I Think I’m Losing My Edge

I used to be with it. Then they changed what “it” was.

That’s a quote from The Simpsons, a show that used to be with it, or maybe it used to be “it.” Then they changed what it was.

Back in my day, Simpsons references were cool. Now it just makes you seem old. Then again, everything makes you feel old when you’re old.

When I was in college, I tried to keep up with “the scene.” My friends would mention bands I’d never heard of and I’d rush back to my dorm to download their songs on Napster.

Eventually, I figured out they were getting all their music tips from Pitchfork, the “online music website,” as we called it then, that replaced Rolling Stone and NME as the cultural guide of what’s good and what’s cool.

You’ve heard of Arcade Fire because Pitchfork gave their debut album, Funeral, a 9.7 out of 10 in 2004, a banner year for indie rock, and the halcyon days of peer-to-peer file-sharing that Charli XCX refers to on brat, her chart-topping summer 2024 album (more on that later).

Pitchfork said the Dismemberment Plan was cool. So they were. But when their lead singer, Travis Morrison, went solo, they famously gave his album a zero out of 10.

Morrison’s hipster-fuelled music career ended so immediately that the next time his name came up was in a 2010 Slate article written by his wife, who had no idea the co-worker she met and married used to be a rock star.

She figured it out when the Plan got back together and played The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon in 2011.

I don’t know if Pitchfork is cool anymore. Probably not, since I still read it, and I’m pushing 40, the age at which coolness recedes with one’s hairline.

But it remains a big source of music recommendations, and when list season rolls around — the six weeks before Christmas, when every website gives you their best of the year — I read Pitchfork’s.

I check out all their faves, and equip myself with enough contemporary music opinions to feel like I’ve been in the know all year long.

Pitchfork lists follow a similar pattern. Every single one is a mix of things you know and stuff you’ve never even heard of, and they typically end with a very cool one-two punch.

Anatomy of the year-end music list

The album that takes the number-two spot will be something that normies and oldheads and regular people have heard of. Something that really broke through, earning critical acclaim and big sales, somehow reaching college kids and parents alike.

This year, Pitchfork’s number-two album of the year pick was brat by Charli XCX.

A perfect runner-up.

The music was fire, and the album’s conceit, a nostalgia for the glory days of MySpace, where Charli XCX got her start, was catnip for those who came of age on the early internet.

Anyone being objective is sure to agree that in terms of quality, impact and cultural cachet, this was the album of the year.

But not if you’re cool.

Moms enjoyed brat. Kamala Harris was brat for a hot second.

Charli XCX has been the cool kids’ pop idol for over a decade, but this year, she finally broke out, trading coolness for legitimate commercial success.

No publication trafficking in cool can give album of the year to something everyone enjoyed.

Cool kids know something you don’t. Cool kids live outside the mainstream. They read websites and sources that you’ve never heard of and celebrate stuff that you probably wouldn’t like, since you’re not cool.

The number-one album is typically something along those lines, and this year Pitchfork did not disappoint.

The best album of the year, according to Pitchfork, is Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee, a super-lo-fi, two-hour, 32-song, pop-rock record, described by critic Andy Cush as “a foggy transmission from a rock’n’roll netherworld with its own ghostly canon of beloved hits.”

You probably haven’t heard of it.

And how could you have? Diamond Jubilee was self-released with no promotion by a Canadian artist, Patrick Flegel, who doesn’t seem terribly concerned with the idea of promoting it.

He sings in a creaky, androgynous falsetto. Every song feels unfinished, and not just unmastered, but missing some core instrument that songs that sound like this are meant to have.

The effect is phantasmagoric and off-putting, like watching an old horror movie or fantasy film, by yourself, on a Saturday, when you were young.

You’re not supposed to like it, all the cool kids used to say, and that’s the point.

So cool it’s almost entirely inaccessible

Pitchfork gave Diamond Jubilee the coveted “Best New Music” label back in April, not to mention a 9.1, their highest score for anything in five years.

Flegel responded to the mounting intensity of suddenly sold-out shows by dropping out of his spring 2024 tour completely.

Fame sounds exhausting, but as an artist who’d love to make money, I tend to roll my eyes at big-league artists who pine for obscurity others come by honestly. But the erstwhile scenester in me can’t help but admire his refusal to “sell out,” as we used to say.

In a sense, Diamond Jubilee is a similar nostalgia exercise to brat, harkening back to the same MySpace era, roughly two decades ago, when the cool kids got their music from websites and blogs that told them which .WAV files to download and convert to MP3. Fittingly, Diamond Jubilee is not available on Spotify or Tidal.

Until somebody helpfully uploaded the whole thing to YouTube, the only way to get it was to download WAV files from a GeoCities website, like we used to.

Flegel’s indie-rock cachet, too, dates back to the aughts. Before he became Cindy Lee, he was part of a Calgary indie-rock band known as Women, whose lo-fi, post-punk, zombie Beach Boys sound made them darlings at Pitchfork.

Their single, “Black Rice,” was the 18th best song of 2008, another year-end list that follows the formula perfectly.

At number two, Fleet Foxes’ “White Winter Hymnal,” a folk song that broke big enough to become a modern holiday staple. Number one went to Hercules & Love Affair’s “Blind,” a post-disco dance collaboration between DJ Andy Butler and trans torch singer, Anohni.

You probably haven’t heard of it.

“Black Rice” was awesome. It sounded like everything I liked, and somehow nothing I’d ever heard. I listen to it now and I remember myself in 2008, feeling cool for having heard of it while hearing it for the first time.

I listen to Diamond Jubilee and I get the same feeling. I hear Women right away — you can tell it involves Flegel — but I also hear a bunch of other bands I liked back then: Yo La Tengo, Belle and Sebastian, Deerhoof, Chad VanGaalen, the Shins, not to mention their musical forebears, the Cure, Joy Division, Television, the Beatles, the Band, the Velvet Underground.

It’s music that conjures a bygone era, a whole vibe, a self I aged out of two decades ago, right down to the smug satisfaction of knowing about it at all.

Despite being praised more than once on Pitchfork, Rolling Stone for Millennial Dads, it still seems like a secret.

I don’t play these games anymore. Who has time to play “cool hunter” with two little kids, who make me feel less cool with each passing second?

Yesterday, my daughter asked what sus means. “It’s short for suspicious,” I said to her, adding, “I think.”

But reading Pitchfork’s year-end list and listening to their top pick, I was transported back to the days of my youth, when I still had the space to make my taste in music most of my personality.

Diamond Jubilee is really good, and highly recommended. I think that you’d like it.

If you don’t, that’s okay, you’re not supposed to, and the artist is likely indifferent.

That’s what makes it so cool.