By Doree Shafrir
Adam Brody as Seth Cohen, the quintessential Jewish indie rocker
At an indie rock show I was at a few weeks ago, the lead singer of one of the bands got on stage and said to the crowd, “Sorry for making you guys miss The O.C. But Seth Cohen would be proud.”
I relate this anecdote for two reasons: one, to express that I was, indeed, annoyed that I’d had to miss The O.C. to see what turned out to be a pretty mediocre band; and two, because Seth Cohen has so permeated the indie-rock zeitgeist that he’s now even being referenced by indie-rock bands themselves. It’s a perfect example of art influencing art influencing life...influencing art. Or something.
Seth Cohen—with his skinny frame, dark curly hair, endless pop culture and musical references, and of course, his perfectly Jewish name (though as any O.C. devotee knows, he’s actually only half-Jewish—and on the side that doesn’t count)—has become the contemporary poster child for a certain type of guy: the indie dude. And it should come as no surprise that the quintessential indie dude is, at least in name and part-parentage, Jewish.
As a teenager, I careened from obsession to obsession: the Smiths, the Lemonheads, the Beastie Boys. In retrospect, my angst-ridden adolescent musical taste was only preparing me for an eventual obsession with the Converse-wearing, skinner-than-I-was frontmen of indie rock. And in retrospect, my first real boyfriend was basically a Seth Cohen doppelganger: half-Jewish (on the wrong side!), skinny, mop of black wavy hair—and an intense, brooding commitment to the used bins at Other Music.
He bought me tickets to an Elliott Smith show for my birthday. He made me a mix (this was pre-iPod and CD burner, and I still have the 90-minute cassette) with Gang of Four and Will Oldham and June of ’44—bands I’d never even heard of. He played guitar in an intense, brooding noise band. It’s only now that I realize how perfectly he represented the connection between Judaism and indie rock. (The guy I dated after him listened almost exclusively to Midnight Oil and Prince. He was raised Mormon.)
In many ways, indie rock is the quintessential Jewish music: It’s smart, outside the mainstream and usually headed up by skinny, overly literate, dark-haired men (and sometimes women) from blue states. Some of the biggest names in indie rock are Jewish: Ira Kaplan of Yo La Tengo, David Berman of the Silver Jews, Ben Kweller, Dan Bern, Karen O and Nick Zimmer of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Carrie Brownstein and Janet Weiss of Sleater-Kinney, just to name a few.
But even some indie rockers who aren’t Jewish—well, they kind of look Jewish. And they fit that sensitive, emotional, skinny-and-dark-haired paradigm. Take Conor Oberst (better known, of course, as Bright Eyes). He’s been compared to Bob Dylan in countless fawning tributes, and the continuum from Dylan to Oberst, while not uninterrupted, is nonetheless a relatively straight one.
Dylan was the rebellious intellectual troubadour who—though he changed his name—could do little to hide the fact that physically he looked about as stereotypically Jewish as they come. He used that fact to his advantage, playing to both the Jewish intelligentsia and the heartland. He had an appeal that was at once both high culture and deeply red-blooded American, and perhaps it was his musical genius that helped pave the way, years later, for indie rockers like Oberst and Stephen Malkmus, another non-Jew who nonetheless seems to take Judaism’s aesthetics to heart. (Wesleyan in the mid-’90s would not have been the same place without Stephen Malkmus.)
And how could we forget Jewish indie rock forebears such as precocious little Leonard Cohen, who published his first book of poetry at 15, long before he was getting blowjobs at the Chelsea Hotel (by some shiksa, no doubt!)? Or Jonathan Richman, the Natick, Mass. native who was seized with the desire to get the Modern Lovers off the ground while on a trip to Israel when he was 19? Even after he became famous, he still looked like a guy you could’ve gone to overnight camp with—the shaggy, Jewfro-ish hair, the sheepish looks and of course, the big nose. Not to mention that he was also a guy you could take home to your parents—he was notoriously anti-drug. His impact on today’s musicians is undeniable, but his Jewish roots were also a significant influence on both his music and his persona.
Many of Judaism’s most dearly held traditions are also prevalent in indie rock. Studying the Talmud—constantly looking for new textual interpretations, and divining meanings out of symbols and allusions—is only slightly more rigorous than the degree to which indie rock devotees debate the meaning of certain bands’ lyrics and other seemingly minute details about their favorite indie rockers. On the indie rock discussion board I Love Music, recent topics ranged from “Boards of Canada: Classic or Dud?” “Best use of a police siren in a song, What is.” (One can only imagine what an indie rock yeshiva would look like.)
Likewise, Jews’ emphasis on education has a parallel in indie rock, where it often seems like the game is to come up with lyrics that are more clever than anyone else’s. Take a band like the Decemberists, whose latest album, Picaresque, may leave you scrambling for your Kaplan SAT prep flash cards: any idea what palanquin, pachyderm or falderal means? And those are just in the first song. (Your mom, no doubt, would be proud.)
Indie rock has a classic David vs. Goliath complex, the sense that it’s constantly going up against the huge corporate music machine (then again, it usually is). Though indie record labels like Merge, Sub Pop, Kill Rock Stars and Matador have all found success with breakout acts like the Arcade Fire, the Postal Service, Elliott Smith, Belle and Sebastian, and so on, they remain steadfastly independent, refusing to sell out to the faceless conglomerates that dominate the music business. Still, like the immigrant Jewish businessmen and sole proprietors of the early to mid-20th century, indie labels must rely on their founders’ entrepreneurial spirit—and chutzpah—to survive in an increasingly cutthroat business.
Like Seth Cohen, who’ll no doubt be stuck in high school for at least the next five years, the frontmen and the business of indie rock also will be unchanging for years to come. The music may sound a little different. There may be new bands wowing the crowds at South by Southwest and CMJ. But those dark-haired brooders who’d rather read Allen Ginsberg than Motor Trend will always have a special place in this Jewish girl’s heart.
Doree Shafrir is an author and host of the Forever35 podcast; she was previously a senior editor at BuzzFeed News.