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February 2024
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The Return of Indie Sleaze Style

 

It's clear 00s fashion is back, Isabel Slone writes. But what are we searching for in skinny scarves and disco pants?

BY 

DAVID KRIEGER/BAUER-GRIFFIN

Just over a decade ago, the hipster reigned supreme. These paragons of coolness could easily be sussed out by their American Apparel gold lamé leggings, sideswept bangs, Richie Tenenbaum headbands, and tank tops with craterous armholes that dipped all the way to the hip bones. They listened to bloghaus, an obscure music genre that mashed up indie, disco, and rave. They read Hipster Runoff, a stream-of-consciousness site run by a mysterious pseudonymous blogger named Carles. They partied, frequently, while dancing the night away to electro-pop bands with perplexing names like New Young Pony Club and Simian Mobile Disco. The attendant debauchery immortalized forever through amateur flash photography posted online the next morning. Though a famous n+1 feature by Mark Greif, “What Was the Hipster,” declared the archetype dead in 2010, it clung on until 2012, when Macklemore released the honking anthem “Thrift Shop,” which effectively vanquished the style by Columbus-ing the ironic, novelty style that tastemakers had adhered to for at least a half-decade previous. It was as if the kitchen lights had been flicked on at 2 a.m., providing a short glimpse of cockroaches scattering to the edges of the room before they subsequently disappeared.

JEAN BAPTISTE LACROIX

Vanessa Hudgens performs on September 7, 2008 in Santa Monica, California

As it turns out, hipster style was not dead—it was merely dormant. The hipster aesthetic, now dubbed “indie sleaze,” has been tapped for a comeback. Trend cycles have sped up to such a degree that the vanguard cool kids are now idolizing a time that was barely 10 years in the past. A viral TikTok by Brooklyn-based trend forecaster Mandy Lee suggests there is an “obscene amount of evidence” that the aesthetic is coming back, citing a paparazzi photo of Bella Hadid sporting wired headphones. But the evidence extends much further than that. Margaret Qualley lounges suggestively in lace ankle socks for the latest cover of HommeGirls magazine. (Cass Blackbird, a photographer who was around for the first iteration of indie sleaze, took the photos.) Kirsten Dunst appears on the November 2021 cover of Architectural Digest wearing the mid-aughts staple of black ankle-length leggings under a bohemian-style dress. And on TikTok, users sing the praises of “vintage” American Apparel.

DAVE M. BENETT

Kate Moss attends the Spring/Summer 2005 Frost French fashion event during London Fashion Week, September 19, 2004

“Indie sleaze feels very vague but also super specific at the same time. It’s American Apparel ads, flash photography, Urban Outfitters, Ed Banger records, Nylon magazine, and Myspace,” says Ilia Espialidi, a 24-year-old video editor from Greece who is just one of a growing cohort of Gen Z obsessed with dressing like it’s 2008. “I love how random and tacky it is.”

Espialidi’s daily uniform consists of dark-wash skinny jeans, white granny socks, faux-leather loafers, and an oversized graphic tee, accessorized with pearls, cross necklaces, or bow headbands. “I enjoy [wearing] stuff that makes people skeptical at first or maybe even frown. The contradiction between being trendy and trashy is what makes this aesthetic such an iconic period in fashion for me,” she says.

MICHEL DUFOUR

Zoe Kravitz at Paris Fashion Week on October 2, 2008 in Paris, France

“It was an organic, free-spirited time of not caring, which I think people crave,” says Mark Hunter, the L.A.-based photographer whose blog, The Cobrasnake, was one of the progenitors of the look. “When you look at my photos, people look like they’re having the best time of their life. They’re not focused on the phone in their hand or posing for the camera. They’re living, basically.”

Indie sleaze is about "authentic genuine fun and freedom,” Lee echoes. The time period between 2006 and 2012 was the last on earth before it became normal to walk around carrying a tiny computer with a professional-grade camera in one’s pocket. Nobody dressed up for the express purpose of being photographed—unless they were deliberately trying to get on the Cobrasnake. The ineffable quality captured by the party photography of the era is a result of its candid nature.

ARNALDO MAGNANI

Blake Lively on location during filming of Gossip Girl on March 14, 2008 in New York City

Much of the appeal of indie sleaze is fairly straightforward and obvious. The current Y2K style revival has reached its zenith, making the 2010s the next natural destination for the nostalgia trend cycle to land. Further, its messy and chaotic countenance serves as a discernible rejection of the frictionless “millennial” aesthetic that dominated the previous decade, evinced by start-ups like Allbirds and Everlane whose utterly nondescript designs sanded down any indications of personal style into a smooth, uniform surface.

But the allure also goes much further. Indie sleaze serves as a somewhat painful reminder of the last gasp in time when it was possible to envision a future unscathed by the ravages of late capitalism. Olivia V., a 30-year-old video editor from Toronto who runs the Indie Sleaze Instagram account, remembers spending most of that era attending grungy house shows where bands played in the basement. “I saw Grimes play for $5,” she says. Today, the prospect of a sandwich, let alone a Grimes concert, for $5 seems like a ludicrous fantasy.

JEFF VESPA

Lindsay Lohan and Samantha Ronson at The Kress on September 21, 2008 in Hollywood, California

In a sense, indie sleaze is not about a desperate urge to party with pre-pandemic abandon, but nostalgia for a world in which you could still live cheaply on basically nothing. Thanks to rising inflation and a crazy housing market, cheap rent has gone the way of Betamax or charcoal irons—a thing of the distant past. Even Macklemore’s 99-cent “leopard mink” would now cost at least $50 at the thrift shop—and that’s if it hasn’t already been marked up to $200 by an enterprising Depop seller.

The aesthetic also feels like a direct repudiation of the metaverse, which Mark Zuckerberg is hawking as the next stage of human development. If we are to believe him, the future of humanity involves sitting alone in a room wearing a giant headset and “interacting” with the world through a wholly virtual interface. According to The New York Times, “The metaverse will turn out to be one more suffocating blanket of technology, cocooning humans from each other, and from the sensory pleasures of real life.” Indie sleaze says, “Fuck that,” and leaves the house without a cellphone to see a DIY noise show in somebody’s basement. It encourages disciples to experience the world as it was before things became completely untenable, before exhaustion and hopelessness became a rote part of the human condition.


ALBERTO E. RODRIGUEZ

Zendaya at the premiere of Justin Bieber’s Never Say Never on February 8, 2011 in Los Angeles, California

Of course, there are a number of barriers in the way of widespread adoption. The ironic provocateur attitude of VICE Magazine, which fed its audience thinly veiled racism under the guise of “making a joke,” has morphed into something darker, as some former hipster dirtbags like Gavin McInnes have helped fuel the current rise of fascism. Conversely, the unguarded elitism on display simply isn’t compatible with today’s “let people enjoy things” optimism. Though I do think there’s an argument to be made for gratuitously dunking on things one dislikes, it’s an activity best kept private.

JUSTIN CAMPBELL

Santogold at Milk Studios on February 17, 2010 in New York City

The next is that the style wasn’t all that mainstream to begin with, so it’s difficult to imagine the normies of today adopting neon-purple unitards and fried peroxide hair as their preferred mode of dress. The next is an admission of the more “problematic” aspects of the culture, which shouldn’t be ignored.

Some critics suggest we should be careful of glamorizing an era when sexual predators like Terry Richardson and Dov Charney ran amok. Mia Worthington, an 18-year-old indie sleaze devotee from Tucson, says she’s heard people go as far as to denounce wearing old American Apparel clothes, because they see it as disrespectful to victims of sexual harassment.

RAY TAMARRA

Sandara Dara Park, of 2ne1, leaves a Manhattan hotel on August 21, 2012

Lee doesn’t quite buy that argument, denouncing it as a “chronically online take.” “When trends come back, it’s not like the values are the same,” she says. “Nobody thinks that people who like to wear dresses from the ’50s and ’60s suddenly want to be housewives who are abused by their husbands.” 

Instead, she hopes this revival eschews some of the more unsavory elements of the era like starvation-thin bodies, out-of-control drug use, and a seemingly never-ending zest for cultural appropriation. (Remember when people wore ceremonial headdresses to Coachella? Unfortunately, that, too, constitutes indie sleaze.) 

There’s no point in positioning indie sleaze as a more “innocent” time in history, but it does represent a pointed form of resistance against the direction the world is headed in. Renounce the metaverse in favor of shotgunning a warm, scuzzy PBR while listening to Klaxons remixes. If indie sleaze is coming back, long may it reign.

The Story Behind Bongwater: Portland's Lost Stoner Comedy Starring Luke Wilson, Jack Black and Brittany Murphy

 

We spoke to director Richard Sears about what happened to a movie that has all but disappeared.

(courtesy of Alliance Independent Films)

How Linguists Are Using Urban Dictionary


Urban Dictionary continues a long history of recording low-brow language. It’s also a repository of a specific kind of internet immaturity.

Manz /manz/ noun. 1: Friend, Buddy, Associate... somebody you are close to. 2: Part man and part zebra.

 
Illustration: Jonathan Aprea/Pixabay


Urban Dictionary, as you may know, is a crowdsourced website where anyone can suggest a new word—or a new definition of a word—years before establishment lexicographers catch on. It was founded in 1999 by computer science student Aaron Peckham to make fun of the comparatively staid Dictionary.com. Yet Urban Dictionary has become much more than a parody site, drawing approximately 65 million visitors every month.

Of course, Urban Dictionary is also a repository of adolescent grossout humor, often humor about sexual practices that are the stuff of urban legends (uh, penis McFlurry?). This isn’t just a matter of trifling but ultimately harmless terms. Bigoted words and definitions have thrived on the site, but Peckham believes that offensive words should be left intact. It’s clear from a quick browse through the trending terms that the users are particularly titillated by (or nervous about) women’s bodies (e.g., twatopotamus) and sex between men (e.g., vaginal intolerant).

With its crowdsourced definitions and high speed of coinage, Urban Dictionary is very much a product of the internet age. But it also continues a long history of recording low-brow language: dictionaries of English slang have been around in some form for centuries. The slang dictionaries of the seventeenth century were considered useful for clueing readers into the language of thieves and cheats, which itself was part of an older tradition of exoticizing the language of the poor and criminal. By 1785, Francis Grose’s Classic Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue extended the slang lexicon beyond the middle-class conception, adding terms such as bum fodder (for toilet paper).

Urban Dictionary carries this legacy forward, and the site is likely to persist in some form. The Library of Congress now archives it. Its pages were saved to the Internet Archive more than 12,500 times between May 25, 2002, and October 4, 2019, with a steady increase over time. And according to internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch’s much-touted new book Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language: “IBM experimented with adding Urban Dictionary data to its artificial intelligence system Watson, only to scrub it all out again when the computer started swearing at them.”

The stakes are increasing as well. Urban Dictionary is being used to determine the acceptability of vanity plate names in some U.S. states. More serious is the continued tradition of dictionary use in legal cases, where the interpretation of a single word can have grave consequences. Urban Dictionary’s definition of to nut, for instance, has been brought up in a sexual harassment claim, and the meanings of jack were debated in a financial restitution case. While Urban Dictionary’s speed may be useful in a legal setting, some lexicologists believe that depending on a crowdsourced dictionary is risky.

Linguists Open the Urban Dictionary

Whatever we might think of its vulgarity, Urban Dictionary is useful. It allows researchers to track terms that are too recent or too niche to appear in establishment dictionaries, and to determine how people are using English online.

For example, one 2006 paper by communication expert Jean E. Fox Tree uses Urban Dictionary, along with other examples of “public dictionary websites” (like Wikipedia and Answers.com), to excavate the uses of like in storytelling. And Urban Dictionary is regularly cited as a source in linguistics research, such as a 2015 paper by Natasha Shrikant on Indian American students.

McCulloch finds Urban Dictionary useful for mapping chronology, due to the datestamps attached to definitions, especially for the period in the early 2000s, before social media sites became behemoths.

Derek Denis, a linguistics researcher at the University of Toronto, agrees that the datestamp function is useful. The other key aspect, he points out, is the use of Urban Dictionary to unearth indexical meanings, or the social meanings of words. For him, the first example that comes to mind is the interjection eh. Urban Dictionary, unlike more formal dictionaries, mentions the Canadian association early and often.

In Denis’ research into Toronto’s multiethnic slang, he’s used Urban Dictionary to find the earliest documented use of terms like mans/manz, meaning “I.” The wide-ranging, youth-oriented website might seem especially well-suited for recording this kind of multiethnolect: a dialect that draws from multiple ethnic groups, typically spoken by young people, and often stigmatized or dismissed. An example is Multicultural London English, sometimes oversimplified as “Jafaican,” for “fake Jamaican.” But Denis believes that Urban Dictionary’s applicability is broader: “It’s generally useful for not just young people and multiethnic areas but general for any speech community,” he says.

Not Exactly the Wild West

2010 paper by the linguist Lauren Squires suggests that, despite Urban Dictionary’s anarchic reputation, it can reproduce the idea of a division between proper and improper language, with internet language being deemed socially unacceptable. Squires gives the examples of chatspeak, defined by one user as “[a] disgrace to the English language,” and netspeak, called “[a]n easy way to determine the IQ of the person you are talking to over the Internet.”

In other words, some Urban Dictionary contributors appear to be conservatively guarding a notion of a pure (print) version of English, even though language purists consider the site itself to be a key source of corruption. But maybe this isn’t as paradoxical as it seems. It may be that the site has become a linguistic sewer because certain users feel emboldened by the format, allowing them to use (or coin) terms they wouldn’t in a more formal setting.

Urban Dictionary’s bias toward obnoxiousness might make it less a repository of slang and more a collection of a specific kind of internet immaturity. As McCulloch writes in Because Internet: “There seems to be a correlation between how genuinely popular a word is and how much Urban Dictionary’s definition writers despise it and the people who use it.”

Are its contributors just pranking would-be scholars attempting to use the site for anything other than gleeful entertainment? Well, surely some are trying to. An alternative Urban Dictionary definition of manz, “part man and part zebra,” might stem only from the cackling imagination of a single user. Researchers may need to tread carefully, particularly given that young men are overrepresented on the site.

But linguists like Denis aren’t too concerned. The premise of Urban Dictionary is that a term, however jokey or quirky, doesn’t need to be popular to be worthy of recording. In Denis’ view, it just needs to be understood by at least two people. He says that “it’s probably not completely idiosyncratic. It’s probably not just limited to that one person, but rather, it might just be that person and like two or three friends. But the important thing there is that those few people—
maybe it’s two people—still form a speech community.”

In fact, the lack of restrictions, a style guide, or a core arbiter in Urban Dictionary means that “things can come out more explicitly” compared to conventional dictionaries, Denis believes. “I think the Urban Dictionary model is probably more representative because it doesn’t rely on that authority.”

It’s been argued that the now 20-year-old Urban Dictionary has become something of a fogey itself (if internet years are like dog years, the website is ancient). Newer websites and social media platforms may be even more responsive to language trends, possibly leaving Urban Dictionary in a middle ground: not as immediate as Twitter, not as specific as Know Your Meme, not as respected as Merriam-Webster, not as credible as Wikipedia, and not as popular as Reddit. But for now, linguists are digging through Urban Dictionary to track, date, and analyze language, no matter how niche or nasty, as it’s actually used.

Gen Z Are Resurrecting Shoegaze for Their 'Bleak, Post-COVID World'


Thirty years later, the reverb-drenched late 80s genre is still going strong on TikTok.

By Paul Toner

A YOUNG FAN IS MOVED TO TEARS AT A SLOWDIVE CONCERT. PHOTO: GONZALES PHOTO / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO


The day the shops re-opened after the UK’s third national lockdown, I took a trip to Rough Trade East. Among the fellow vinyl scavengers were a group of three teenagers, who giddily scurried to the till once they’d come across a copy of Slowdive’s sophomore record, Souvlaki, which was released in 1993. 

This trio of retro-loving Gen Zers aren’t alone when it comes to a modern-day love for shoegaze. Currently, the hashtag #shoegaze has 31.1m total views on TikTok, with the names of seminal shoegaze outfits My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive racking up a further 22.7m and 24.1m total views respectively. 

To give a little context: Shoegaze was a label given to a sub-genre of reverb-heavy, late eighties alt-rock. The name was coined as a way of lumping together a group of bands – Ride, My Bloody Valentine, The Jesus and Mary Chain – for their tendency to stare at a complex puddle of foot pedals when performing.

Pretty quickly, the term became a way to lambast those who appeared to make moody tunes. “We became labelled as a bunch of boring, middle-class students, not really engaging with an audience,” says Miki Berenyi, former member of Lush and now member of Piroshka. “Which was totally unfair, I have to say, given that there’s more fucking middle-class people in Britpop than in shoegaze.”

By the time 1993 rolled around, publications such as Melody Maker were publishing that they would “rather drown choking in a bath full of porridge,” than listen to another Slowdive record. Instead, the music press dedicated column inches to the “Cool Britannia” bravado of Damon Albarn, lanky Jarvis Cocker and the proper madferit Gallagher brothers.

Thirty years on and the barometers of cool couldn’t be more different. Across TikTok, you’ll find Cocteau Twins-inspired make-up tutorials, Addison Rae edited dancing to MBV and e-girls burning incense and caressing their crystals in the hope of manifesting a “shoegaze bf”My Bloody Valentine signed to Domino Records last month and (finally) added their full back catalogue to streaming services. Miley Cyrus is covering Mazzy Star.

“I feel like more people are moving towards that dream-like, distorted sound that never used to be too popular with Gen Z and beyond, until it started showing up on TikTok,” says Kelsie Herzog, a 23-year-old from Wisconsin, who uses the platform to recommend lesser well-known shoegaze bands like Slow Crush and the Lilys. 

Herzog says she got into shoegaze “about a year or two ago”, but was particularly drawn to the genre through the pandemic. “[Shoegaze] feels like a giant fuzzy hug! Lots of people search for comfort music and I think shoegaze is a great contender,” she says. 

In actual new musical terms, there’s been an increase in musicians adopting the reverb-laden sound. Spotify reported that there were twice as many shoegaze recordings released (or re-released) in 2018 than in 1996. 

The Blossom (AKA Lily Lizotte) could easily be Gen Z’s answer to Mazzy Star. Signed to Kevin Abstract and Romil Hemnani’s label Video Store, the non-binary musician says they knew they wanted to make shoegaze from the jump.

“I find myself really leaning and reaching for things that are more textural and melodic and repetitive, as well,” says Lizotte, who was introduced to the genre through a combination of their father’s suggestions and hours spent scouring YouTube and SoundCloud. 

Brisbane-born artist Joe Agius – who goes by the alias RINSE – says channelling a shoegaze sound came completely natural to him: “I think it was half me being very insecure about my singing and instrument playing that I would completely smother things in effects, and half my ears sonically being attracted to creating big walls of sound,” he says.

Mark Richardson, critic for The Wall Street Journal and former editor-in-chief of Pitchfork, says shoegaze’s appeal today comes down to its DIY obtainability. “You can make music at home alone with your computer and headphones and make a version of shoegaze,” he says, adding that the steady mixing of genders in the genre’s most prolific bands, Slowdive and Lush included, makes shoegaze seem “especially welcoming and inclusive”.

But when you bring TikTok into the equation, is it just a bunch of sad boys with heavy fringes trying to shove their obscure music taste down your throat? Or is being into shoegaze a new way to gloat how you’re “not like the other girls”?

Well, there’s a bit of that, but as Dev Lemons, a 21 year-old TikTok creator who unpacks hidden meanings of songs, reckons, the genre’s “blend of softness and chaos sonically feels like the experience of growing up”. 

You only have to look at the Cocteau Twins-inspired Insta meme page to see how the genre is now attuned to life online. “I think there is a direct parallel between shoegaze and meme culture,” adds Lizotte. “I think because the stereotype of who listens to shoegaze is this melancholy, internet-tapped boy or girl, the music has become the flying flag for that subculture.” 

16-year-old Jude Atkins says they got into shoegaze “about a year ago” through memes about My Bloody Valentine, but has stayed past the LOLs. “The atmosphere of shoegaze really fits with the bleak, post-COVID, world we’re in. Everyone’s trapped inside and shoegaze has a very dreamy quality to it,” says Atkins.




You could dismiss Miley Cyrus’ cover of Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You”, back in January, as the catalyst for the current shoegaze resurgence. Though as Richardson points out: “there is something "unfinished" about shoegaze, a sense that something big was about to happen but it never quite did.” 

By failing to attain mass popularity in the 90s, the likes of Slowdive, MBV and Lush come as rare, hidden gems, that Generation TikTok have claimed as their own.

“As a 18/19-year-old, you want to listen to cool, undiscovered, non-chart music. It’s a bit more yours,” says Berenyi. “I think you can put your own identity on it then as well, that nobody else knows who the fuck these people are. Your peers can’t really sneer at it, and if they do, they’re just fucking stupid that they don’t understand.”

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