The Effect of Money and Mythology on Brooklyn DIY

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I was there. I was there at the fourth annual LCD Soundsystem holiday residency in Queens, New York. I was also there in 2021 and, other than the residency moving from Brooklyn Steel to the Knockdown Center, what I saw was ostensibly the same. It was the same two-hour setlist, the same lightshow, activated by the same spilling bridges and the same explosive bass drops. And yet: I couldn’t care less.

I first discovered LCD Soundsystem in 2014, after hearing “New York I Love You, But You’re Bringing Me Down,” on an old episode of Gossip Girl. Like many zoomers, I spent a majority of my early adolescence scrolling on the virtual sidelines of culture, discovering everything just a little too late. By the time I heard the track and then downloaded Sound of Silver onto my iPod Nano, LCD Soundsystem had already been “retired” for three years.

Now, just 10 years later, there I was, listening to “New York I Love You, But You’re Bringing Me Down,” live. All of my flickering, pixelated memories suddenly exploded before me, transmogrifying into the real, visceral present. I understood the strangeness of this feeling, however—how paradoxical my triumph really was. While I was drunk off my own personal delight, the song I was celebrating was in fact not a victorious one, but an elegy—an elegy for the very city I now lived in. Over waltzing, wistful piano, James Murphy laments that everyone in New York is pulling minimum wage. There is a billionaire mayor who thinks he’s a king, and the doors of his treasured bars and stores are starting to shutter. Is he so wrong then, Murphy argues, to say that his New York “doesn’t exist”?

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Well, maybe. According to Lizzy Goodman’s Meet Me In The Bathroom, LCD Soundsystem, along with the Strokes, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and other 2000s “indie rock” bands, are a part of what is now canonically regarded as the last successful “New York rock dynasty.” The story goes that, after getting priced out of the East Village, these already semi-established rock bands migrated to Williamsburg, Brooklyn—taking full advantage of the low rent to host all-ages DIY rock shows like those found at 285 Kent, Death by Audio, Silent Barn and Shea Stadium.

After 9/11, the tenor of this era of Brooklyn became one of “partying like the world’s going to end.” With purposefully smudged eyeliner and fear behind their eyes, Brooklyn residents saw a need—as well as open retail space—to release and rejoice. Whether you listened to electroclash bands like Peaches and Fischerspooner, indie rock acts like the Strokes, or you just liked attending Misshapes’ celebrity-filled parties, Brooklyn was indoctrinated by a galvanizing mutual hedonism. But just as quickly as this “artist bohemia” flourished, it vanished. Or, more accurately, it was gutted.

While gentrification is compounded by a number of factors—wealth of the renters, as well as the interest of various stakeholders (investors, developers, public policy officials)—the proliferation of artist scenes that emerge (uncoincidentally within previously segregated racial and class neighborhoods) directly influence the symbolic, or imagined, identity of a place. Once word spread that Williamsburg was a hip, up-and-coming, blue-collar utopia, the DIY spaces—the apartments, offices and restaurants—in which cultural products (like art) were made were then bought and sold for double or triple the price of their original value. So while you can no longer go to 285 Kent, you can shop at Chanel and Hermès.

After a certain point, however, the Meet Me in the Bathroom bands no longer really needed the physical Williamsburg—they already benefited off its symbolic identity and created a legacy—a legacy that was then even furthered only a few years after the era “ended,” through the success of Meet Me In The Bathroom. Almost immediately after the book’s release LCD Soundsystem returned with their fourth studio album, American Dream. The LP then became their first #1 album in the United States, earning them a Grammy nomination for Best Alternative Music Album and a win for Best Dance Recording (“Tonite”).

While I enjoy that record, I don’t necessarily think it’s their best. By virtue of their preemptive mythologizing, however, it became impossible to not see LCD Soundsystem through a nostalgic lens, thus appreciating their cultural value, i.e. their perceived seminality. So when the dance rock messiah returns, you must praise him (with a Grammy). Like LCD, we’re currently witnessing a surge of nostalgia-fueled touring, particularly by cultish alternative bands whose glory days might be well behind them even if they weren’t that long ago. Modest Mouse did the entirety of The Lonesome Crowded West; Built to Spill toured There Is Nothing Wrong With Love; Weezer did the Blue Album in full last summer. While there isn’t anything inherently wrong with this, it’s just too easy. It’s selling you something you already bought. Even Taylor Swift knows this, as her “Eras Tour” became the highest grossing tour ever, pulling in more than $2 billion, even though her golden years are far, far from over.

The aesthetic proliferation of LCD Soundsystem’s bygone era, known under the neologistic “indie sleaze revival,” is a similarly nostalgia-based act of consumption. It’s a search-engine optimizer—go to Amazon and type “indie sleaze” and you’ll see what I mean—so while those dressed in bedazzled tees and microskirts can post TikToks or make songs that sound like a Drake-ified, fuckboy version of LCD Soundsystem there is no real subculture attached to their visual identity. When reliant purely on aesthetics and market value, art, even if it poses as radical or subversive, amounts to nothing more than a hologram of an ideology. It simply becomes commerce.

Even more troubling: Our culture’s obsession with nostalgia, prevalent not just within the music industry but practically every artistic medium, indicates an underlying displeasure with the present. Or, as S. Posner so perfectly puts it in this Substack post, it indicates an “indie malaise.” Industries also see this nostalgic preoccupation, so they capitalize on the “good times,” those of ease and seeming rebellion, in order to distract you from the bad. It’s effective marketing, because when living through both political and economic turmoil, distraction is one of the easiest, most immediate coping mechanisms. It’s like eating because you’re bored—you’re not sure what to do with yourself, so you consume until your own satisfaction, no matter how momentary, says you’re content.

Art, if anything, is supposed to surprise us. This means engaging in something unexpected and unfamiliar, something new. New bands, good bands, crop up every single day—especially in New York City. DIY didn’t stop once Williamsburg became a hipsterish Times Square, because, as one cultural moment dies and a phenomena fades, invariably, something new must grow from its ashes. Maybe even a few things. Consider the two Brooklyn acts tapped to open for LCD Soundsystem: the art-punk band Gustaf and the electronic trio Fcukers. Not only are these the two sides of the same LCD coin (one dance, one post-punk), these, to me, similarly exemplify the two current sides of Brooklyn music—which is to say the two sides of Brooklyn nightlife.

DJ and booker Jenny Hussey has witnessed this divergence first hand. Born and raised in Bayside, Queens, Hussey has worked within the greater Brooklyn DIY scene for the last five years. As the current manager for her own project, Lanky Fuego Booking as well as Samara Bliss’s Locker Room, Hussey sees that, while these scenes are simultaneously established, there seems to be a wider interest in clubbing rather than that of seeing live, local rock (broadly speaking) music. “Brooklyn is completely torn; half is DJ shit, half is live music and it doesn’t seem to overlap,” she says. “I do a fair share of booking with DJs and there is no issue of getting people to come. The marketing is the same as it is for DIY rock shows. It’s the same kind of flyers, the same kind of vibe, the people dress similar, whatever, yet more people show up to those kinds of events than that of DIY.”

Like attending your favorite old bands’ nostalgia tours, clubbing essentially promises you a guaranteed return: You will have a good time; you will dance. Choosing club music, compared to DIY, lessens the possibility of the consumer experiencing the unfamiliar or experiencing something they might not like. Whether the risk assessment is determined by money or time, there seems to be less and less people willing to take a gamble on their very sparing nights out. Not only is this evident from a consumer standpoint, but it is clear through a commercial one, too. The summer of 2020, the newly formed National Independent Venue Association—which is currently surveying venues to gather vital data on the state of the music industry and lobbying Congress to protect these cultural hubs—reported that 90% of the spaces they polled were worried they’d have to fold without help from the government. While high setup costs and regulatory hurdles make it incredibly difficult to open a venue, what keeps a venue in business is a consistently packed audience. Hosting electronic shows—which feel more inclusive than the stereotypically white male-dominated DIY—might just be the way to go.

Market Hotel, a club in Bushwick parallel to the Myrtle/Broadway J train, is a perfect example of this focused transition. Starting as a DIY venue that hosted and housed indie acts like Real Estate and Vivian Girls, the venue was eventually forced to close in 2010 after a NYPD raid. Five years later, Market Hotel reopened and has since become one of prime spots for electronica, along with the likes of their Bushwick neighbors Bossa Nova Civic Club and the newly opened Rash. A vast majority of the smaller, rock-focused venues are also located in Bushwick. Whether it’s Alphaville, Purgatory, Hart Bar or Wonderville, as Jenny Hussey puts it, “you can’t be in New York and be interested in rock ‘n’ roll and not realize that a lot of it takes place in Bushwick.” One might assume Bushwick has taken over as the new artistic haven in the city and, while that could be true, it might be too late to truly reap those benefits in the way musicians got to 20, 25 years ago.

Although Williamsburg became the public face of yuppie gentrification in the mid aughts, Bushwick had been well underway, with a median rent of $3,350. Yet, it is just within the last few years that Bushwick has become magnetized as a new “alternative” cultural zone through the likes of social media, and more specifically through the spread of memes. Just a few months back, The New York Times investigated the notorious Myrtle/Broadway meme—an image of a string of eyesore chains (Popeyes, Dunkin Donuts and Checkers) found near the Myrtle/Broadway subway station and accompanied by a sarcastic description such as “divine” or “a hajj for people who like ketamine.” Additionally, there is an entire Instagram meme page (@meetmeintranspecos) named after a venue that now stands where the previous DIY space Silent Barn used to be and is dedicated to the “niche” aesthetic trends found in Bushwick (mullets, piercing, etc.), as well as other alternative spaces in New York and around the world.

Perhaps making memes out of scenes and cultural moments is simply our generation’s way of recognizing and processing a phenomenon. This is essentially what blogging was two decades ago. It’s on the ground, self-reporting. Yet, those blogs were created in earnest. They served to champion bands and the Williamsburg scene at large, and it worked: Sarah Lewitinn’s Ultragrrrl led to the signing of The Killers, and Laura Young’s coverage of The White Stripes and The Strokes via the Modern Age propelled them into the mainstream. The Bushwick narrative, however, is far more dismissive due to the ironic nature of memes themselves. At a (very) basic level, irony signifies opposites—to reveal a hidden actuality. So, even if the irony in the Myrtle/Broadway meme is meant to showcase how Bushwick is actually just dirty and gentrified, this performative hyper-awareness doesn’t offer any alternative perspective, only judgement—because irony doesn’t just reveal, it negates the thing entirely, and that includes both the good and the bad (the imagined and actual). As Søren Kierkegaard explains in The Concept of Irony, irony functioned as that for which nothing was established—that, “if it posited something, it knew it had the authority to annul it, knew it at the very same moment it posited it.”

This rejection of nerve—of sincerity—is both symbolically and physically contagious. After a while, it emulsifies both realms and, before you know it, solidifies into ennui. Authentic enjoyment then becomes virtually impossible and apathy, already apparent through our culture’s nostalgia obsession, prevails, resulting in inaction and disengagement from the actual physical world of Bushwick and DIY music. “I’m just disappointed,” says Hussey. “We all have these little computers in our hands, and yet so many people move here and they just stay comfortable with what they know, they don’t really like to venture out. You could live 20 different lifetimes in New York. And by that, I mean that there’s an endless amount of things to do. You could keep regenerating and living different lives with different groups of people, but people do tend to stay in their comfort zones.”

With the cost of living in Bushwick now 17% higher than the New York average, it is not a stretch to say that an unsupported DIY scene will become extinct before it even really has a chance to tangibly grow. “People need to wake up and stop just being fed what they’re told on algorithms,” says Television Overdose vocalist Tyler Wright. “Going to shows is having an experience that you would not have had. More than just watching a show, you get to make friends and bump up against someone that you probably normally wouldn’t talk to.” It’s not like there is a lack of talent, either. Acts such as Television Overdose, as well as Water From Your Eyes, Model/Actriz, Hotline TNT, Chanel Beads and Mystery Lights have all been slowly puncturing the mainstream rock bubble. But these are only a few of the hundreds of bands found in Brooklyn.

The lack, then, must be from attention and attendance. While the concert business at large is hitting record profits, average attendance is down 14.9 percent, with the disparity no doubt a product of high ticket prices. If this is happening from a national, macro standpoint, then local participation must be comparable, if not worse. Just the high cost of living makes it almost impossible for art to sustain itself; as Wright says, “if you want to make music you shouldn’t quit your day job.” Art is then threatened even further if there is nowhere to exhibit or perform it. Since true DIY spaces are no longer sustainable businesses, local participation is now more crucial than ever as ever-growing numbers of smaller venues, like Bushwick’s Our Wicked Lady, are facing closure.

Founded in 2015 by former Brooklyn Bowl workers Zach Glass and Keith Hamilton, Our Wicked Lady has supported just about every type of artist throughout their nine years of business. Located in an industrial warehouse, OWL first renovated the top floor of their building into rentable studio spaces for musicians, tattooists, photographers, writers, etc. The lower level was then turned into a full-fledged music venue, and live event programming quickly became OWL’s financial backbone, most notably their Winter Madness competition— a bracketed, March Madness-style battle of the bands that has featured acts like Shred Flintstone, SKORTS, Dead Tooth, Native Sun and THICK.

But right as Our Wicked Lady was in the process of drafting contracts with prospective investors, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Interested parties pulled out and, without the substantive profits from bar patrons and concert attendees, overhead costs became all the more excruciating and debt began to pile up. At this point for OWL, it is do or die. “We’re speaking out about this because it isn’t just us,” Hamilton says. “This isn’t just for me. If it were just me and my job, I would just close, you know? But in this case, it would affect the community. All the employees, all the artists, all the musicians.”

Hanging up just a few blocks from OWL, on the corner of Knickerbocker and Flushing, are a collection of posters highlighting the upcoming programming for the Bowery Ballroom venue. The lineup includes: LCD Soundsystem, TV On the Radio, Interpol and Modest Mouse. It’s a celebration, they say: 20 years of programming, 20 years of a scene that still, to this day, we’ve yet to truly get over. No matter what they sound like, NYC rock bands often have to undergo a litmus test: Are you more LCD Soundsystem? Are you the Strokes? How do you fit within the demarcated path that has already been paved for you? This goes beyond Meet Me In The Bathroom, but back to the very beginnings of the New York rock continuum to the likes of The Velvet Underground, Television, The New York Dolls and the CBGB days. While this history is surely imprinting onto creativity, it also impresses an unattainable ideal. It disregards the sheer randomness of the sound of the human spirit. Not only that, with all the noise about bygone eras and indie sleaze revivals, that emergent, growing sound is almost impossible to hear. As Anne Carson says in Autobiography of Red: “Reality is a sound. You have to tune into it, not just keep yelling.”

And the reality is now, more than ever, the odds are disproportionately stacked against musicians and the greater DIY community. The stressors found in “New York, You’re Bringing Me Down” are the same, only worse. People are still pulling minimum wage, but now Brooklyn minimum wage workers need to clock 89 hours a week — 13 a day — to keep their shared rent at 30 percent of their monthly income. NY’s latest billionaire mayor Eric Adams also thinks he’s a king, and stores, like OWL, are frequently forced to shutter. Nostalgia isn’t going to help, and neither is irony— the only thing left, then, is action through both policy changes and participation from the local community.

With over eight million residents, New York City is the country’s largest datafield of raw, human expressiveness. More often than not, those who not only seek this out, but who also wish to share their findings, are artists. “The reason we love New York is because of its art,” Glass says. “That’s why you’re here. If you don’t have the bars, venues, all of these things, it’s just a really expensive, dirty city.” So despite Murphy’s woe over its disappearance, art and NY rock, is still very much alive and well. Of course it is, I mean how many times over its roughly 70ish years of existence has rock been declared “dead” only for it to come right back? It reminds me of that bit in Almost Famous when Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Creem writer Lester Bangs tells the protagonist, William: “Your writing is damn good. It’s just a shame you missed out on rock n roll. It’s over.” “Over?” asks William. “It’s over,” says Bangs, “you got here just in time for the death rattle. Last gasp. Last grope.” “At least I’m here for that,” says William.

So if you want to be here for the rattle, you have to know where to look. That is, not behind you, not online, but around you. Once you find it, hang on. Then, maybe one day, you’ll get to say “I was there.”

Donate here to help keep Our Wicked Lady’s doors open.

Sam Small is a freelance writer of sorts & shorts based in Brooklyn, NY. She has written for NME, Consequence of Sound, Clash Magazine and Under The Radar.

New York I Love You, But You’re Bringing Me Down: The Effect of Money and Mythology on Brooklyn DIY

The odds are disproportionately stacked against musicians and the greater Brooklyn DIY community as they face a higher cost of living and crowds hell-bent on consuming nostalgic media over anything else.