How To Discover New Music

It’s so funny to peek at music magazines today. Try it—I don’t care which one you pick, they’re all the same: they write about the stuff that doesn’t matter. They don’t even see half the genres that are presently happening, and they miss nearly all the good new albums and bands.

If you want to learn about innovative new work, best not even look at a magazine. They will keep you from it. Their job isn’t to expose you to exciting new things, it’s to funnel you down to buying products sold by the corporations they have interest in.

There used to be all kinds of escape hatches out of this, to get you into new worlds of discovery, if you knew where to look.

In the ’90s there were zines, homemade little staple-bound laser-printed booklets that spoke from the heart and had mojo and soul. Some of them were big and had reach—like if you were into punk, you’d need MAXIMUMROCKNROLL. Others like Rollerderby seemed to hold more glamour than anything the best Madison Avenue minds could muster. They were worth reading and looking at. Another hatch were the email listservs, like the popular sick-and-tired list and the “secret” invite-only CHUGCHANGA-L which was basically for indie rock royalty and insiders, and rounding it out there was college radio and record stores.

It’s a crazy new century, but there’s escape hatches in here, too—and believe me, they work. You should use them.

Those mailing lists dried up and died before even MySpace came around, it’s all Internet archaeology now. College radio isn’t what it was, in part because radio has lost importance and because college did, too—neither are what they were back in the 1900s. A few DJs still have shows worth listening to, and there’s still some good record stores, too. But online retail and streaming have made most of them moot.

The biggest hatches now are Bandcamp, YouTube, and Substack. Legacy media can’t keep up with any of them, and that’s where you’ll find the real, raw goods. I try to channel that work in my store. It’s the energy that we’re excited about. Surely, there’s a lot of greatness in 1900s music. I don’t abandon it, and sometimes it’s fun to look back, flip through the pages of a Creem, take in a little Lester Bangs, spin a new wave record and reminisce. There were so many cool scenes of yesteryear. But—they’re yesteryear. We’re not strictly a museum. We’re also here to make a scene of our own, create something new, and celebrate artists we know, who are working right now.

So let’s talk about Neggy Gemmy. Her new album, She Comes From Nowhere, is news. In that way, it should have been painted all over the music press. Of course, it caught the legacy “experts” by complete surprise; they’d never heard of it. Well, they have now. It’s only been a month, and the vinyl is already burning through a second pressing.

She recently put out a video for one of the tracks, “Polly Pocket.” It’s an escape hatch. How good is it? It’s as good as it gets, that’s how good. This video was self-produced, and it’s better than most of the videos in the whole entire history of videos. If MTV still existed, it would rocket to number one. It’s up there with Ginger Root’s “Loretta” video and Nirvana’s funny “In Bloom”—or Pavement’s “Painted Soldiers,” where the band’s all fired one by one and replaced by the girl-band Veruca Salt. The “Polly Pocket” video is an absolute achievement of the highest order. Even lodged as it is in the underground it managed to get over 10,000 views in a week, and if my gut feelings are right the count will soon be measured in millions. Everyone needs to stop everything right now and just watch this.

Here, do it:

I feel a certain spasmodic, riotous feeling of righteous victory every time it comes on.

There’s a feeling that this is Us, that we who love this underground and unrepresented music, that we’re capable of creating our own parallel cultures, thriving in them, and that right now we are doing it, this thing is unstoppable, and who cares about the mainstream gatekeepers anyway. Their gates are guarding dead and lonely castles. We’ve got all the glamour and the gold. I mean, just look at this—visually, aesthetically, conceptually, this video is everything! There’s no big-money label behind it, no committee, no focus group, it’s all from the heart. How can you not recognize how great it is, and celebrate it?

Neggy, by the way, doesn’t quite come from nowhere. She comes from ten years, and many more than ten years, of hard work and creation. Her natural singing voice can be as lithe and haunting as Harriet Wheeler of The SUNDAYS or Elizabeth Fraser at peak Cocteau Twins. The music is pure electronic indiepop of its own invention; I get distinct tastes of Saint Etienne, Sade, Cibo Matto, Orbital. There’s even a ribbon of exotica running through a few tracks on this record, setting a mysterious and smoky scene of exotic ports, cargo ships, and tall starlit skies under the palms. That this music is sophisticated is a gross understatement: it distills a kind of wistful, leafy-lane sophistication and offers it in fragrance form.

Jump through this escape hatch and discover the world of Neggy Gemmy. I believe in this record so much that I bought every last remaining copy of the initial press run to sell in my store. If you want it, come get it, it’s yours. And you should want it. Even if you work at a magazine.