The definitive history of indie rock—from Iron & Wine and Death Cab for Cutie to Fiona Apple and St. Vincent—and how the genre shifted the musical landscape and shaped a generation.
Maybe you caught a few exhilarating seconds of “Teen Age Riot” on a nearby college radio station while scanning the FM dial in your parents’ car. Maybe your friend invited you to a shabby local rock club and you ended up having a religious experience with Neutral Milk Hotel. Perhaps you were scandalized and tantalized upon sneaking Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville from an older sibling’s CD collection, or you vowed to download every Radiohead song you could find on Limewire because they were the favorite band of the guy you had a major crush on.
However you found your way into indie rock, once you were a listener, it felt like being part of a secret club of people who had discovered something special, something superior. In Such Great Heights, music journalist Chris DeVille brilliantly captures this cultural moment, from the early aughts and the height of indie rock, until the 2010s as streaming rocks the industry and changes music forever. DeVille covers the gamut of bands and in the vein of Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties, touches on staggering pop culture moments like sharing music recommendations via AOL Instant Messenger and the life-changing OC soundtrack. Nerdy, fun, and a time machine for millennials, Such Great Heights is about how subculture becomes pop culture, how capitalism consumes what's “cool,” about who gets to define what's hip and how, and how an “underground” genre shaped our lives.
6 pm reception/6:30 pm program
Free & open to the public. Registration required.
Copies of Such Great Heights will be available for sale & signing courtesy of Joseph-Beth Cincinnati.
About Chris Deville
Chris Deville is the managing editor at Stereogum, where he has written extensively about the full spectrum of indie music for the last ten years. In 2014, he launched The Week In Pop, a column exploring mainstream music from an indie fan’s perspective. Chris has also been featured in outlets like The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and Rolling Stone and prominent digital outlets like The Ringer, Deadspin, and The Verge. He lives with his family in Columbus, Ohio.
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