Chapter 2 Soundtrack: The Indie Kids Learn To Dance

The playlist accompanying SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS's second chapter, "Take Me Out," explores the New Rock Revolution and the rise of dance-punk.

Each chapter of my book SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion—which is available for pre-order now—is accompanied by a soundtrack. The sequence of songs will be printed in the book, but I’ll also be posting them as playlists to this Substack in the run-up to publication. Today I present the soundtrack for Chapter 2, a roadmap for a cultural moment that included not just Meet Me In The Bathroom-era New York but also DC, Detroit, Omaha, Las Vegas, London, Glasgow, and beyond.

The book is about how indie rock changed the mainstream and the mainstream changed indie rock in the 21st century. This chapter is where that narrative properly kicks off. It’s centered on the tunes that soundtracked the sweaty indie dance parties and MTV2 playlists of the immediate post-Y2K era, a time when a wave of talented new bands were rejecting the precious affectations of late 1990s indie in favor of gritty yet accessible body-moving rock music. Within a few years, there would be iterations of this post-Strokes style poppy enough to cross over to the Billboard Hot 100, and super-producers within the music industry machine would take inspiration from this scene when crafting some of their own mega-hits—all while the general public became acquainted with the Brooklyn hipster archetype and sales of trucker hats surged.

As I explained when Chapter 1’s soundtrack went live, each of these playlists is exactly 20 songs long, which resulted in some tough cuts. It could be worse: If I was feeling really ambitious/in the mood for self-torture, I could have limited each one to less than 80 minutes so it would fit on a blank CD-R, which was the way I usually curated my playlists back then. But it seemed best to go with a nice round number of tracks regardless of runtime.

At 83 minutes, this one just barely crosses that CD-R threshold, so it would have had to stay in Winamp or on my iPod back in the day. But if it’s too long to burn to a disc, compared to the sprawling tracklist I imagined at first, it feels concise to me: a tight little recap of the New Rock Revolution and user-friendly dance-punk, plus the early indie synth-pop standout that gives the book its title. Dig into it below, and head to the comment section to let me know which other songs from this lineage you’d include. (If you’re wondering why no Jet, they fit into another chapter’s theme coming up!)

The Dismemberment Plan, "The Ice Of Boston" (1997)

The Faint, "Agenda Suicide" (2001)

The Hives, "Hate To Say I Told You So" (2000)

The Strokes, "Hard To Explain" (2001)

The White Stripes, "Fell In Love With A Girl" (2001)

Liars, "Mr Your On Fire Mr" (2001)

Interpol, "PDA" (2002)

Hot Hot Heat, "Talk To Me, Dance With Me" (2002)

The Rapture, "House Of Jealous Lovers" (2002)

Yeah Yeah Yeahs, "Maps" (2003)

!!!, "Me and Giuliani Down By The Schoolyard - A True Story" (2003)

The Postal Service, "Such Great Heights" (2003)

LCD Soundsystem, "Losing My Edge" (2002)

TV On The Radio, "Staring At The Sun" (2003)

Les Savy Fav, "The Sweat Descends" (2004)

Franz Ferdinand, "Take Me Out" (2004)

The Killers, "Somebody Told Me" (2004)

Bloc Party, "Banquet" (2005)

The Bravery, "An Honest Mistake" (2005)

Kelly Clarkson, "Since U Been Gone" (2004)

SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion is out Aug. 26 via St. Martin’s Press. Pre-order it here.