Every week, a different FADER editor compiles a playlist to highlight a new release and give you a guide to that artist’s web of influences and peers. These Staff Selects live in our Spotify app, alongside GEN Fs from our archives and playlists for each issue. This week, it's Alex Frank on indie pop from his college days.
This playlist is not an endorsement of the songs herein—more just a snapshot of an era of music that I remember sometimes very unfondly. Much of the stuff from the early 2000s does not hold up well at all, no matter how popular it was then. There's a Le Tigre documentary on Netflix that's really not very good but that I watched all the way through anyway because I love Kathleen Hanna and because it conjured up some nostalgia about my years living in a college dorm room in Washington, DC. Every college freshman I knew would blast Le Tigre's "Deceptacon" and many of them would scream-sing along and do a weird sort of hop-dance along with the beat. It was 2004, a weird time in music, and that kind of vaguely danceable, slightly-electro style was big. The other music popular with college freshmen, at least in my school, was post-'90s, alterna-twee, cute indie pop-rock; some of it was really insufferable, like possibly the most boring, blanched music ever made. I was dragged to a Deerhoof show once in 2005 and I did not like it. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, however, were super awesome, and though it feels sort of embarrassing to listen to Le Tigre now, I'll always have fond feelings for them. I watched them play a show in 2002 and they were wearing wedding dresses. Here's a roundup of songs I remember being popular in the dorm.
Stream: Indie Pop From the Early 2000s
