What’s More ‘Indie Sleaze’ Than Turning 31?
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Kaitlyn: As with any trend, it’s hard to tell whether the “indie sleaze” revival is real or imaginary, happening or being made to happen. There could be venture capital behind it. Or just regular capital. Last year, a photographer who was closely associated with the aesthetic back in the aughts was hired to document a fairly sleazy-looking party at a music venue in downtown indie-rock territory … hosted by, uh, Old Navy! But this newsletter isn’t about cultural criticism. It’s about going to stuff.
Recently, our friend Becca held an indie-sleaze-themed 31st-birthday party for herself in Prospect Heights, right in between Lizzie’s house and my house, which was very convenient. The invite said, “Come with the same energy as if it were 2010 and you were bringing your fake ID to a club on the LES that chloe sevigny went to once.” I didn’t relate to this, as I’m actually a little too young (brag) to have experienced the first indie-sleaze era in person. I only learned about it at the tail end on Tumblr.
Still, I was excited. I love a theme and I appreciate that Becca always provides one. I expected that she would execute it flawlessly, as I know that she went to NYU around the time of the Great Recession.
Lizzie: As far as I can remember, no one really called that whole thing anything the first time around, but now it’s been officially branded by a trend forecaster or whomever, which I guess makes it easier to talk about. Except it doesn’t. Even trying to define what “it” is feels like a losing battle, and that’s why Becca is braver than I am. Is it music? Disco shorts? 2007? 2010? Maybe, and I’m sorry, but … is it Terry Richardson?
Not saying I’m completely disconnected from the gist of whatever it refers to. The prematurely canceled and iconic public-access show New York Noise defined my high-school years, and I still sometimes wonder if Jeffrey Lewis did or did not see Will Oldham on the L train that one time.
Kaitlyn: I don’t get any of those references. Uh-oh!
Day of the sleaze party, I was at Laundry City sorting out my whites when I had the idea that I should get Becca a copy of the 2009 Tao Lin novel, Shoplifting From American Apparel. I started my machines and then went on an hour-plus journey to five different Brooklyn bookstores, none of which had this historically significant text in stock. I need to work on my impulse control, I think. There was no reason to try five stores—the reference wasn’t even that good (alt-lit being only adjacent to indie sleaze), and a book is not a sexy gift. But once I got started, I was like, “Surely the Barnes & Noble?” I’m full of hope. After my sheepish return to Laundry City to put my long-finished laundry in the dryer, I settled for a gift the neighborhood could provide: a bouquet of Wet n Wild eyeliners and a sandwich bag of loose cigarettes.
When I got home, I changed into a skort and some tall socks and a T-shirt I got on Depop that says, in hot-pink lettering, My boyfriend is literally on stage. It was hard to wear that out on the street for the walk to Lizzie’s house in broad daylight.
Lizzie: Dressing was the most difficult part of the evening. I invited Ashley and Kaitlyn over for some sleaze-style pregaming (pizza, a Finger Lakes fizzy red, ’90s music videos) and to help me pick an outfit. The fit pickings were slim, but we landed on running shorts, a white Hanes T-shirt that I cut giant torso-revealing armholes into, and thigh-high tube socks with black stripes. Good enough if you don’t think too much about it and have no other options.
After we had covered the important topics of the week—HBO’s The Idol, corporate email-tracking systems, the superiority of Marcona almonds—Ash departed my apartment around 9, fully committed to leaving whatever indie sleaze was or is in her past. Kait and I walked our embarrassing outfits over to Becca’s and crossed our fingers that we wouldn’t see anyone on the way there except the rats.
Kaitlyn: Everyone had a different idea of what “indie sleaze” meant. (In this way, the theme was actually memory …) Luke was wearing a Natty Light snapback. Becca was wearing a skinny scarf and dark eye glitter. There was a Kate Moss–inspired look, and someone in a bikini top had a silver iPod. A bunch of the girls drew X’s on their hands in Sharpie and did that classic MySpace-photo concept where you stick your tongue out and pretend to be lighting it on fire. Remember when Taylor Swift tried an indie-sleaze music video where she had pink hair and skinny jeans and dated a guy who hit someone in the face with a billiards ball? Nobody was dressed as that.
Lizzie: There was a Death Grips album (The Money Store) taped up on the wall. The references must have spanned at least 10 years! But they were 10 years of our somewhat overlapping youths, so no one was going to start a rumble over minutiae.
Kaitlyn: Becca led us to a big bowl of “Jungle Juice.” It tasted like Smarties and the past! We feared it. Nathan showed up a few minutes after we did with Rebecca (a second Becca) and Bayne and two six-packs of Red Stripe. The apartment was crowded and everybody was shiny-faced, dripping sweat (on-theme), so we moved over to the far side of the living room, where the air-conditioning unit was doing its best work. On a side table that was not part of the party decor, a lamp was sitting on top of a stack of books: a David Foster Wallace, a Jonathan Franzen, and my book, by me. Wow! Of course I took a bunch of photos of this, with flash (on-theme), and was pleased even if it was a joke I wasn’t getting.
“People love to be in the kitchen,” Lizzie observed. True, the beating heart of the party was the breakfast bar, which was strewn with PBR cans and half-eaten pieces of pizza—people were laughing across it and touching each other’s arms and stuff, taking selfies, etc. But where we were standing, there was room to dance.
Lizzie: So we danced! Becca’s playlist really had us wiggling. The Strokes, Azealia Banks, MGMT, Spank Rock, Daft Punk. It was the soundtrack to some period of time in the past, probably adhering most closely to the span of Bloomberg’s three terms in office. Is Mike Bloomberg indie sleaze?
Kait left the dance floor to go “mingle,” but Nathan, Rebecca, Bayne, and I continued to groove in a manner that would’ve made Gregg Gillis proud. My bottle of Red Stripe seemed to warm up to hot-tea temperature within seconds, probably because of the heat from my hand as I did electro-clash aerobic exercises next to the glass coffee table. At one point, Nathan returned to the dance floor munching on a pre-eaten piece of pizza that he’d found somewhere. He poured my Jungle Juice into Kait’s abandoned cup and started to chug. But he didn’t get far. Like, not more than a few gulps. That was probably for the best.
If all this talk of Jungle Juice and sweat and bodies is making you wonder what the room smelled like, it was actually quite nice, because Becca had a Balsam Fir Yankee Candle burning. Cory Kennedy x Christmas vibes.
Kaitlyn: What a beautiful scene. I told Luke I appreciated that his British and American passports were part of the coffee-table-scape, and that I was sorry about Brexit. Wouldn’t it be great for him if he were part of the European Union? I was also sorry about his hometown’s recent news coverage. As you may have read, the stepson of one of the passengers on the destroyed OceanGate submersible attended a Blink-182 concert while his family member was lost at sea and posted about it numerous times in a tasteless fashion. This kid, like Blink-182 and Luke, is from San Diego, and he was wearing a San Diego Padres hat in a photo he shared of himself at the show.
Luke said something inspiring about life’s ups and downs. When the Padres were beating the Dodgers in last year’s playoffs, the fans sang Blink-182’s “All the Small Things” in the pouring rain—a peak. And now, a valley. At this point, the Jungle Juice was doing its work, so, unfortunately, I started screaming about baseball. Mark Canha (a New York Met who inexplicably displays his email address in his Instagram bio) is on the cover of the new issue of The Atlantic!
Lizzie: All night, we had heard talk of a roof. Imagine how cool, literally cool, the roof would be. It was nighttime on the roof. A wide open space, high in the sky. There was probably a breeze up there! We had to see it for ourselves. Instead of taking the elevator, we ran up, like, four flights of stairs. In hindsight, I couldn’t tell you why we did this, but maybe it was to make that first surge of Mother Nature’s cool air feel even better against the skin.
Kaitlyn: There’s nothing like being on a roof after you’ve been sweating. The Manhattan skyline doesn’t get old, and neither do we. We looked at the view and had some typical roof talk—Bayne theorized that women are socially conditioned not to whistle and everyone strongly disagreed with him. After airing out our armpits, we went back downstairs to get a bit more dancing in. Becca declared “Good Girls Go Bad,” by Cobra Starship featuring Gossip Girl’s Leighton Meester, “the best song ever made,” and who could argue with her? Women are socially conditioned to be good and then go bad! [Flipping double middle fingers.]
Lizzie: We left before midnight, and Mariya said, “More like indie snooze,” which was a good burn and a fair point. But there comes a time in every sleazer’s life when the promise of mozzarella sticks and a bedtime weed gummy is more enticing than another round of hot beer and the existential feeling of time’s passage tracked by DFA Records releases. I scrunched my thigh-high tube socks back down to my ankles (disguise mode) and walked home.
Kaitlyn: Obviously, “indie sleaze” as a concept is pretty incoherent. (At the end of the “Good Girls Go Bad” video, Leighton Meester’s character is revealed to be a cop. PBR is owned by a holding company backed by a private-equity firm.) Historians still have no idea whether anything about it was meant to be ironic or if people just said that afterward because they were embarrassed.
Doesn’t matter! In Becca’s hands, a prompt is a prompt and a good excuse for a great night.