DeVille’s history of indie rock in the 2000s and 2010s is essentially the story of what happened when the infrastructure those 1980s bands built collided with the internet, television, and venture capital. The O.C. and Grey’s Anatomy created a Hollywood soundtrack machine that presented a shiny, easy-listening version of indie rock to the masses. Pitchfork’s rise from a basement in Chicago with zero employees to 240,000 daily readers and its own festival, becoming a kingmaker that could blast Arcade Fire into the stratosphere with a single review. Each wave exposed the same tension: a vibrant subculture transforming into something more like a product.
The book surfaces the recurring pattern of a scene’s progression from underground to overground, authentic to commodified. What began as radical and boundary-pushing evolved into a trendy buzzword with its own digestible Spotify playlist. The core thesis here is that these cycles move in one direction, and the best you can do is catch the wave while it’s still breaking.