No. 37 - Hot Topic will have its revenge edition
The long tail cultural footprint of a mall retail staple
My Chemical Romance finally played their reunion tour. Tickets were expensive! I did not go! Correlation does not equal causation!
Nevertheless, the tour, which continues into 2023, marked the arrival of not just My Chemical Romance as an arena-sized legacy act, but the entire mid-2000s rock subculture they’ve come to represent in their time away.
MCR are arguably the best musical analog for the myriad styles of rock that went mainstream in the 2000s, though I’m sure they’d want nothing to do with such pigeonholing. Still, the purest distillation of this era’s aesthetic, the umbrella under which entire lineups from Warped Tour, Ozzfest, and Taste of Chaos can neatly fit, was the “countercultural” retail chain Hot Topic.
Cynics would argue that classifying artists under a single corporate banner is proof positive of the commodification of underground culture. You wouldn’t necessarily be wrong, but you could also look at it as simply as the natural progression of the post-Summer of Love proliferation of headshops. Capitalism gonna capitalism and in the early 2000s that meant corporate expansion, baby!
In a (very good) piece for The Ringer’s recent “Emo Week,” writer Rachel Brodsky captured the hold the store had on fans of pop-punk, emo, nu-metal and goth music at the time: “For suburban or rural-based emo fans in the ’90s or 2000s, the local Hot Topic was the only place they could go—outside of a concert—to find the music they liked, buy merch to match their musical tastes and convene with like-minded fans.”
The chain didn’t expand outside of the States until 2010 (fittingly, in the suburbs, ie: not downtown, of Toronto) which meant I grew up with the old decentralized model. I bought my hair bleach and wallet chain at Cheap Thrills and my band-tees at the Rock Shop (still going strong!) on Vancouver’s Granville Street. Yet even in my early-20s in the mid-2000s I understood “Hot Topic” as shorthand for a very specific type of artist or fan.
Of course, when you come to represent something so specific, your fates become intertwined. As Brodsky notes, “in the years since side swept bangs and studded belts, the retailer has become all things for all fans—an ethos that may appear to be a far cry from Hot Topic’s roots.” Against the winds of change, the retailer had to expand its offerings outside of the “mall goth” look with which it was associated, and with it, the sense of community the chain had engendered.
Even as Hot Topic: The Brand moved on—it continues to serve up a steady diet of multi-genre band-tees and pop culture ephemera and from all appearances is doing just fine thank you very much—Hot Topic: The Aesthetic still lingers. In fact today, its influence is greater than at any time since its mid-2000s heyday. And I’m not talking about its ability to stir nostalgia amongst the OG generation of Hot Topic kids, though judging by the When We Were Young and Sick New World festival lineups, those bands, and their fans, are doing just fine.
One need only look at the current crop of young stars’ musical and sartorial choices— Billie Eilish’s wardrobe, Olivia Rodrigo’s Avril-indebted pop-punk, Drake’s myopic millionaire in-my-feelings thing, the Phoebe Bridgers #sadgirl vibe, 100 Gecs —hearken back to this era.
Mocked and dismissed for years, Hot Topic is having its pop cultural revenge. But’s not the only mall retailer doing so.
If you’ve spent any time poking around the nerdier music-related corners of the internet, you might have heard about indie sleaze, a retroactive umbrella term for the collision of rock and club cultures in the mid-2000s. Think Ed Banger, electroclash, DFA, Meet Me in the Bathroom and the Cobrasnake.
But the throughline that connects all these dots is American Apparel, the ethically made, unethically managed and marketed clothing brand that became the hipster uniform in the late 2000s. Though the company shuttered its storefronts in 2017 when it was bought by Gildan, you can still by its neon leggings (and other offerings) online.
Though it’s a fairly new slice of nostalgia, driven primarily by the indiesleaze Instagram account run by Torontonian Olivia V (there’s an accompanying podcast, Date With the Night, as well), there’s been no shortage of press coverage around the potential of this era—a lot of it anchored by the recent release of Mark “The Cobrasnake” Hunter’s coffeetable book, Y2Ks Archive—making a comeback.
Many of the musical principles from this period are still active: Yeah Yeah Yeahs just put out a very good new album; Uffie has resurfaced; Bloc Party are going on a massive tour with Hot Topic muses Paramore. Olivia V is even premiering the first official Indie Sleaze night here in Toronto on November 30 with Cadence Weapon lending a hand.
Yet it’s hard to hear or see their direct influence on the current culture in the diret way that Hot Topic has. I’ve seen a handful of new artists shoehorned into Spotify’s Indie Sleaze playlist (because its not a movement until The Algroithm says so) but the one that sounds like they’re actively echoing this era in any way is The Dare with their (so far only) song “Girls.”
Over the course of the pandemic society seemed to finally get over its fixation on the 80s and moved onto the 90s. See: flared jeans and bucket hats making a major comeback. We haven’t even properly reckoned with nu-metal yet!
Still if you’d told me ten years ago that Hot Topic would be dominating pop culture I would have called you crazy.
But music is often the canary in the coal mine when it comes to nostalgia cycles. 90s touchstones have been a thing for some time now, so I wouldn’t be shocked to see neon leggings coming soon (again) to a mall retailer near you.
Kool Kids Self-promotion Club
I spoke with Artic Monkeys’ singer-guitarist Alex Turner about their new album The Car and trying to keep up with his younger self. "That's something that's coming back to bite me 15 years later," he said of the physicality involved in playing the band's early hits today. "After our third album [2009's Humbug], everything starts to get a bit looser. We just haven't been writing the kind songs that require that kind of tempo."
I also reviewed the (excellent) new album The Will to Live from New Jersey rabble-rousers Titus Andronicus. The record “leverages all that's come before into a streamlined set of bangers that threatens to push Patrick Stickles career-long belief in rock and roll as a force for redemption out of the dingy clubs and into the realm of corporate-sponsored venues.”
Kool Kids Recommendation Club
Hey y’all, in an effort to stay on top of which artists are playing where when I started a concert listings/recommendation page. You can check out a curated selection of Toronto concerts here.
Now, on to our regularly schedule music recs.
Hemlocke Springs is one of the artists I was referring to when I accused folks of trying to shoehorn new artists under the indie sleaze umbrella. To my mind (and ears) the North Carolina-based singer has far more in common with Grace Ives-style bedroom pop. But whatever! Her latest single, “Girlfriend,” one ups her viral hit “Gimme All Ur Luv,” and finds Springs debating the merits of partnering up with someone she isn’t quite sold on.
The mid 2010s amidst produced slew of fantastic bnads remaking indie and punk rock into a more inclusive space. Swearin’, Charley Bliss, Chumped, Aye Nako, and Cayetana were just a few of the artist to prick up ears outside of the usual DIY internet haunts - the New York Times wrote a huge feature about the phenomenon. I don’t know if Durham, UK crew Martha listened to or played gigs with any of these artists, but they fit right in with them both musically and politically. Their fourth album, Please Don’t Take me Back dropped a couple months back. It moves the needle on their sound a big—things are a little slower, a bit more expansive—without detracting what made them great in the first place. Mostly, the record is another welcome blast of fuzzy, power-pop indebted punk from a far too underrated band.
Coco and Clair Clair are what happens when two talented best friends turn their inside-joke filled DMs into a band. The Altanta duo’s debut, Sexy is a gauzy indie-R&B send up of online celebrity culture as seen through the eyes of two very online celebrities. They’ve been making music together for a while now, but things really took off on TikTok with tunes that smush a plethora of 2010 microgenre tropes into three-minute bops.
Guitar Music, the debut album from Liverpool quartet Courting has been a late-in-the-year standout for me. As the digitally rendered urban landscape that graces the record’s cover suggests, the band have built their own little musical world, and I for one am moving in. “Famous” is probably the album’s most straight forward - and catchy! - track. Yet even at their most accessible, the mix of influences colliding into one another is on full display: Speedy Wunderground post-punk, glitchy hyper-pop and even flashes of the 1975’s post-modern pop with the arch tone of Art Brut’s Eddie Argos.
There’s always been a future-nostalgia vibe to the music of Elite Gymnastics. During their original run, Jaime Brooks and Josh Clancy always seem to be referencing some imagined past that listeners could never quite put their finger on. After Clancy left in 2013, Brooks put the project on ice and rebranded her musical forays as Default Genders, releasing a series of great, under-the-radar albums under the Main Pop Girl banner. Now Brooks, working with Viri Char, has ressurected Elite Gymnastics. Snow Flakes 2022 reworks elements of EG’s past, with shards of the wider pop world - from the Beatles to “Crimson and Clover” - without ever feeling backwards looking.
Finally a number of Friends of the Club (a term I just made up) have put out new albums recently.
Rich Aucoin teased his new instrumental record, Synthetic: Season 1 back in KKMC No. 14 . It’s the first of four such albums the Halifax based musician is planning to release in six month intervals.
Joseph Shabason, who I spoke with back in KKMC No. 12, re-teamed with his Philadelphia collaborator Nicholas Krgovich for At Scaramouche. The always busy Shabason also dropped the soundtrack to the Canadian dark-comedy Stanleyville back in July.
And Dazy, the very cool project from former Teen Death member James Goodson, who I spoke to in KKMC No. 31, dropped Out of Body, his debut album after several years of releasing singles and EPs.
Ian Gormely is a freelance music journalist based in Toronto.
Hit up koolkidsmusicclub@gmail.com for questions, criticisms and submissions.