The Beaten Track

Reflections on The Last Dinner Party and terrible music discourse.

I’ve been thinking about the term “Industry Plant” a lot lately – partially because I need to get out more, and partially because I’ve been browsing Reddit’s Indieheads forum, where a fresh band, The Last Dinner Party, and their album, Prelude to Ecstasy, have attracted a fair amount of ire. (The Strokes have also been gracing my car CD player a lot, and they’re basically the original plants.) Granted, there’s plenty of backlash to the backlash now, but the general sentiment is this: ‘Oh, a popular new band: they must be incredibly rich, or related to someone in the music industry.’ Of course, the musicians who have attracted particular attention are often female: Boygenius, Wet Leg, and, to a defining level, Clairo. There’s already a great article on the subject by Daniel Dylan Wray, who deems the term a ‘go-to slur for any new artist who blows up “too quickly” for some online communities and conspiracy theorists’. Essentially, industry plant rumours exist due to misogyny, notions of authenticity in popular music, and the contingent nature of success in our age of social media flare-ups and inconstant nostalgia.  

To be honest, I’d never heard of the band before about a week ago, and I wanted to offer my general thoughts on their music, reception, and the state of criticism at the moment, a void which is constantly being filled by banal and tepid discourse. Indeed, the value of music journalism as a discipline is only being cemented, at least in my mind, as music fans continue to trample on its grave. The result is a fatal merger of publicity and critique, always to the detriment of the latter, which possibly helps to fuel these weird conspiratorial trends. As for The Last Dinner Party themselves, the discourse is reminiscent of that around the success of Wet Leg, especially in the sense that any half-intelligent listener would actually find their popularity very easy to understand. Personally, I didn’t love Wet Leg’s debut album, but their hits are absurdly catchy, eminently witty, dynamically performed, and produced with enough clarity and bombast to ingratiate them to a relatively mainstream audience. The Last Dinner Party’s music is equally suited to the echelons of Mercury Prizes and Radio 6 coverage: vivid, enthrallingly gothic, lushly orchestral, and anchored, again, by poppy production and a knack for memorable hooks. As a more clear-headed Redditor notes, ‘It’s like post-punk meets ABBA.’

All this hype is, obviously, still only a minor level of success within music as a whole, and some fans would do well to remember that far more people were lapping up terrible post-grunge music in the early 2000s than all of their favourite indie acts. Drake has around forty times the amount of monthly listeners on Spotify than Danny Brown does. Is Drake better than Danny Brown? No. Is it easy to understand his success? Sort of. I don’t know, who cares? Sometimes popular stuff is good, sometimes it sucks. Nirvana were really cool and popular. As a sidenote, I’ve been reading some Mark Fisher lectures about post-punk, and while I think he’s correct that the preconditions for such a music scene may have vanished in neoliberal Britain, I think he puts too much stock in originality, especially when he argues that nothing from the 2010s couldn’t have been produced in an earlier decade. After all, he talks at length about how much he loves The Jam. Nirvana and my aforementioned best buds The Strokes took past music trends and recapitulated them into something full of verve and wonder. In Utero is essential not because it reinvented the wheel, but because it took Kurt Cobain’s love of noise rock and melodic pop music and exploded the tensions between these things, leaving us with a chaotic opus of abrasion and tenderness. Anyway, I’m getting sidetracked.

I was initially confused by the reference to conspiracy theorists in Wray’s article, but it actually makes perfect sense. Countless comments look for and report pieces of information about artists’ personal lives, charting how they “cheated” their way to the top. The juiciest piece of info is always that one band member went to a private school, or, in rare cases where it actually applies, that their parents work in the industry. Music PR probably does seem fairly oblique to most people, but the relentless anger and bitterness at a mostly bureaucratic system of emailing magazines and sharing promotional material seems misguided at best. Such accusations simply don’t exist in industries like film and TV, where these ancillary figures are a precondition of the work being made at all.

There is another mirror to conspiracist, incel theories, in that the relative fruition of women after years of subjection, hatred, and cruelty has resulted in violent outbursts from the most pathetic of men, who feel infantilised by the fact that they can’t get by on an unearned form of social status. Hence the whining about bands getting far without any “effort”, as though the amount of labour performed ever had anything to do with fame. As Wray notes, success in music is noticeably contingent at the moment. In a sense, it always has been. Many working class bands who formed in the 70s and 80s – Pulp, for example – were only able to (barely) fund their music careers by exploiting Thatcher’s Enterprise Allowance Scheme. No such opportunities exist nowadays, however indirect, and more benevolent sources such as arts funding face massive cuts. Everything is more expensive, and it’s no wonder that working class musicians don’t have the time or money to follow this often fruitless dream.

With this in mind, it seems completely unremarkable that many hit UK bands consist of middle to upper class university students – after all, when else do you get an extended period of free time to brainstorm weird ideas with your mates? The Last Dinner Party are a particularly innocuous case. According to Wikipedia, they met in London before starting their courses, bonding over the vibrant music scene around The Windmill and other venues. They were signed after performing together for a few months, and things snowballed from there. The dichotomy between struggling indie band and so-called “industry plant” is, as always, really just the difference between a band being signed or unsigned. There are plenty of groups who perform at similar venues and don’t get the same buzz; but equally, label scouts will be paying distinct attention to these gigs, and it helps if you can craft indie pop bangers as well as TLDP can. Additionally, as much as industries try to flaunt how accessible they are, music is always going to have a strong social element – who you know, and where you go, will always matter. It is laudable that these venues are very open to new talent; the tragedy is that working class kids will find it harder and harder to nurture that talent. That’s not the fault of other artists, many of whom are still sacrificing a great deal to sustain their careers.

All this resentful and regurgitative discourse reminds me of how sorry a state independent music is in, even if we seem to be enjoying a wave of exciting UK bands. As you’re probably aware, the popular magazine Pitchfork recently experienced a wave of layoffs, following a similar trend at Bandcamp, a service that has been instrumental in allowing smaller artists to garner a fanbase and fair source of revenue. Many have suggested that online journalism in general, often ad-funded, is facing a serious cataclysm. Subscription-based models such as that of The Quietus, a brilliant and refreshingly esoteric, honest site, seem to be working well, but they rely on a heavy degree of long-term respect and disposable income. Newer sites may be doomed to fail. And, though I enjoy the diversified models of sources like So Young, who are as much a merch site as an illustrated zine, it would be nice if music reviews could exist for their own sake. In another Reddit post, I was frustrated to see many comments celebrating Pitchfork’s downfall, especially childish ones related to critics not liking people’s favourite bands, or for being snarky in the past. Frankly, their output since 2010, divorced from millennial nostalgia, has been incredibly diverse and largely free of the snobbery long-associated with the brand. Also, a good reviewer is not simply a person you agree with. It’s someone who writes well, defends an interesting opinion, and introduces you to music you might not have considered listening to.

In the absence of critical thought, people will always invent absurd criteria such as the industry plant accusation, making themselves feel better about dismissing something, or for feeling weird when they see successful women on their Twitter feed. Many commentors I saw suggested that they would find new records through streaming services, reflecting a very pernicious and stupid idea that algorithms are completely unbiased, and will naturally lead to the best and most expedient result. Similarly, I feel almost physically sick when I hear people suggest that the randomness of social media trends somehow constitutes a level playing field. Chance is not the same as accuracy. The industry needs accurate reflection and accurate thought. More money for venues, more schemes for musicians, and more critics celebrating great music.

P.S. I’ve just listened to Prelude to Ecstasy for a second time. I wrote the majority of the article feeling a little indifferent to the album, and to The Last Dinner Party as a whole; after all, first impressions can be deceptive. This happens especially with albums: you have to learn patterns, feel the rhythm pulsing through you, consider the lyrics and their place in a world of metaphors, merging with your own experiences. Melodies require repetition. All that is to say, the album is really strong – a compelling blend of visceral, feminist melancholia; 80s gothy new wave vibes; and the slightly self-aware exuberance of those aforementioned Windmill bands. I love the winding, screechy guitar of ‘Sinner’, the violent, incisive lyrics of ‘The Feminine Urge’, and, of course, the epic choruses littered throughout the record.

Words by Joe Bullock