Brooklyn's lost indie decade

Hello! Emilie here. For most of my adult life, Lizzy Goodman’s Meet Me In the Bathroom has been the only definitive book about the New York music scene of my youth. The trouble is that a lot of important stuff happened alongside and after that, particularly across the river in Brooklyn. So, thank God for Ronen Givony. The founder of longtime concert series Wordless Music and former Le Poisson Rouge booker braved the wilds of the publishing industry to bring us the first comprehensive history of the Brooklyn music scene: Us vs. Them: The Age of Indie Music and a Decade in New York (out now via Abrams).

Us vs. Them traces the years 2004 to 2014 and a wide cast of artists and other characters, some familiar, many not. But part of the point is to look past the usual suspects to talk about the lesser-known artists and promoters who built the scene, often with their very own hands. The book traces how Bush-era political dissatisfaction, cheap rents, and digital technology gave rise to one of those uniquely fertile cultural moments in music history that only come around every so often—you know, where great gigs felt endless, scenes felt possible, and you and your friends were the ones making it happen.

Ronen joins us to discuss what it was like to chronicle a scene that, unlike the Manhattan scene of the Strokes, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Interpol, was geographically far-flung and features a lot of characters who never became household names or whose careers have been lost to time. We also get into what conditions made it possible for north Brooklyn to become home to a creative ecosystem that, in Ronen’s words, “existed for a reason other than profit” and its complicated relationship to commerce, the media, and selling out. And we talk about what this history teaches us about how we might go about fostering culture in New York—and cities like it—today.

Ronen was also kind enough to make us a playlist featuring artists from the book. Cue it up for a great companion listen to the episode.

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