30 Days in 60 Minutes: January 2012

If I wanted to maximize the potential virality of this Substack, I would’ve hopped on the 2016 wave…but the first thing I noticed when looking at my January 2016 mix is that there’s at least three bands on there who are cancelled to a degree that ranges from “mildly, but what was that all about again?” to “tried to release a project under a new name and got that cancelled too.” This is a constant danger of the “emo revival goes mainstream” era.

So then, something more fun that aligns my two favorite pastimes of the post-year end interregnum, i.e., catching up on the electronic music I missed over the past twelve months and 2005 nostalgia. At least in 2012, “electronic music” tended to encompass “electronic indie pop,” a style of music that I couldn’t help but love since I regularly attended Coachella and thus had to consider “would this go off in the Sahara Tent?” That’s how you end up putting a Friendly Fires album in your top ten.

(playlist below the paywall)

Caribou - “Drumheller”

I don’t think I’m misrepresenting Steve here when I say that I felt the clock ticking on Indiecast from the moment they gave us the green light. At the beginning, I was mostly worried about the optics of two white guys starting a podcast…mind you, this was the summer of 2020 when Phoebe Bridgers and Mike Kinsella were the target of Twitter harassment campaigns because Punisher and the latest Owen album had release dates that coincided with Juneteenth. We had good numbers and a loyal audience throughout, but for at least the past two or so years, we had to consider the possibility of life without UPROXX. To be clear, UPROXX has been nothing but kind to me during our entire relationship…which was the exact thing that worried me, it was a very “ca. 2012-2014” kindness that I was quite familiar with, where publications gave me almost no pushback on my pitches, minimal editing and a bigger fee than a Pitchfork headline review…before they eventually folded after two or so years when the financier discovered that music journalism was an exceedingly dumb way to spend their money. Like everyone else before them.

While I’d much rather have Indiecast go on unimpeded for eternity, I did feel a sigh of relief because I could now focus on the book, no longer tempted to pitch things like a “Caribou Albums Ranking List.” It’s not that I’d felt emotionally compelled to do so, I haven’t really loved a Caribou album in 15 years. Nonetheless, I knew a) they’d let me do it, even though an “Caribou Albums Ranking List” premised on the 20th anniversary of their fourth or fifth-best album probably got no traffic and b) it would be way, way, way more work than I planned on. It’s 2026 so I know damn well I’d be spending an unnecessary amount of time trying to rank Ghostface and Thursday albums on the 20th anniversary of Fishscale and A City By the Light Divided. I suppose there are easier ways to make $500, but not in music journalism.