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Messy hair. Millionaires. MGMT. M.I.A. TiK ToK, Indie rock. Britpop, Disco, Electro Pop.Skins reblogs. Myspace skins. Too much skin. Overexposed. High-flash. American Apparel. A-l-c-o-h-o-l. Terry Richardson. Bloghouse. Bright colors. Black bangs. Arctic Monkeys. Just Dance. ‘80s Wayfarers. ’70s mustaches. ‘90s band tees. 300+ Facebook albums of the same image again and again like a Warhol print. Day-Glo leggings and Disco Pants and popsicle sticks. Ke$ha. Let's Dance To Joy Division. Joy Division. Smudge eyeliner. Cory Kennedy. The Cobra Snake. I-Kissed-a-Girl Katy. Nihilistic. Authentic. Genuine. Fun. Cheap. Free. Tongue-in-cheek. Irony. On the inside of some other girl’s teeth.
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Last summer, a psychic told me that my generation would burn down the world. That was the catch in the back of my mind when I remembered the mid-aughts movie Project X — ohhhh my god, remember Project X? A bacchanalian tale of a high school party spun wildly out of control. With a dubstep-heavy soundtrack, music video montages and social media vérité visuals, it was a parody of its time even upon release in 2012, the perfect bookend to the era that produced it.
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Make it dirty. Actually, make it filthy. Smudge your eyeliner. Muss your hair. Good luck getting the sticky scent of vodka Red Bull out of your bright pink tank top. Let the flash bounce off the mirror. Let it wash you out. Fall down. Roll around. Take a hit, pour it up, come get f*cked up. But above all: Have fun.
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Aesthetics Wiki pins Indie Sleaze between the years of 2008 and 2014, though this feels generous. Hard to imagine anyone donning tights as pants when Avicii’s “Wake Me Up” was the number one song on the radio. A neologism used to describe the deeply unserious cultural era of dance floor anthems and gritty party girls, it’s the Greek masks of irony and apathy. Draw a line from Helvetica slogan T-shirts to Twitter memes and you’ll hit every Millennial axiom on the way.
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Twenty-twelve also saw the release of another film emblematic of the Indie Sleaze aesthetic, one with more staying power than Project X. Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers delights in the disgusting world of its subjects. The YouTube essayist known as Broey Deschanel, draws a comparison between the A24 epic and an aesthetic era driven mad by the idea of freedom.
Describing the film, she says, “Kids head to Florida to glutton themselves with alcohol and scream freedom, and isn’t that what the American Dream is really about? It’s not the white picket fence and big house we fantasize about. It’s commodified sex, crime you can get away with, and extreme, flashy wealth. Rapid escalation and temporary relief. The real American Dream is a debauched fantasy — an artifice of freedom.”
It was a decidedly unglamorous time, unscrupulously carefree — literally searching for the freedom to not care. If the McBling era saw the construction of McMansions (gaudy symbols of make-believe money and housing bubbles), the Indie Sleaze era sought to burn them down.Project X is Indie Sleaze’s optimistic battle cry — Spring Breakers, the era’s nihilistic eulogy. It’s holding a mirror up to the time itself, Korine’s slap on the wrist to a generation in a tailspin of carelessness.
As Broey posits, “All the way back in 2013, Korine saw a shift in the way youth culture has increasingly prioritized experience and sensation above all else. … So the message comes through form. I’m watching a movie about girls chasing experience — who approach life with a zero-sum mentality and refuse to see the consequences of their actions — or rather do not receive consequences because they’re pretty and white. And here I am, chasing experience by going out to watch this film.”
She asks, “Am I watching Spring Breakers for the plot, or am I chasing the rush of dopamine it gives me?”
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But, but, but, how do we contend with an era built on chasing sensation that was so heavily defined by still images? A photograph is the death of a moment in a way. It elides sensation and catharsis, stopping time and turning bodies into still objects.
Think of American Apparel ads and Skins stills. This was during the rise of Facebook when people would upload albums to their walls with hundreds of images from just one night. When pictures were not only overproduced and overconsumed but overexposed — the bright, glaring, white flash is a hallmark of the aesthetic. Photographer Mark Hunter (aka The Cobrasnake) is synonymous with Indie Sleaze, practically defining it in real time back in the aughts. His event photography depicts some the era’s icons like Cory Kennedy, Sky Ferreira and M.I.A. in moments of (seemingly) candid rapture.
These images of women partying fulfill two uses: A sight of spectacle (like in Laura Mulvey) meant to be consumed and enjoyed by the viewer, feeding their need for sensation (pleasure); and a socially mediated image of spectacle (like in Guy Debord) meant to be emulated — a representation of a desirable lifestyle that’s ascribed social capital by virtue of the images itself.
In an essay on Sofia Coppoloa’s The Bling Ring (2013) — which is set in ’08-’09 and depicts McBling aesthetics but borrows from the Indie Sleaze culture it was produced in — Anna Backman Rogers, discussing Debord at-length, writes, “Reality, as it were, is abstracted. Therefore, the spectacle in its purest form is power. It is capital at a degree of abstraction that it has become image in that it functions as a relation of power that mediates relationships between people and between people and their environment.”
This abstraction is where Spring Breakers lives. This was a time of transition between, as Backman Rogers writes elsewhere, “a life as it is lived and life as it is repackaged and sold as an aspirational image to be consumed by others.”
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Recent articles describe Indie Sleaze as optimistic, awash in the Champagne throes of Obama’s inauguration, living under the absolute reality of the Great Recession. The post-9/11, McBling years were defined by shows like Laguna Beach and The Hills. Glossy peeks into the lives of the rich and vapid, and aspirational in the most American sense. Which is to say, unattainable.
Indie Sleaze rode in on a housing market crash and a recession and a president that campaigned on hope. All the excesses of the McBling era had begun to spoil, but we weren't quite ready to clean up just yet, favoring instead to languish in the filth a little longer.The culture was suddenly bolstered by a new reality show, the black sheep to The Hill’s white bit of fluff.
Jersey Shore was about blue-collar Italian-Americans partying on the titular spit of land between the boardwalk and the Atlantic. They lived and f*cked in a dirty Shore house. They drank so much, they fell down on dirty floors and flashed their thongs and pissed behind bars. They used garbage bags instead of luggage. Most admirable: They were unfailingly enthusiastic every step of the way. These bodacious braggarts — easily emulated, happily reviled, ready to revel in filth. No more bottle service at Les Deux; but well shots at Karma. The party was finally ours.
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There’s an unheimlich quality to Project X’s poster. THE PARTY YOU’VE ONLY DREAMED ABOUT floats above the smoke of a nightmarish scene. Enflamed in apocalyptic imagery and lit my police lights. Yet, the eye is instantly drawn to the proudly raised arms, including one belonging to one of our faceless heroes in the foreground. A salute of victory. Partied to death and burned it all down and proud to the end. We could only dream.
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Project X was accompanied by Kid Cudi’s deeply melancholy party song “The Pursuit of Happiness,” taking its name from one of the rights guaranteed in the Declaration of Independence. While in the latter, the phrase is employed with an unearned optimism, Kid Cudi uses it with an ironic detachment.
The music includes dance floor beats, the era’s essential DJ drop and an effervescent build, while the lyrics describe a selfish, anxious protagonist on a futile mission.
The culmination of the chorus is Gatsby-esque in its ironic melancholy: I'm on the pursuit of happiness and I know / Everything that shine ain't always gonna be gold, hey / I’ll be fine once I get it, yeah, I'll be good.
Before, finally, the clarity comes too late in the final lines.
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The era predicted the sad party anthems of The Weeknd and Alessia Cara. Only three years after Project X, Cara gave voice to an introverted generation weary of group festivity, tired of drugs and loud party anthems and dancing.
There’s a sense of togetherness and community in today’s culture despite all the hand-wringing about loneliness and the solitary nature of screens. In the early days of the pandemic, when being alone was a moral necessity, people donned masks and gathered to protest. Saving the world is something we still agree is a social activity. But enjoying it together? Maybe that’s too frivolous. That’s why I was surprised to see writers recently refer to Indie Sleaze as optimistic — even though I agree, it could be. Naively so.
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In 2012, the world was ending. But by then, we were experts in the end of the world. 2000, 2001, 2005, 2008. Other generations have lost patience for Millennials’ inability to plan for tomorrow. A youth culture defined by Yolo. f*ck it, we ball. I’m screaming out, “f*ck that.” When Alessia Cara was listening to music with a message, Millennials screamed along to LMFAO.
A house on fire is my happy place. This is fine. A Twitter therapist would say this is a trauma response. What can I say: We were never promised a future. It was a shock when it arrived anyway.
Burn the house down but never think about when the sun comes up and you’re left sitting in the ruins. At some point, you want to start caring again. You want to be cared for, by someone other than yourself.
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When I look at the Project X poster today, it’s too familiar. Not a familiarity born of nostalgia but of images posted just last week. You see it right? The fire. The smoke. The police. The crowd, eyes in one direction, together in revolt. Even our heroes on the ground partied out — or injured. Victorious all the same.
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At the Prado last November, I knew I would marvel in front of The Garden of Earthly Delights, humble myself at the foot of Las Meninas — but it was out in the hall, as I hurried from one gallery to the next, that I was struck dumb, stopped dead, arrested in a feeling.
Antonio Gisbert Pérez’s The Execution of Torrijos and his Companions on the Beach at Málaga was commissioned as a paean for liberty in the face of authoritarianism. It features a line of faces, all experiencing a unique emotion as they confront certain death. Pride. Anger. Acceptance. Prayer. Despair. Disdain. We, too, are implicated, meant to bear witness as the man to the left of Torrijos stares back in accusation. And in the foreground: the blood and bodies that will soon become of our protagonists.
As I looked, I was moved by them all, but it’s the two figures to the left of the canvas that my eye kept returning to, like pressing on a bruise. Two faceless men, locked in an embrace — tender and tight and together — for one last time.
I was moved by every single one of them but it was this depiction of love and camaraderie at the end of the world that I had to write about.
There’s a couple on the right side of the Project X poster in a similar embrace, gripped together, grabbing for each other in the middle of chaos. Was our ambition for a party to end all parties an act of frivolity? Or an education in how to care for each other? Changing the world. Burning it down. Defiant despite it all.
If the end of the world does come, if we ever kick it off, I hope it’s like that.
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The club is bumping. The ladies look good. The alcohol is flowing. There is much pain in the world, but not in this room.1
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But, okay, this is all a little saccharine, isn’t it? Especially when describing an era defined by irony. My 16-year-old self would find all this talk about love and compassion a bit cringe.
What it really boils down to is this: America is a vapid place with a vapid culture. Is this an indictment of the American people — or the best PR the country could ever ask for? It's mind-boggling and stunning at once: That we can party through recessions and wars. That we can leave the protest and go to the bar.The frivolity is the point.
During the Indie Sleaze era, everyone partied. The wealthy and the working class. Frat boys and feminists. Sexually liberated women alongside rapists. Now, when certain people party, it's an act of revolution. When others do the same, it's proof of their moral failing.
That's the problem isn't it? When you party, it’s bad. Should you be more upset that you enjoyed yourself? That your comrades and countrymen enjoyed themselves. Would that make you a good person? If you were more tortured about it — would that absolve you of your joy? Should we all come together and mea culpa for our vapidity? Should we throw a party? Should we invite Snooki?
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Will we look back and feel sad that we wanted so much and got so little? As Kid Cudi warns: Oh my God, why did I drink so much and smoke so much? Ugh, oh f*ck. Will we care that we didn’t care? Will we feel bad about the people we hurt, even — especially — when we meant no harm? Do we just long for a time when these questions didn’t matter — when this kind of talk was cringe?
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The closest we’ve come to an Indie Sleaze revival is the hysteria around Charli XCX’s Brat, perhaps most apparent in Charli saying this in an interview with New York Magazine while discussing the album: “My music is not political… Everything I do in my life feeds back into my art. Everything I say, wear, think, enjoy — it all funnels back into my art. Politics doesn’t feed my art.”
A homage to ‘90s and ‘00s club hits, the album inspired a summer of chasing feeling and sensation over any particular style or look. (Though some have criticized Brat Summer as an inauthentic, failed Indie Sleaze revival, Backman-Rogers’ experience that’s been “repackaged and sold as an aspirational image to be consumed by others.”)
As YouTube essayist Jordan Theresa says in her recent video linking the two trends, “I think Brat Summer becoming such a cultural phenomenon, and Indie Sleaze possibly making a comeback — I actually think the fashion is just the tip of the iceberg. I honestly don't think it's about the fashion at all. I think people are rather yearning for the lifestyle that comes with having a Brat Summer. One which is carefree, fun-filled, filled with friends and partying. And I think that social media, consumerism, the cost of living crisis [and] social stunting from the pandemic has essentially left a lot of young people in crisis and striving and yearning for a large shift in their lives.”
Are you really having a Brat Summer when all you do is mainline headlines about genocide and inflation and climate disaster? Well, yes! The two directly correlate. Should we have a little dread? Should we do a little rage?
Indie Sleaze requires a cascade of concomitant crises. The writer of the New York piece follows Charli’s quote about politics with: “Perhaps, then, the only thing [Kamala] Harris and Charli actually share is that they’re making people feel slightly less miserable this year. The other thing they might share: a hunch that this good feeling can’t last forever, can it?”
In a brilliant discussion of the sexy-sinister nature of Indie Sleaze urtext Britney Spears’ Blackout for Pitchfork, Meaghan Garvey writes, “Spears understood something … Abjection is a powerful aphrodisiac, and desire requires a void.”
It’s telling of the ethos of the era. For all its pleasure-seeking, Indie Sleaze was a time when apathy meant supremacy. Raised by a culture that believed in nothing, that was so alienating, oblivion became comfortingly familiar even as we chased feeling. Separate yourself from your body, turn off your mind, escape into nothing. That's what sleaze is: when you have nothing to gain, nothing to lose. No past, no future. A race to the void.
There's a difference between the desire for freedom and being free. It's just hard to tell in a darkly lit room. That's what the flash exposed.
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Selfishness was the ill that ended Indie Sleaze. An irony-poisoned, sensation-seeking, surface-level epoch that lacked meaning or connection. When everyone around you is only focused on their own enjoyment, you included, there's nowhere to go but down.
This is reflected in the social movements that came at the end of Indie Sleaze; the liberal smugness and pop feminism of Obama's second term; the liberal smugness, wide-spread despair and Me Too movement of the Trump years.
The revival of Indie Sleaze aesthetics, the nostalgia for ‘80s hedonism and the ‘90s fight for your right to party indicates a longing for excess. People want more — and, more than anything else, they don’t want to be made to feel bad about it. But, are there other types of excess we could imagine? An excess of time. An excess of creativity. An excess of feeling. Could we have so much — all the time — that selfishness becomes obsolete?
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The Party You’ve Only Dreamed About. I don’t know when that time will come. But everything’s on fire. And we’re together.
