Just saw IDLES and Olivia Rodrigo together on a playlist titled DIY Punks, this is whiplash
Guys the playlist is subtitled, "Fuck the system!"
Still putting this out there because one of you is going to say it
[ID: a picture of the tags added to this post. They say: “#also did I miss the bit where Olivia Rodrigo stopped being a Disney-famous major-label backed and major-label-budget promoted star #and somehow turned grassroots DIY? #also how is a pop star punk? #still I have a feeling the harshest critics of this post will be the “IDLES are punk poseurs!” gang”. End ID.]
@exalteranima go ahead, I don't know much about any drama surrounding her, all I knew was that she was a Disney programme actor who made music, which is well and good, so many Disney stars have launched music careers, but the way she was marketed (professionally marketed! Let's start there?) as independent and DIY just because someone in marketing knew what a cassette was irked me.
It completely took out what alternative bands, DIY scenes and indie-meaning-independent musicians have to do to survive and put out their music. She didn't have to haul ass from a venue at 11 PM because a 3-hour drive back home from the next city was a smarter financial move than booking a hotel for the night. She didn't have to fit in her own guitars into the back of a loaned van and clean up her own gear at the end of her set. Her drummers didn't have to share a supporting act's drumkit because only bigger bands with larger vans and buses can actually afford to carry around their own drum setup while on tour.
You know what I mean? She didn't have to book her own tour and she didn't have to phone up the vinyl pressing plants or place orders of custom-printed tees and caps as merch. She's not an ‘indie’ artist, and I know this is hardly a new discussion. It is 45-year-old news. Still, it bothered me in the way that it's bothered grumpy old alts and indies for like 5 decades. Her Spotify bio was something unassuming like, “hi i'm olivia and i make music :)” when you know for a fact that that's completely not true. You're not just some girl called Olivia in your bedroom who blew up on soundcloud and cannot believe her luck, you're a Disney actor that people already knew because you were on cable television across America. You didn't have to build that fanbase completely from scratch. Why pretend? The authenticity wars of the 80s and 90s are over. (It used to be a really big deal especially for rock bands with certain leanings and backgrounds that they always had their first hits with the underground crowd, which is why a stupidly large record label like Columbia in the 80s can be found to have sent an early promotional copy of a Depeche Mode album to our little basement campus radio station on vinyl. It was about the 'authenticity' of having first broken on college and underground radio and all. That's not really the case anymore.)
Everyone knows what marketing is. You're a pop star. Why pretend? That irked me, it feels to me like it undermines all the work that people without major label backing have to do to record and release music, and to reach out to audiences.
And I know, people will say that pop music has always been about taking things from the ‘underground’ that have potential and putting them out there to the world. I've heard this discussion come up again around Harry Styles, because of course the style of music on his latest album isn't revolutionarily new. Musically it's a rehash of 2008 Vampire Weekend indie. That's why he's taking a band like Wet Leg on tour.
But the thing is, indie's cool now, pop punk and alternative are cool now, in palatable, marketable doses. It doesn't filter back to the original scenes, and it doesn't necessarily mean that the pop audiences who fall in love with Harry's House are going to like any of the alternative albums that the non-pop audiences loved that paved the way for the type of music Harry makes to be popular. It doesn't mean that Olivia Rodrigo's fans are going to come back and like the punchier, punkier alternative that she takes her style of music from.
It's the way that pop is able to take a surface-level looks and motifs from a genre, subculture or scene and make them cool for the hip kids who will continue to think the alternative kids are ‘freaks’ (in the past) or (nowadays) ‘cringe’, ‘lame’ or need to lighten up.
Those kids are never going to come to a sweaty crammed DIY punk show, they will continue to find those aspects of the music they now like gross. (It's the opposite of gatekeeping lol: the gate's wide open and they do not want to come anywhere near it). I just didn't like that they could just rock up and take the cool parts of these musical subgenres, the bits that make all the hard work worth it, and continue to shit on them all the same. It's not new in the least, but it still is annoying. I have no problem with her as a person or a musician though, but selling a mixtape cassette in the WMG store doesn't make you alternative, that's all.