “Television, the Drug of the Nation,” 486
The Ass Ponies, “Little Bastard,” 481
MC 900 ft. Jesus, “The City Sleeps”
Dada, “Dizz Knee Land,” 425
The Nails, “88 Lines About 44 Women”, 414
Royal Crescent Mob, “Get On the Bus” 165
Romeo Void, “Never Say Never,” 115
The Dead Milkmen, “Bitchin Camaro” 65
Dubbed by Matt Sledge as “the quintessential 97X song” during the 2023 MR 500 where it placed at lap 493, Meryn Cadell’s 1992 spoken word track “The Sweater” was popular on modern rock radio when it was first released but has since fallen into obscurity most everywhere else except among WOXY listeners. As Sledge’s characterization demonstrates, the station used this song to crystalize its identity for listeners. Over a sample of Syd Dale’s “Walk and Talk,” Cadell tells the story of a teen romance with a twist: the eponymous garment “belongs to…a boy,” and the song narrates the experience of a girl who wears the sweater as a sign of what she thinks is their romance. But, as the end of the song reveals, [play clip]
This song leans way more towards “Rock Lobster” than it does grunge, and the hook here is less power chords and more wit. It’s making fun of heterosexuality, especially the narrative of hetrosexuality sold to us by mass media like the then-ubiquitous Sweet Valley High books. One of the station’s slogans at the time was “Corporate Radio Sucks,” and WOXY listeners knew that corporate mass media was “100% acrylic.” The girl in the song feels OK in the end about being rejected by her former crush because he’s ultimately basic. Turns out, different IS what she’s looking for, just like WOXY listeners. A witty parody of mainstream, orthodox narratives on top of avant-pop beats, “The Sweater” distills WOXY’s modern philosophical and musical values down to a just over three-minute-long vision statement.
Continuing chronologically, the Indie 500 is still diverse, but the texture and stakes are different. 20 years after Kelefa Sanneh’s New York Times piece “The Rap Against Rockism,” the old rockist investments in purity that had once made modern rock’s appropriation of disco and dub radical had little hold anymore. Back in the era of Steve Dahl’s infamous “Disco Demolition,” mainstream rock’s politics centered on white straight men appropriating performances of stereotypical Black American masculinity—that’s what “moves like Jagger” are. By performing caricatures of what white people thought Black men acted like, white rockers felt they could access a greater depth of physical and sexual prowess than your average square, vanilla white dude. No Wave icon James Chance’s “Almost Black” parodies this dynamic, as the lyrics delivered by what sound like a white woman and a Black woman both praise and undercut the white man protagonist’s performance of a masculinity that is, as the title says, almost Black. I would play a clip but taken out of context the song could sound really offensive, so you can Google it on your own. Rather than shoreing up rockers’ elite status among white men, disco, with its roots in queer communities of color, and genres like reggae, with its roots in Jamaica, were thought to throw it further in question. The Disco Demolition is evidence of how these anxieties about queer and foreign influences played in the rock world. Musicologist Dale Chapman has shown that a similar vibe existed in the jazz world at the time, as anxieties about the influence of disco and fusion (i.e., Afro-Latin influences) led to the rise of “neoclassical” jazz.
In that sort of context, where disco and Caribbean musics are seen as threats to hegemonic white rock masculinity, embracing those sorts of influences is an obviously counter cultural move. As Haddon argues, it’s this embrace of disco and reggae (specifically, dub) that defines “post-punk” and makes it “post-“. It just so happens that the two longest-running speciality genre shows on WOXY were DREADLOXX, their reggae show, and XTRABEATS, their dance music show. WOXY’s “modern” embrace of a wide range of genres was “different” from the small-c conservative rockist investments in narrowly-policed boundaries around what rock music is and who gets to make it that dominated pop music through the end of the aughts.
But by 2024, it’s clear that this “modern” moment is over. Poptimism, or the view that pop music by and for the likes of Britney Spears was of equal artistic merit to rock, grew hand-in-hand with the emergence of popular feminism, and with the mainstreaming of both omnivorous listening (a.k.a., “I like everything except country/hip hop/etc.”) and post-genre music like “Old Town Road”, the rejection of narrowly-policed genre and identity boundaries is no longer “different”. Rockist notions of genre purity are so old-fashioned that when former Rolling Stone head Jan Wenner said in a 2023 interview with The New York Times that white women and Black people were incapable of the same level of rock musicianship as white men, the backlash was so strong that he was removed from the board of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Though such rockism was common in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, by the 2020s, such publicly-stated views were disqualifying.
At the same time, Spotify executives tout their vibes-based playlists like POLLEN and LOREM by claiming that, as Jordan Stein put it,
When I was growing up, you were really defined by your music tastes. It’s like being a pop-punk kid or being a hip-hop fan. That was what you listened to. That was what you associated with,” he points out. “But now there’s a lot more openness and eagerness to find different things from different spaces. I think genre is a lot less important in that way.
According to Stein, genre is a thing of the past, something people who care about rigid adherence to defined categories use to translate their identities into musical tastes. Also note how the specific genres Stein cites–pop-punk and hip-hop–plot out a white/black racial binary and highlight genre’s very traditional association with race. As Stein’s quote above suggests, Spotify understands genre-less listening as more progressive than the traditional set of race-based genre norms we’ve inherited from the 20th century recording industry. Here, elite status is framed as a matter of overcoming old-fashioned genre provincialism; modern rock’s ecumenicalism with respect to genre and style is no longer a countercultural position – it’s the stuff the most exploitative platform in the industry uses to sell listeners on their playlists.
In the 2020s, the stakes that made keeping up with and showing influence from contemporary electronic dance music and avant-garde Caribbean musics a meaningfully counterculture gesture have changed. As The New York Times noted in 2017, by the second decade of the 20th century indie rock was increasingly dominated by white women and other gender minorities, and people of color. Artists and listeners with these identities don’t need to turn to music to disidentify with and separate themselves from mainstream white rock bros. At the same time, the music industry makes a hard pivot towards popular feminism in 2014, and a decade later the most successful and powerful artist in the world is Taylor Swift, a white cis woman whose music has increasingly centered indie rock influences. The old hard binary hierarchies – masc/femme, white/black, rock/not-rock – have all been scrambled: anything can be content and anyone can be a serious musician, so long as you have enough wealth to get by in an industry where only the very top superstars can operate in the black touring and record sales alone.
The contents of the 2024 Indie 500 reflects this changed context. Daft Punk’s 2013 “Get Lucky” is the only dance track released after WOXY stopped broadcasting to appear on the countdown at 197, and with the exception of Chance The Rapper’s “All Night” at 159, all the hip hop, reggae, grime, dubstep, or anything remotely on the reggae/dub spectrum in the countdown pre-dates 2010. There are many songs that take up pre-2010 dance styles, from CHVRCHES neo-New Order or The Wombat’s “Let’s Dance to Joy Division to the NIN-y vibes of St. Vincent’s “LA”, but they all treat dance music as an artifact of the past that has not evolved since the Obama administration. There’s no hint that dubstep exists despite a handful of entries from reggae artists and British dance acts like Fatboy Slim; there’s no work by contemporary house, techno, or EDM artists. There’s not even any new work from Trent Reznor. Songs in the Indie 500 draw on a diverse range of styles and genres, but the references are all frozen in the past. There is no need to engage with current descendants modern rock’s traditional genre interlocutors – EDM and dubstep – because the political and aesthetic motivation to do so isn’t there anymore. Now that rockism is itself a thing of the past, there’s no need to use disco, dub, and their descendents as statements against it.
Whereas straight white men’s discomfort with disco once drove rockism, in the 2020s the music industry is well into its girlboss era. The gender and racial politics of today’s indie rock are largely focused around white women’s performances of gender. As music scholar (and fellow Ohioan) Dan DiPiero writes, “a certain approach to indie rock has coalesced” since the beginning of the Obama era that is
predominantly performed by women and queer musicians…[and] eschews overt political orientations, instead emphasizing emotions, feelings, and affects that resonate indirectly….Rather than producing feminine excess by appropriating masculine-coded sounds (as feminist punk did), Big Feelings instead doubles down on the stereotypical association between femininity and emotion, positively re-appropriating such tropes in the pursuit of creating community, catharsis, and safety in a world where such opportunities are increasingly under assault.
Whereas rock traditionally centered white masculine transgression through the performance of an appropriated Black masculinity, indie’s Big Feelings era centers more or less the opposite: queer feminine collectivity. It’s this sensibility that informs Taylor Swift’s use of indie rock in her last several albums, which focus on curating powerful emotional experiences through lyrics sung over instrumentals which avoid any hint of musical transgression. Whereas Nirvana’s cover of Ledbelly’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” was once emblematic of a rock aesthetic premised on white men’s appropriation of Black blues masculinities, today both indie rock and pop-rock center mostly cis womens’ performances of femininity.
Named after popular and influential producer Jack Antonoff, “Antonoffication” is a recent stylistic trend that prioritizes a song’s emotional force over its musical one. As Mitch Thiereau puts it, “Antonoff established a distinctive yet elusive sound whose hallmarks are less musical than emotional…a mechanism for delivering a concentrated shot of big feelings.” Though the music on albums like Taylor Swift’s folklore and evermore may be, to use Jools Lebron’s term, “very demure,” eschewing grand moments of tension and release for a more lo-fi vibe, the lyrics go hard on emotional content, as the viral tweet from earlier this year suggests. The Big Feelings approach to indie emerged as the people traditionally marginalized in rock spaces finally had a chance to elevate their voices in a music scene that, like professions like teaching, grew to be dominated by women because it lost the elite status it once occupied. In the hands of mainstream players like Swift and Antonoff, Big Feelings indie gets appropriated into girlboss pop. The figure of the girlboss uses women’s past marginalization and purportedly “new and different” approach to elite roles to cover over ongoing systemic inequality, and girlboss pop likewise uses women’s empowerment to obscure the fact that the music industry is more unequal than ever. The (men) rock gods that once stood at the apex of the industry have, for now, been replaced by women stars like Taylor and Beyonce. However, the current economics of streaming and touring make it impossible for anyone of lesser status to make any money for their work. We may have gone from The Boss to the Girlboss, but not much has improved for the 99%.
Whereas the Modern Rock 500 foregrounded a broad diversity of styles and sounds to transgress and dis-identify with conservative rockist rules about what real music was and who could make it, the Indie 500 uses a very similar commitment to modern rock’s diverse sonic palette to stake out a counter-cultural position in the era of the Antonoffied Girlboss Pop Star. As Thiereau describes it, Antonoffication is the process where indie rock “dispers[es] into the digital ether and infus[es[ nearly every other genre,” the diffused and diluted musical influences helping create what Thiereau calls an “enforced modesty” in sound that leaves space for emotions to take the driver’s seat. The 2024 Indie 500 certainly includes many Big Feelings-style artists, but it includes a lot more than that too. Overall, the chart reflects a very broad range of musical influences, from turntablism to flamenco to pop-punk and soul. Notably, a handful of Prince songs appear in the chart; that may seem like an unusual addition to Indie Rock history, but “Let’s Go Crazy” was #3 on the 1984 97 Best of 97X, making this less of a swerve in a new direction and more a re-edit of modern rock history that emphasizes the countdown’s roots on WOXY. Though it emphasizes a slightly different set of distinctive songs from the 80s and very early 90s than the 2023 countdown did, it nevertheless rehearses a very modern mix of styles and genres.
(Wussy’s Chris Cleaver’s first band)Ass Ponys Little Bastard 385
XTC Making Plans for Nigel 335
Bob marley get up stand up 315
Punk rock girl 285 & Bitchin Camaro 100
Romeo Void Never Say Never 135
Groove Is In The Heart 73 (hi Shiv)
Public enemy fight the power 55
With its emphasis on sometimes quirky songs that, as Chappell Roan would put it “have a fucking beat” the Indie 500 helps clarify that the stakes of the 2020s may not be the same as the ones that defined modern rock in the 80s, but they still involve disidentifying with a homogeneous mainstream, this time figured as Antoniffied girlboss pop. The story the Indie 500 tells about its modern rock past sounds like the opposite of “enforced modesty.”
Charli XCX’s “brat” — both the meme/discourse and the album — is perhaps the most prominent example of this retromaniacal use of old modern rock reference points to position oneself against an Antonoffied mainstream. As Charli describes it, the brat figure is “just like that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things some times…Who feels like herself but maybe also has a breakdown. But kind of like parties through it, is very honest, very blunt. A little bit volatile. Like, does dumb things. But it’s brat. You’re brat. That’s brat.” Brat is TRANSGRESSIVE. Sonically, the album depicts that transgression through gestures to electroclash, PC music, and aughts grime from for example The Streets. [PLAY CLIP] It’s perhaps no surprise that former XTRABEATS DJ Jae Foreman has played songs from brat on her Friday morning show on Inhailer. In a very “cult classics, not bestsellers” move, brat cannibalizes indie’s MODERN rock past to distance itself from a pop mainstream significantly influenced by post-Obama-era indie rock. Though Charli has never explicitly said anything about this aspect of the brat aesthetic, it’s so prominent a feature that fans were chanting “Taylor Swift is dead” at her summer 2024 shows supporting the album. Contrast that chant to the title of L.A. Style’s 1991 “James Brown Is Dead” (also spun by Foreman on XTRABEATS back in the day) and the stakes of 2020s indie are very clear: whereas modern rock looked outwards to disco and dub in order to disidentify with a white rock masculinity narrowly focused on appropriating the Black blues tradition, brat looks inward to modern rock itself to disidentify with a mainstream white femininity centered around the eschewal of transgression and the appropriation of femme indie rock sound.
Digging into the music of the MR 500 and the Indie 500 illustrates how both the music and the broader cultural and political stakes it spoke to and about have evolved since the early 1980s. Modern rock developed as a way to push back against a rockist mainstream. Even though rockism is a fringe view these days, inequalities persist in both the music industry and society at large; elite status is configured a bit differently and new faces occupy a decreasing number of truly elite roles. The MR and Indie 500s use musical style to stake out a position that is committed to different aesthetic and cultural values than the ones that rule the mainstream music industry.
As I mentioned earlier, today’s music industry is even more unequal and exploitative than it was in the 80s and 90s. For example, in April 2024 Spotify stoped paying any royalties to tracks that had fewer than 1000 streams per month. Similarly, as gentrification swallows up mid-sized concert venues around the world, conglomerates like LiveNation and Ticketmaster squeeze both artists and concertgoers so dry that it’s increasingly unaffordable to both go on tour or go to a concert.
To close, I look at the MR 500 as an institution to suggest one proven way we can organize music scenes and institutions to work for artists and listeners. The MR 500 has been able to persist as an institution because it embodies a particular value – the idea that true independence can be found only when practiced with and for other people. Unlike ideas of independence FROM, that frame freedom as not being imposed on by other people, this idea of independence TO holds that the only way we can realize our most precious goals and aspirations is with the mutual support of other people.
Dubbed the “Last Great Independent” radio station by Rolling Stone Magazine, WOXY’s independence is central to its identity. In terms of programming, you already heard about how WOXY chose to treat listeners with respect and program to the highest of standards rather than the lowest common denominator; this in turn happened to be the one way to make a station that otherwise was doomed to fail actually run in the black. By supporting listeners’ musical independence, WOXY preserved its own. Similarly, as I argue in my book about the station, WOXY itself has been able to persist even past the end of its regular broadcasts in 2010 because the community continues to work together to keep it alive. The 2023 Modern Rock 500 is one of the most visible examples of WOXY’s ongoing existence, as is Inhailer’s taking up the station’s mantle in many ways beyond the Indie 500. For many years, Dave and Damian, whom you heard at the top of my talk, hosted a podcast about the station. Every month, Luanne Gibbs posts a collaborative playlist to the WOXY Forever Facebook group, and members populate it with their favorite new songs. I could go on with other examples, but, uh, you can just read the book if you want more. WOXY’s community keeps it alive through their continued collaboration and organization around it.
Regardless of what you think of the music it broadcast, as an institution the Modern Rock 500 shows that what it takes for independent media to survive and thrive is a community of mutual care. Think about it: the original Do-It-Yourself punk scene emerged in the context of a robust social democracy – there was the dole, free college, free health care, squats and council flats to live in, etc. Punks could spend their time being creative because they didn’t have to constantly hustle to meet their basic needs. Similarly, the MR 500 persists because a core group of people in mid-to-late middle age with established careers, good day jobs, and free time have not just the will but the resources to keep it going. If we truly want to support independent music and independent media, we have to make sure everyone’s basic needs are met so they have the independence to contribute. The fact that true independence is only possible when practiced with and for other people may not necessarily be a “modern” idea, but its veracity is something the ongoing existence of the MR 500 continues to prove.