They're An American Band

My latest SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS B-side pays tribute to Yo La Tengo, torchbearers for a 20th Century indie rock ideal

My debut book SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion is up for pre-order. This is the latest in a series of “B-sides” from the book I’m publishing here at Substack. Check out previous entries here and here and listen to the Chapter 1 Soundtrack here.

I wonder what I would have written in my college newspaper about my first Yo La Tengo show.

By that point, they were already living legends. It was April 2003, the spring of my freshman year at Ohio University. The band was touring in support of that year’s sleepy Summer Sun—not a highlight of their discography, but it’s fine—and my main concert buddy and I were in the habit of driving all over the Midwest to see as many of our favorite bands as we could.

In this case, that meant catching Yo La Tengo gigs on back-to-back nights, first at a fancy new Columbus nightclub called the Factory (soon to be shuttered) and then at Newport, KY’s late, great Southgate House, a converted mansion that once belonged to the inventor of the Tommy Gun. The main things I remember about these performances is that (1) I was disappointed about the Columbus show’s lethargic vibes, (2) the next night was much punchier, partially thanks to a searing “Cherry Chapstick,” and (3) during the encore of the Newport show they granted my request for “The Last Days Of Disco,” shouted from the front row, which ruled because that song rules.

Spouses Ira Kaplan (guitar, mostly) and Georgia Hubley (drums, mostly) formed Yo La Tengo in 1984 in Hoboken, NJ, where they were regulars at the esteemed local hipster rock club Maxwell’s. After a procession of bandmates, James McNew (bass, mostly) completed the classic lineup in 1992, and it’s been the three of them living the dream ever since — touring, recording, staying tied in with local institutions like their beloved WFMU, keeping up bespoke traditions like their annual Hanukkah residency. I discovered them in high school by reading wild-frontier era Pitchfork, my original portal into indie rock. In an effort to educate myself on the genre, I headed to the hip independent record store in my dry Ohio suburb’s uptown business district (I was lucky to grow up at a time when there were so many hip independent record stores that even dry Ohio suburbs had them) and picked up a CD copy of their 1997 masterpiece I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One.

That album is the most obvious perfect 10 in all of indie rock, but it took me years to appreciate the depths of its greatness. Yo La Tengo try so many different things across those 16 tracks: rousing and drowsy, clean and distorted, compact and sprawling, groovy and practically rhythmless. Not every song is suited to the sensibilities of a teenager in search of an accessible endorphin rush, with stickers for crowd-pleasers like the Strokes, Weezer, and Deftones affixed to the back of my car. I liked Yo La Tengo enough to consider myself sophisticated and tapped-in, but as ’90s Matador royalty went, I preferred the overt hookiness of Pavement and Guided By Voices at the time.

It’s not that Yo La Tengo are a difficult hang. They’ve been known to enjoy a perverse joke—like covering the Beach Boys in the droning, feedback-drenched style of the Velvet Underground or titling a cataclysmic post-rock slow-build “We’re An American Band”—and they risk alienating listeners with both their long, noisy songs and their slow, quiet ones. But they’re not an especially evasive or confrontational band, going out of their way to provoke. For the most part, they’re not daring you to flinch. They’re just doing their thing, riding their own wave. They’ve been doing it for over four decades now, impervious to trends. It’s a big reason why they’ve been able to keep thriving regardless of the state of the zeitgeist. They know who they are, and they know what’s cool to them. That wholehearted devotion to their own taste and ideals, without a mind for optimization, is a big reason they’re so fucking cool.

It’s also why the Yo La Tengo live experience can be perplexing for a novice. If the band feels like putting on an especially chilled-out or avant-garde show one night, they simply will. I’ve since seen them come out and absolutely rip, perhaps inspired by an opening set from Times New Viking. I’ve also seen them take the stage at Pitchfork Music Festival and play straight through the tracklist of an unreleased album. (Hearing “Pass the Hatchet, I Think I’m Goodkind” for the first time when you don’t know what’s about to hit you… whew!)

I thought about my own initial checkered experience with Yo La Tengo’s live show last weekend when a concert review from a college journalist went semi-viral on Bluesky. The Life Editor for The Observer, the student newspaper at Case Western, weighed in on Yo La Tengo’s show March 24 at Cleveland’s Beachland Ballroom. After puzzling over the lack of an opening act or greetings from the band, the reviewer commented on the absence of fancy styling or stagecraft:

They also didn’t put much effort into appearances—since they’re an older group, it’s not like I was expecting coordinated outfits or costume changes or anything—which was a bit of a surprise anyway considering how standard visual appeal has become for performances today. Yo La Tengo wore casual clothes, no visible makeup and had no props or visuals beyond two lines of colored lights and a disco ball that they turned on for exactly three songs.

She also noted, “Interestingly, of the concert’s 19 original songs, none of them even fell within the band’s 30 most-streamed on Spotify,” explaining that the devotion to deep cuts was admirable but also challenging for someone with only a passing familiarity. The writer believed Yo La Tengo’s approach was “self-indulgent,” but she ultimately offered her endorsement with the caveat that concert-goers should explore the group’s discography before attending a show.

Responses to this review were fascinating. Galaxie 500 and Damon & Naomi member Damon Krukowski, a vocal critic of Spotify, had a laugh about the writer’s dismay over Yo La Tengo not performing their most-streamed songs: “Our Algorithm Could Be Your Life,” he quipped. Others cracked jokes about someone expecting flash and an analytics-approved setlist from Yo La Tengo. Producer and former Death Cab For Cutie member Chris Walla had a generous, level-headed read: “counterpoint: yo la tengo is a confounding band who have defied convention and easy description for more than 40 years, and a young concert reviewer who notes this for their unfamiliar audience — as they also note how enjoyable the show was — is doing pretty solid work.”

But of all the takes I saw circulating, the one that struck me the most was from former Bandcamp editor JJ Skolnik, who was frustrated about the college journalist’s apparent misunderstanding of Yo La Tengo’s context, despite some passing familiarity with their work. As Skolnik put it, “this is a review of an older indie rock band (indie in practice) judged by 2020s indie rock standards (indie in genre).”

I would argue that, as much as it does now, “indie” implied a particular musical aesthetic in the ’80s and ’90s; the Overton window for the genre has simply shifted (and arguably expanded) since then, so that alongside a range of classically indie sounds that seem to always be enjoying a resurgence underground, “indie” now encompasses a lot of glossy music fit for SiriusXMU, which is the stuff that constitutes most Americans’ understanding of the term. (I will never forget the couple I met at a birthday dinner who told me they listen to a lot of indie music, “like Hozier.”) But Skolnik was tapping into something very real about the band’s ethic. Yo La Tengo continue to operate within the late 20th century paradigm that shaped them, an approach that clashes with the high production values and corporate entanglement of an era when people straight-facedly used the word “indie” to describe a multiplatinum, Grammy-winning Taylor Swift album released under the Universal umbrella.

My forthcoming book SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion (available for pre-order now!) is all about the cultural changes that took us from Yo La Tengo’s version of indie to the current landscape. It is, put simply, a book about how indie rock went pop—about what happened to this music and its attendant scene when the boundaries between indie and mainstream blurred in the 2000s and early 2010s. In one chapter, I even use Yo La Tengo as a control variable to illustrate how much the baseline for indie music had changed by the mid-2000s at the height of bloghouse and indie electronica.

When I set out to write my book, I thought of it in some ways as a sequel or companion to Jesse Jarnow’s BIG DAY COMING: Yo La Tengo and the Rise of Indie Rock. The books are not perfectly congruous in terms of genre. BIG DAY COMING is a deeply sourced biography of one band, whereas SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS is a cultural history told through heavily researched interconnected essays. But both books work to sketch out the same burgeoning subculture’s shifting landscape. In telling Yo La Tengo’s story, Jarnow also tells the story of indie rock’s genesis, how a loosely connected network of weirdos, idealists, and snobs evolved into a thriving underground infrastructure.

At a time when “indie” for many people implies playlist-friendly lifestyle music that can easily soundtrack your visit to Chipotle, it is heartening to see Yo La Tengo still holding it down for the scraggly and uncompromising version of indie all these years later. And I did see it for myself again recently, just one night before the Cleveland gig that spawned that fascinating concert review. On March 23, I attended Yo La Tengo’s show in the rural southeastern Ohio town of Nelsonville, where they made their grand return to an old restored theater called Stuart’s Opera House. It was a perfectly imperfect performance that moved at the band’s own pace, according to its own internal logic.

As in Cleveland, this was “An Evening With Yo La Tengo,” which meant forgoing an opener and playing two sets: one that erred on the quiet side, one that got louder and louder as it went. Across about two and a half hours, the band offered an ideal mix of professionalism and idiosyncrasy, the soft and the abrasive, the exploratory impulse and the familiarity that comes with a lifetime of collaboration. It was exactly as mercurial as the performance described in the college newspaper, deeply rewarding at times but also sometimes challenging. Throughout, they swapped instruments and toggled through genre exercises. Beauty, power, patience, discord, mystery, adventure, bum notes, thrilling climaxes—the show had everything I’ve come to expect from these three people who’ve come to represent a certain indie ideal.

Kaplan shredded, but he did so in a way that would be an affront to Guitar Center employees everywhere, attacking the instrument in off-kilter outbursts that added some volatility to even a catchy Neil Young pastiche like “Stockholm Syndrome.” (Would’ve liked to have heard the exact guitar solo from the album, maybe my favorite guitar solo of all time, but I respect it.) The vocals were competent but not exceptional, even from Hubley, blessed with the most beautiful voice of the three. The ballads were sometimes so minimal that they threatened to flicker out of existence, while the closing noise-pop workout “The Story Of Yo La Tango” built up to a towering wall of harmonic noise, triumphantly droning on for what seemed like 20 minutes—my favorite part of the show by far, like an extended fit of rapture. It was not the exact Yo La Tengo setlist I would have assembled, but upending expectations and pushing listeners to new places are part of this band’s appeal.

In the encore, Kaplan—a former rock critic who has always maintained an interest in independent media—shouted out Craig Calcaterra’s Ohio-based baseball and politics newsletter Cup Of Coffee. I loved that he made it a point to reference a local, grassroots, DIY effort as one-of-a-kind as Yo La Tengo. It was the kind of gesture you get from a band that has spent its whole career vitally participating in not just a genre but a culture.

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.