Indie, Please

On Daniel Falatko's 'The Wayback Machine'

Julian Casablancas at Troubadour in Los Angeles, 2001, Photograph, Getty Images

In the late 2000s and early 2010s, I went to many rock shows in Williamsburg and Bushwick. The neighborhoods, like me, were a bit scruffier then. The glass monoliths had not yet swallowed up the waterfront. PBRs were a buck, never more. The men kept their shirts earnestly plaid and their jeans earnestly tight. I was warier of the jeans, fine with the plaid, and let my hair unspool in a billowing halo of curls. My close friend, who actually played in a rock band, favored leather jackets, and so did I. I had no musical talent of my own — an attempt to learn the guitar at seventeen flopped terribly — but I could lose myself in those shows, which were usually illegal. The bands, often named for animals, thrashed for hours in “DIY” loft spaces and warehouses with names like Death by Audio, Monster Island, and Shea Stadium. I had a dim sense, as a teenager, I belonged to a kind of scene, but I never thought of it that way. This was simply my youth, and where my friends, in the bands that were booked to play, went to rock out. Rock was key: it was the present and the inevitable future, and all of the music I listened to, with few exceptions, was very new. Nostalgia hadn’t swallowed me, or the rest of the culture, whole. My rock, this indie music especially, was going to be the vanguard. “When rock was the dominant force in music, rap came and said, ‘Y’all got to sit down for a second, this is our time.’ And we’ve had a stranglehold on music since then,” Jay-Z told MTV in 2009. “So I hope indie rock pushes rap back a bit because it will force people to make great music for the sake of making great music.”

Jay-Z was talking up a band called Grizzly Bear thst had just packed the Williamsburg waterfront for a free show. Earlier that year, in what was an annus mirabilis for my own musical tastes, they had released a lush, soaring album called Veckatimest, which had been widely lauded. Two thousand and nine had begun with yet another animal band, Animal Collective, dropping Merriweather Post Pavilion, an electronic, psychedelic LP that was something like Pet Sounds for the indie set. Remarkably, it would peak at no. 13 on the Billboard charts, selling more than 200,000 copies. Veckatimest would climb even higher, to no. 8. All the precious music I loved was now popular, and this only made me happier. I wanted to be at the forefront of a movement I had known on a more intimate level than most. If even Jay-Z thought rock was the future, then I, too — on the cusp of twenty — was going to inherit a world sculpted to my own tastes.

“All of this shit you insist on caring about so deeply, all these bands nobody’s ever heard of and ‘youth culture,’ whatever that is, and Brooklyn gentrification patterns and black metal t-shirt prices on eBay, all of it means absolutely nothing,” an ex-girlfriend tells Nathan in Daniel Falatko’s acid, uproarious, and punchily brilliant new novel, The Wayback Machine. “Absolutely nothing at all. Not to anyone. Not even to you.” Indeed, the 2000s are now a relic: rock didn’t own the future, DIY venues were shuttered, and the best anyone could hope for was a whiff of nostalgia in the 2020s, kids born after Is This It dropped chattering about “indie sleaze” into the warm, dead glow of their smartphones. There are enough recent novels on contemporary urban life — the cramped apartments, the woozy nights out, the awkward hook-ups — and most of them are flat and forgettable, the prose limp, the autofictional influence regrettable. That is not a problem for Falatko, who has a story to tell about today’s New York through Nathan, a drug dealer who’s been released from prison and is now living, illegally, in his dead friend’s Manhattan apartment. Nathan has been away for many years, and he’s therefore a refugee from another era, trying to hack it absent cash or social capital.

But Nathan does have something to trade on: his stories. At one time, he was a popular music writer and publicist, writing for a website called Dagger that once made (and broke) the major indie acts of the 2000s. He also knows a lot about another magazine, Bad Habits, that evolved from a small Canadian rag to an entertainment behemoth worth hundreds of millions. Bad Habits and Dagger are closely modeled on Pitchfork and Vice, two publications that were, for a cool decade, the greatest tastemakers on the independent scene. Nathan has come to post-Covid New York just as the youth seem hungry for what went on two decades prior: the bands, the outfits, and the hipster lifestyles that, before they were parody, represented something like a tangible avant-garde. Nathan has tales to tell, some of which might be tall, like an absurd bar fight with The Strokes’ Albert Hammond Jr. or the possibility that Bad Habits was making millions off drug deals. And he has a willing audience in a popular podcast hosted by two sardonic Gen Z indie obsessives, Noah and Micah, who are quite wealthy themselves and willing to pay Nathan thousands of dollars to share all his gossip.

Nathan, a 2004 Rip Van Winkle, is confounded by this new New York, where a coffee shop asks him for a $14 tip, weed dispensaries are everywhere, and half-collapsed outdoor dining sheds fester with rats. Finance bros flock to the outer borough neighborhoods that once were the staging ground for rock bohemia. Nathan pines for M.I.A., the once-famed rapper; he met her at a party more than twenty years ago and now she seems to be floating on the dissident right, thanks to her anti-vax views. (M.I.A. ends up with a speaking role in the novel, one that is, for all its quirkiness, quite poignant.) Nathan’s luck turns for the better when his episode on Noah and Micah’s show, The $200 Mason Jar Podcast, goes viral. Other media outlets pick up his segment, the listener count surges, and Nathan imagines a new career for himself as a well-compensated raconteur of the old days, a social media personality who can trade on indie war stories for as long as he’d like. Some of Falatko’s funniest bits come from this podcast, which he reproduces, throughout The Wayback Machine, as a transcript. This is a flourish that is challenging to pull off and Falatko succeeds because he is, on the sentence level, superior to many novelists working today. A “podcast” book threatens to be a slog — Jeremy Gordon’s See Friendship, blurbed by the brightest literary lights, can’t, for example, compete with The Wayback Machine — but Falatko’s fizzy dialogue never flags:

NOAH: And with those words, we’ve officially placed ourselves directly into danger. I’m not kidding you. And we’re doing this specifically for our Patreon Silver and Platinum members.

MICAH: Don’t forget the thousands of Basic members, Noah . . .

NOAH: Fuck those stingy motherfuckers, man. If they can afford to have a phone or laptop on which to listen to this pod, they can afford another $5 per month.

MICAH: He’s kidding, of course, but please do remember to subscribe. Silver members receive the pods a full week before they post to the lower tier. Platinum members get to ask questions for our platinum Q&As, plus you have access to my vids documenting how to cook hearty, nutritious meals utilizing items purchased from the Dollar Tree in Bushwick.

NATHAN: Doesn’t your father own half of Connecticut?

MICAH: New Hampshire, and please allow us to finish our begging, man, we will get to you.

All can’t stay peachy for Nathan. It turns out his podcast appearance has angered some powerful, mysterious people, perhaps a few men tied to Bad Habits, which doesn’t like that an old music writer is blabbing about a drug trade they may very well have overseen, after all. Noah and Micah begin to distance themselves while Nathan is randomly pursued by violent goons in Jack White Halloween masks. He flees to Los Angeles for another paid podcast appearance, though this one, a socialist show called Marx & Recreation, is not what it seems. Three thousand miles can’t keep the goons away, and soon Nathan learns the great and terrible truth about the world he once knew.

The Wayback Machine, for all its antics, is in possession of a soulful undercurrent. The early 21st century New York bohemia, as Falatko writes, was often insufferable and relentlessly mockable, but it also represented a flesh-and-blood upsurge of creativity that was mostly unmediated by the internet. The blogs were important but still ancillary; there was little social media and no algorithms deciding what music should be listened to next. The rents were cheaper and the parties were rowdier. Fast money wasn’t the point, and there was an ethos built around the earnest pursuit of art in spite of the cash it might generate down the road. Commodification hadn’t yet flattened style and discourse. At novel’s end, Nathan is confronted by the media oligarch who may have been the reason he went to prison. The oligarch, fisting $28 donuts, has choice words for what’s become of Nathan’s youth. “Look at all your former kingdoms now!” he bellows. “Whitewashed. Affordable only to the epically rich. Restaurants and bars and stores run by billionaire’s daughters. $200 mason jars. Everybody inside their 5k-per-month junior one-bedrooms with paper thin walls, streaming streaming streaming.” Indeed, it’s still difficult to walk among these Brooklyn neighborhoods and witness the disorienting transmogrification that has taken place. And, of course, it’s far harder for the actual working-class—those Puerto Ricans, those old Poles—to survey Williamsburg, Greenpoint, and Bushwick and find streets unrecognizable from the end of the 20th century, when it was rather straightforward to rent an apartment a few blocks from where you grew up. The market, all of a sudden, got quite punishing. Had the hipsters alone been responsible, the rents would have gradually ticked upwards; there would not be towering waterfront condos and restaurants with $325 tasting menus below the Williamsburg Bridge. The indie kids were nothing against Bloomberg rezonings and international capital.

For all his cynicism, Nathan clings to his ideals, and this, in its own way, is stirring. He doesn’t want to give up on all that’s lost to time and economics. And he finds an unlikely ally in Micah, the Gen Z trust funder who is not as numbed as she appears. When she meets Nathan again, she has her own theory of how the old world fell and the new one, in its luxurious sterility, came into being. “Their defenses were down from the fallout of 9/11. They didn’t see it happening in real time, and when they finally noticed they were spooked, man,” she tells him. “They had the channels all set up for you to flow into the suburbs, into the office parks, into their grips. But you all went the other way. You embraced a future of your own making. But you all should have known they’d never let you do it.”

Ross Barkan is the Editor-in-Chief of The Metropolitan Review.