Antonoffied pop vs brat & the stakes of elite musical taste in pop’s girlboss era

It’s been a while since I’ve been able to post, as I’ve been spending the summer finishing up bigger projects like the first draft of Good Vibes Only and the proposal for the second edition of Resilience & Melancholy. Another thing I’ve been working on is my AMS Rock & Roll Hall of Fame lecture (this Sept 19th!) on “What Is The Modern Rock 500?” This post is an excerpt from that.

For centuries, anglophone popular music has been defined by a dynamic where white men try to establish their elite status over other, basic white men by appropriating stereotypical performances of Black masculinity. This is, for example, Mick Jagger’s whole schtick. (If you want to read more about it, there’s this, this, and this.) Similarly, as popular music scholar Mimi Haddon defines it, the thing that coheres post-punk’s variety of styles and scenes under a single umbrella is its commitment to appropriating a more inclusive range of Black musics beyond just blues-rock: “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.”

20 years after Kelefa Sanneh’s “The Rap Against Rockism,” the old rockist investments in purity that made modern rock’s appropriation of Black genres that were too queer and/or too foreign in a bad way 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.

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 – they didn’t offer the form of sexual and physical prowess. 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 the iconic modern rock station 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 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. The indie revival of the early 2000s re-enacts post-punk’s turn to dance music as a way to dis-identify with basic rock bros, this time figured as mainstream alt rock a la Fred Durst and Korn.

But by 2024, it’s clear that this “modern” moment is over. With the rise and fall of poptimism – the view that pop music by and for the likes of Britney Spears was of equal artistic merit to rock -, the emergence of popular feminism, and 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”; it’s mainstream. Rockist notions of genre purity are old-fashioned; 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 on touring and record sales alone.

The contents of Inhailer Radio’s 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 90s and aughts by 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.

From the widespread popularity of indie supergroup BoyGenius to the rise of Antonoffication – Mitch Thiereau’s term for the process where indie rock’s purported stylistic conservatism helps domesticate pop music by artists like Taylor Swift into mere content for platforms – 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, sounding a (queer) feminist valence to the extent that it refutes the straight/white/masculine construction of rock music vocabulary….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 Antonoffied use of indie rock in her last several albums, which focus on curating powerful emotional experiences through the lyrics, which are sung over instrumentals which avoid any hint of musical transgression. 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 producer Jack Antonoff, after whom Antonoffication is named, 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.

In many respects, the Indie 500 is the anti- or de-Antonoffied version of 2020s indie. It 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 “Purple Rain” appeared 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.  The Indie 500 tells the story of WOXY’s influence in a slightly different way than the 2023 MR 500 did, spotlighting The National as the premier local act rather than any group with a Deal or a Duli in it, and emphasizing a slightly different set of distinctive songs from the 80s and very early 90s.

• (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
• Dead Milkmen Punk Rock Girl 285 & Bitchin Camaro 100
• Romeo Void Never Say Never 135
• Dee Lite 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 Antonoffied girlboss pop.

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. 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.