Ronen Givony on the 2000s Brooklyn Music Scene and the Future of NYC Culture

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OK, here's what is going down today: Earlier this year, Wordless Music founder and author Ronen Givony—whose previous books include 24 Hour Revenge Therapy (or, The Strange Death of Selling Out) and Not For You: Pearl Jam and the Present Tense—published his latest tome Us v. Them: The Age of Indie Music and a Decade in New York, 2004-2014. As the title suggests, it takes an alternate view of the buzzy and bubbling-over Brooklyn music scene from the mid-2000s to the mid-2010s, covering the proliferation of DIY venues like Glasslands and Monster Island Basement to previously overlooked borough-specific acts like Dragons of Zynth and Oneida. For anyone who's thumbed through Meet Me in the Bathroom and books of its ilk, Givony provides an alternate history of NYC subculture around this time as well as its lasting legacy, in fascinating fashion no less.

Starting tonight, Bushwick's Selva Gallery will be showcasing a week-long exhibition of photos from the time period the book covers and slightly beyond, featuring work from photographers like Jackie Roman, Ryan Muir, Ebru Yildiz, and many more. In advance of the gallery show and after many months of us intermittently communicating about the book itself, I linked up with Ronen for an extensive chat about all things regarding his book's subjects, and it made for an extremely interesting conversation that I'm happy to bring to you today. Check it out:

Tell me about how you feel regarding the book's reception thus far.
It's been really moving. When you write any book, you have a couple of people reading over your shoulder, keeping you honest. With this book, I felt—in a good way— that I had hundreds of people reading over my shoulder, whether it was people in bands or venues, or just friends of mine. It seems like, almost every other day now, I get an email out of the blue from someone who was there at the time who's doing a photo book or TV show. It seems like this moment in the culture still really means something to people, so it feels like the book came out at the right time.

You have this gallery show that's taking place, which plays into the larger role of book promotion. That's something I'm always interested in hearing from writers about. I think a lot of normal people don't understand that writing a book is usually just the beginning when it comes to keeping it alive.
This is my third book, and ut's the first that's out on a trade press—which, in the music world, is the equivalent of a major label. The last book I wrote came out during COVID and was about a very particular band and fan base—which, I guess, is true of my first book, too. Those books would live or die on how they were received within this very intense subculture.

There's writing a book, there's promoting a book, and there's writing a book proposal—and none of those really have anything to do with each other. One thing I will say is that it shouldn't have been a surprise that, this being a book about Brooklyn DIY, the more rewarding opportunities would come about in a DIY nature. I had a publicist who sent the book far and wide, and yet I found that the people who responded to it were almost always people I had written to myself.

The photo show is similar in that regard, in that I can honestly take zero credit for it. It came about because Ryan Muir read an early copy of the book, and he took it upon himself to reach out to all 10 photographers, print the programs, and get sponsors for the opening. It's very much in the spirit of the subject that I wrote about, which was this moment in New York which was post-9/11, pre-social media, pre-iPhone. You had all of these musicians and music fans who had no choice but to come together face-to-face and do these things on their own. It shouldn't be a surprise that the book would turn out that way as well.

The intro of the book talks about the notion of culture versus counterculture. There's this documented moment in the early-to-mid-2000s of a false counterculture emerging—the type of music associated with Garden State and The O.C—where "indie" becomes something nominal rather than explicitly ethos-based. It's very interesting to think about that, compared to the paradox of today's monoculture, where it's both totally dissolved and more crushingly omnipresent than ever. One of the big stories of the 2020s is people starting to reject more oppressive cultural forces that really took hold in the 2010s—Taylor Swift, Marvel, streaming television. It's how you get a bunch of terminally online 19-year-olds who suddenly consider Swans to be their version of the Beatles—which is so weird, but it's kind of happened. Given everything I just threw at you, I'm curious to hear you reflect on some of the takeaways you had when looking back on the early-to-mid-2000s, as well as what you see from your vantage point in the present day.
I've been thinking about this a lot, especially since there's that 25th anniversary show with the Strokes, TV on the Radio, and Beach House. Somebody asked me about this recently—is this the whole nature of anniversaries and marketing, that everything eventually gets turned into a celebration? But this era that we're talking about was very interesting, in that the book starts in 2004, which was when I moved here—the week that John Kerry accepted the nomination for President, and Barack Obama gave his speech. Maybe not coincidentally, a month later was when the Bowery Presents did their first show.

"Indie rock," as it had been considered up to that point, was very much in the ethos of the Bob Dylan lyric—"There's no success like failure"—which was Bonnie Prince Billy, the Pixies, or whomever would be artistically as good as it gets, but maybe commercially not quite recognized in the same way. But 2004 was also the year that the Pixies got back together, and all of a sudden these bands—whether it's Dinosaur Jr., My Bloody Valentine, or Mission of Burma—this counterculture that was completely marginal in the '80s and for a lot of the '90s moves a little bit toward the center.For a good 10 or 15 years, you have all these things shaking out where the music industry is in free fall, people are not really buying records, and the idea of a self-sufficient artist moves to the road, as opposed to music royalties and things like that.

So it's not surprising that, for a few years—and you wrote about this a lot in New York magazine—you have these bands like Dirty Projectors, Animal Collective, and Grizzly Bear, who you wouldn't call "pop music," but you wouldn't totally call them marginal either. This has everything to do with economics, technology, and journalism. Chris Weingarten of Parts and Labor said, "We didn't want to be Linkin Park. We wanted to come home and not work at a burrito place," which is a pretty low bar—and the middle class in music has totally been wiped out, like in so much else of American life. So I think you're right to call out this tension between these two things.

But I would also say, when I was reaching out to people to interview them and thinking about who would make up the chapters—the Meet Me in the Bathroom scene is a very discrete, circumscribed thing, right? You could ask 100 people, "Wo were the bands from that era?" and 98 of them would say the Strokes, Interpol, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs—whereas if you asked 100 people who went to Glasslands in 2009, "Who were the five biggest bands of the moment?", you'd probably get, like, 40 different answers. To me, that was a sign of just how rich that moment was—but, more to the point, how diffuse the consensus was. Because, as you say, there is no monoculture, and the way that these things are being talked about are broken up into the blogs, the alt-weeklies, and the remaining journalists like you that were still out there.

You mentioned the financial aspirations in this corner of indie, which is definitely something that has come full-circle. I've talked to a few younger bands where there's almost a refreshing lack of ambition again in that regard. What you chart out in this book is a very discrete group of artists who were trying to do something different in a scene that was, arguably, already becoming over-covered. Also, a lot of 2010s "indie" was very nakedly aspirational, especially the further out you got from notions of existent scenes or artistic collectives. There's a good quote you have from New York magazine in 2009: "It may be a good deal harder to get rich in the music business." The 2010s was defined by this era where there really wasn't that much money for anybody to make, hold, or have—but the money seemed present regardless, albeit tantalizingly out of reach. Given all that, I'm curious to hear you talk about other aspects of indie in the 2010s, divorced from what you wrote about in this book. What do you see as the main differences between that time and the 2000s when it comes to perspective shifts?
There's two sides to this. I used to book a club—30 shows a month—so I had to put my ear to the ground in a way that I don't now, and I can't really pretend that I do. I do try to stay abreast of things, and it does seem to me that, at least over the last two or three years, the tide is turning a little bit. I mean, look at bands like Horsegirl, who are, to me, the best band in America at the moment. I went to their sold-out show at Warsaw, and it was half kids in their 20s, and half dudes like me in their 40s wearing Pavement and Guided by Voices shirts. They seem to be finding an audience through the integrity of their music and the excellence of their songwriting.

At the same time, if you look at any of the bands in my book, the artists today are almost doing it with one arm and one leg tied behind their back—no press, no listings, there's no reviews, there's no critics. All these things that we took for granted at that time—Red Bull, Intel, Vice—a lot of people looked askance at those things at the time, and rightly so. You should be skeptical when a multinational corporation comes in and wants to start throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at artists. But I'm not sure that many people right now would say that we're better off for that. Any band that "makes it" today—Water from Your Eyes, Horsegirl, Black Country New Road—they're doing it with none of the infrastructure that the bands I talked about did, and I take my hat off to them.

In terms of music discovery, what are your go-to sources these days?
I like reading—I don't always love my choices [Laughs]. I like reading The Wire, Tone Glow, Doug Mosurock's newsletter, you. I feel like I spend $100 a month on 10 people's Substacks, and those could go to one source that would pay people fairly and consolidate—because it seems to me that it's not really sustainable. This year in particular, I've been obsessed with Tara Clerken Trio, which I learned about from Tone Glow. On my browser, I always have 15 tabs open, 10 of which are Bandcamp pages. It does seem like a pretty good year or two for music.

I've said this before, but if you told me that, when I was writing a book about the Brooklyn indie scene of the Bloomberg era there would be a Brooklyn indie band on Saturday Night Live the week it came out, I'm not sure I could've visualized how that could've even been—but it is the case,. I do think that it's not really about me, but if you spend five minutes on Twitter these days, it's not a coincidence that this subject—this era, this music—is in the discourse every two weeks. It's because there was this set of circumstances that really has not been replicated since.

Most importantly, it was the last analog era—a time when we had no choice but to come into these rooms, build these venues, start these labels, and create culture and community from scratch. There is that going on now, but the challenges seem considerably greater.

Something interesting about the Geese thing is that they pretty much blew up on their third—and fourth, if you count the Cameron Winter—record, instead of having a strong level of buzz from the very beginning. Somebody who's profiled in your book that's had somewhat of a similar trajectory is Natalie Mering of Weyes Blood.
I was pleasantly surprised that she even made herself available, because she seemed very much on that trajectory.

The incubation period for buzz, at this point, feels both very random and deliberate. The gap between success and failure has never been more perilously thin.
It's hard to paint with a broad brush, but my memory of 2007-2010 was that you knew that Panda Bear was really good, you knew that Grizzly Bear was really good. Did you know that they were going to make these almost-perfect records when they did? No. It was people building block-by-block. Now, the PR trajectory is almost like a movie rollout, isn't it? You start at Coachella, you have the late-night date, the Subway Takes TikTok. It seems a lot more regimented. Back then, obviously, all those bands had publicists, but I don't think you'd say that Beach House is where they are because they had an amazing marketing company.

One of the most interesting chapters of this book, to me, was the Sea Ray chapter. It's so rare that you read a band reflecting with clarity and straightforwardness about how complicated it is to navigate the actual ending of a band. It's a very under-discussed thing, but people are interested in hearing about it.
I'm glad you brought them up, because they're one of my favorites, and it felt really good to write about them. There's a version of this book that exists on my hard drive with chapters about the Walkmen, Animal Collective, and Grizzly Bear. Ultimately, I decided that was maybe the less interesting book. Maybe I made the wrong decision there, but I wanted to write a book that was like if Howard Zinn wrote a piece of music criticism. Music criticism—especially compared to film, literature, or art—is so far at the bottom. There's a reason why 99% of books in the music section are oral histories: Because most people can't string a sentence together.

What I was trying to do with Sea Ray—and, really, with the whole book—was approach it like a social historian and journalist. When 99% of the world hears about a musician, writer, or actor, they're successful, and that makes sense. Why would you hear about them otherwise? But there are people who still have day jobs along with being in bands, writing books, making records, and putting out films. I was trying to just do justice by them a little bit. For myself and our peers, we're in a similar situation where, if you're fortunate enough to write a book or make a film, you ask yourself, "Do I build this whole mountain up all over again over five more years? Or do I go apply for a grant-writing job at Lincoln Center?"

There was a certain naïveté, romance, and idealism in that moment—and that's not to say that that isn't here right now. But when I sent the book proposal to 75 agents, 72 of them said the same thing: "This book has already been written. It's called Meet Me in the Bathroom." That didn't seem right to me at the time, because there's many bands who weren't even in the same arena as any of those folks, and I wanted to do justice by that moment. You didn't necessarily need to be the Strokes to be a successful musician.

You also weave quite a bit of personal memoir into this book. There's the chapter addressing your days working at Nonesuch where you're like, "How do I balance this with doing the stuff I actually love to do?" That sensation is very cross-generational. The job I just had was very much something I did for money, with the stuff that I actually like to do as a job on the side. Let's hear you reflect more about that experience.
I'll say a few things. First, as a writer and reader, I tend to be a bit bummed when I open up a review or an article and the first word is "I." My instinct was almost to leave myself completely out of it, because this scene—more than most—was not about one person or one scene. It really was greater than the sum of its parts.

But it would be hard to deny that, in my own story, there's this element of serendipity and kismet that I had no agency over. When I moved to New York from Florida, I made a rule for myself for the first 10 years I was there. It didn't matter if I was tired or if I'd been out six nights in a row—if somebody invited me to their show, birthday party, or play, I was going, because you never knew what would happen. That was how I started Wordless Music, how I got the job at Nonesuch, and how I met the guys at LPR. It very easily could've gone differently, the serendipity of all these things happening at the same moment.

It's hard not to write a book like this and think about, if I moved here this year and I were 25, what kind of opportunities would be available to me? My heart breaks for kids who are graduating from college. You and I have been like, "I don't want to work at Lincoln Center or BuzzFeed, but I gotta pay the rent." Those jobs aren't even available to them. I'd like to say I'm not worried and that I trust people will figure this out, but I do think that it's not trending in a super-positive direction. BrooklynVegan and Pitchfork are shedding writers, and there's kids in their 20s online who—and I'm not criticizing them—don't know what it's like to read a competent record review. Their idea of a music critic is Anthony Fantano, who will feel no shame about writing you and being like, "Does your publisher intend to pay for advertising?" That's his idea of being a critic.

There's no universe in which I would've started Wordless Music, been the booker at La Poisson Rouge, or worked for Nonesuch if I hadn't been reading Alex Ross in the New Yorker. When he wrote about the iPod Shuffle, he said something so simple but so brilliant: He said that an iPod Shuffle makes no distinctions, aesthetically or culturally, between Bill Evans, Thelonious Monk, and Björk. Once I read that, a light bulb went off in my head, and I was like, "Yeah, those kinds of music do go well together." Alex, Ben Ratliff, Allan Kozinn, you can learn so much from them.

Let's talk about what you've been up to in your career otherwise and the state of what you do. What are the challenges and rewards as we enter the back half of a particularly rough decade in human history?
I'll say this, Larry. Every week, your newsletter comes out, and you ask almost everyone about COVID. Some weeks I'm like, "Oh man, don't ask them that." But then some weeks I'm like, "You know, I'm glad he's mentioning it." You have hearings going on right now, and people have totally forgotten about those two years of insanity. As a writer and a concert producer, I'm very fortunate that I can do one when the other isn't really happening. But as a concert producer, I do a very specific thing, which is orchestras, classical music, and experimental music.

New York, in so many ways, has recovered. This was one of the best summers in the city in probably 10 or 20 years. And yet, if you look at Lincoln Center, BAM, or Prospect Park, these organizations are a fraction of where they were a few years before. And these changes needed to happen. The people who were running these institutions were almost invariably older white people who had been there for 30 years, and they would be the first to say that things needed to change. But the Brooklyn Academy of Music doesn't do music anymore. The idea of a classical concert is picking a piece of paper out of a hat and deciding which movement to play. There's no leadership or money. I have friends in London, L.A., and Chicago, and I don't think anyone would even put New York in the top five cities culturally when it comes to what I do. It just seems like there's no vision.

For a while, I was very good friends with Joe Melillo at BAM. He was the artistic director there, and by his own admission, he was a theater and dance person. He wasn't a music expert, but he liked what I was doing and said, "Let's put a show together." And I said, "Joe, you don't know this band called Neutral Milk Hotel, but they will do well for you. I promise you that, artistically they'll bring it." And they sold out three nights. For a decade, from that point, I could say to him, "Joe, let's do Punch Drunk Love, let's do The Tree of Life, let's do Moonlight." He'd just say, "Keep doing what you're doing." Now, we almost can't get arrested in New York anymore. We have a lot of work from Apple and Netflix—work for hire. But I'm very much hoping that the indie thing seems like it's coming back in New York, and that the boat will turn around with this as well.