A Response to Robin James’s “Indie Rock’s Undead: Re-Animating Keith Harris’s ‘Did New York Kill Indie Rock?’” Available to Purchase

My immediate reaction to Robin James’s generous reading of my 2012 paper “Did New York Kill Indie Rock?” was one of intense relief. If I’m a little leery of re-reading something I wrote a dozen years ago, I’m downright apprehensive of looking over someone else’s shoulder while they scrutinize such a piece. So I was happy to see that James could use some of my ideas as a springboard for “Indie Rock’s Undead: Re-Animating Keith Harris’s ‘Did New York Kill Indie Rock?” which traces what has happened with “indie”—as sound and as signifier—in the decade-plus since. A lot, it turns out.

I’ll turn to James’s analysis in a bit, but to begin I’d like to note how her discussion of postmillennial indie narratives from writers Zachary Lipez and Chris DeVille, who see in the aughts a gentrification of a more unruly indie past, has helped me contextualize my own piece...