Landfill indie and Rule Britannia, two sides of the same ‘empowered nostalgia’ coin
If you’re anything like me, by which I mean if you were at a British university at any point between 2005 and 2010, your Thursday morning will have begun with multiple group chats sending you VICE’s countdown of the top 50 landfill indie songs.
It marked a welcome change from the other slice of music discourse to dominate social media this week, with a concocted outrage over the use of Rule Britannia at the Proms bringing out a very slightly different flavour of the discussions seen on Twitter on a near daily basis this year.
However, these two emotive subjects, while appearing as far apart as possible on a surface level, have more in common than you might think.
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Nostalgia has been used as a powerful weapon throughout 2020, perhaps informed by the impossibility of new experiences throughout lockdown.
Back in April, we were treated to a near-incessant stream of genre-specific ‘brackets’ on our Instagram feeds and beyond, allowing us to alleviate the boredom of quarantine by applying essentially arbitrary rankings to anything and everything.
Did it matter whether you ranked Dashboard Confessional above The Ataris when completing your ‘early-2000s emo/pop-punk’ assessment, or whether Clueless is better or worse than Easy A in The Ringer’s teen movie bracket? Absolutely not. If anything the fact that it didn’t matter is the point.
This is why the level of detail in the discussions is, to a point, what the reader makes of it. A hugely in-depth rundown across thousands of words can have the same impact as a whispered rumour which spreads from one group chat to the next, so long as enough of the slate is left clean for our own projections.
While the rankings themselves can’t have been less important, the act of thinking about the past to which they belonged is what gave the trend such a substantial appeal. It returns us to a time when future plans weren’t constricted by outside forces, and it’s the association rather than the art itself, and the mere existence of shared experiences, which sets off something in our brain.
Which brings us back to landfill indie. As VICE’s piece recalls:
“The scene booted open the door for people from outside London to become full-time musicians by singing about what they knew, which is what most British people know: that their their post-industrial hometown or middle-class suburbia was and is shit, that youth is precious and fleeting, and that the most reliable modes of escape are romance and drinking.”
To be nostalgic about landfill indie isn’t to attach any significant mythos to, to give just one example, ‘We’ll Live and Die in These Towns’ by The Enemy. It doesn’t require you to pretend ‘Chelsea Dagger’ by The Fratellis carried any deeper meaning beyond being fun to chant on the journey from pub to club or club to kebab shop.
The attachment to the genre is secondary to the music itself, and is better described as an attachment to a past which contained the mere presence of landfill indie as something commercially and culturally ever-present.
For many of a certain age, introduction to these bands is forever attached to a hopeful youth which retrospectively carries a Last Days of Rome romanticism before hope was shuttered by the financial crash. Should we be surprised to see it resonate so much now, then, as similar fears come to the fore?
It’s associated with a freedom to enjoy things unthinkingly without needing to expose oneself to criticism from any direction: if we cared too much about what people thought about the music we enjoyed in 2007, we wouldn’t have listened to enough of this music for a top 50 list to resonate in the way it has.
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Similarly, there will be individuals who consider ‘Rule Britannia’ to be an undisputed banger, but the attachment is as much to do with what it symbolises as what it sounds like.
In seeing it ‘removed’ from the Last Night of the Proms roster (regardless of whether this is true or not), some will read the decision as the erasure of routine and the shuttering of a past where things just were rather than having their ubiquity litigated.
As with landfill indie, though, there will always be some who had happily moved a swathe of their past into a box marked ‘unneeded’, only to be triggered into defending it for no reason other than being bombarded with mentions of the familiar.
The claim in one letter to The Guardian that “The words are grim, but it’s a rousing tune” could equally be applied to all number of songs mentioned here, not even necessarily in a negative sense, and in both cases the attachment owes no small amount to taking the words as symbols of recognition in a singalong sense without assessing their meaning either in or out of the context in which they have appeared.
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Going back to the crux of the matter, though, we can see how easy it is to amplify the power of nostalgia just by creating a somewhat artificial debate out of thin air. The difference, of course, is that VICE at no point hides away from its own active role in proceedings.
It can do this, principally, because the distance between a controversy and its creator can grow unhindered without any long-term impact on the creator itself. When the purpose is building on existing biases and preconceptions, you’re leaving it to the consumer to do the vital legwork for you, and for this reason you’re able to do it over and over again.
