Moving to New York may be the least imaginative decision an aspiring young indie rocker can make. That’s not to say it’s a bad decision. After all, going to med school may be the least imaginative decision an aspiring brain surgeon can make, but it’s still probably a super useful one. And though practicing indie rock, unlike practicing medicine, doesn’t yet require a license (though a guy can dream), it does require nurturing those sorts of professional connections that your career counselors kept saying were so important back when you were an undergrad. At the very least, it requires the presence of other indie rockers. And New York’s probably got as many of ’em as anyone these days.

This wasn’t always so. New York’s near monopolization of indie rock—or, more specifically, Brooklyn’s, or, most specifically, Williamsburg’s—is a relatively recent phenomenon. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the action was in college...

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