#aging millennial

They told us we were counted But never taught us how to count ourselves

Our names appear on lists That do not open any doors Ink dries on paper Ballots disappear into boxes And somewhere a decision is made Without the weight of our breath in the room

We stand in lines that move forward Without arriving The language of power passes over us Like a weather system Felt in the bones And never consulted

Our hands are empty not from lack of work But from work that was taken And renamed as progress Factories become echoes Neighborhoods become numbers History becomes a story told With our faces erased

They ask why we are silent While teaching us silence From childhood They ask why we are angry After grinding the tools of choice Into dust

Disenfranchisement is not a single theft It is a slow removal of mirrors Until we forget the very shape of ourselves It is being told that you are free While the floor beneath you is movable And owned by someone else

I wanna talk mostly about the music here. Specifically the indie from 2005-2015. The assertion is that the indie music from this time is bright, happy, naive, and stomp-clap. That this constitutes its optimism. I think this is an incomplete reading.

Pop music, mainstream pop music from 2005-2015, was dumb, horny, hot and fast. It was one of the last eras when pop music was truly ubiquitous, the same 50 or so tracks were all over radio, tv, at stores supermarkets everywhere. And it FUCKED. It was deliriously horny and usually focused on first meetings for casual encounters.

The indie artists of that time were in no small part reacting to the state of pop music. Pop at that time was fast and bright and dance-able. So indie artists produced that energy, with some kind of flaw behind it. The folksy-acoustic sheen or some strange rhythmic progression. Something uncanny that destabilizes the completely happy tone. And then the lyrics usually betray some horrible thing under the surface. Something that is breaking or about to break just out of view. MGMT and Foster the People come to mind as bands who found success by sounding bright and chipper with these violent and threatening undertones.

All that to say, the actual ‘Millennial Optimism’ is the pop music from that time. LMFAO, Bruno Mars, Pitbull, David Guetta, Flo Rida, etc. The indie stuff has a complication to it because it is a direct reaction to that optimism. It was, truly, a thoughtless time, and there were people who deeply regretted that thoughtlessness but didn’t understand what they were feeling.

Now, there is naïveté to that indie genre and I believe it is this: it casts love as redemptive. Indie music from that time treats romance as the only bright spot in an otherwise empty and crumbling world. Love has no such credit in 2026. A cynic would point out love isn’t real and was just a smokescreen to cover the rape culture that was alive and WELL in indie spaces in 2005-2015. And I understand that criticism.

Every few months I try in vein to find any more details about this band/EP and especially the track “Chainsaw Hedgemaze Massacre” which I played on WERS when I was a DJ in 2003.