okay so there you are, age 16 with an ill-advised haircut, awkward and almost totally alone, sitting cross-legged on the floor with Alaina in a venue called Scenic on Avenue B on a saturday afternoon in the middle of the winter listening to kimya dawson channel jonathan richman and sing about how much she loves her mom. you are wearing a t-shirt you bought from the merch table at kimya’s last show, which she made you on the spot, drawing KIMYA DAWSON LOVES YOU with a picture of a panda on a plain white Hanes crew-neck with a sharpie, which it turns out is the most cost-effective way to make merch and probably the only way she can afford. you are there because you love anti-folk more than anything. it is punk without anger, folk born out of the last bohemian days of the east village, it’s pure honesty, and heedlessly unfashionable. the moldy peaches (together and seperately) and jeffrey lewis and herman dune and Olive Juice Records are singing to you like no one had before and no one has since, singing with anti-folk’s pervasive sense of its own limited appeal and in a way that guarantees they will never sell out a venue bigger than a three-car garage, which it is perfectly okay with.

as you sit there cross-legged, freak-folk is getting big but you find it unrelatable and needlessly weird to the point of disingenuousness (by now everyone knows that devendra is playing the same game as Edward Sharpe but in 2004 it wasn’t that clear), and dance-punk is big too, but as a high school weirdo you have literally never willingly danced, are not a punk, and are definitely not asking for more cowbell. devendra banhart, selling out shows on the heels of curating a compilation and releasing two records that will make his subgenre an indie household name, is a mystery wrapped in an enigma with purposely no history and beard-based wisdom he brought back from “the forest”.

james murphy needs you to know he is sneering down his nose at you, past his vintage microphone, running an insanely trendy record label with an encyclopedic comprehension of the history of popular music. he is the Master Hipster.

but somehow both of them seem kind of desperate for popular attention and critical approval compared to kimya dawson and jeffrey lewis, both of whom will be the first to tell you they are ugly and poor, ineptly strumming cheap guitars on stools in front of 23 people in a venue that will soon go out of business. you and kimya dawson are aware that the music criticism community has never had any intention of taking anti-folk seriously, and she writes songs about that regarding never being cool, and those are the songs that resonate with you, because deciding it’s okay to not ever be cool seems like a happier life than always trying to be cool.

the mark richardson column about Jonathan Richman celebrates him and calls him a punk for loving his family, for being himself, for his prescient sense of the navigating the music business, and for not changing despite what’s cool and what’s not. Anti-folk deserves the same celebration. Just download the Moldy Peaches self-titled record and you’ll see what i mean.

so now it’s almost six years later, and The Bundles record comes out, which is what prompted you to write this. Pitchfork, in yet another pointed attempt to dismiss anti-folk (as if anyone was unclear on where they stood), puts quotes around the word antifolk in the The Bundles review, as if to call into question whether or not anti-folk was even a real subgenre in the first place (meanwhile the staff is working around the clock to ensure that chillwave gets its due). the The Bundles record is kimya and jeff lewis doing pretty much what they did 10 years ago, BEING THEMSELVES, which is the opposite of the genre-hopping, perpetual coolhunting game that james murphy and devendra banhart have been engaging in during that time. i’m not saying some great music hasn’t come out of it, but that’s not my point here.

Devendra is on Warner Brothers releasing light fare and i am not exaggerating when i say no one has put out a freak-folk album in years, james murphy is singing songs about a lifeless nightlife scene that is populated primarily by chloe sevigny and the men who photograph her, and posing for pictures with his designer sunglasses and a leather blazer like the asshole he is trying to tell us he is. it’s also worth mentioning that no one has put out an album that they would call dance-punk in years either because that sub-genre has joined the untouchable caste. again NOT THAT THEY HAVE NOT PUT OUT GREAT SONGS AND GREAT RECORDS, because they undeniably have, but i mean to say that if staying true to yourself and not changing based on the sound and ideas that are fashionable is your goal (a value that Mark Richardson holds jic you think i’m the only one), staying true to your vision as an artist and your sound and your ideas about the music and art you wanna make, neither devendra banhart or james murphy has succeeded. perhaps they have succeeded on other terms? i mean you could say that they’ve progressed as artists while anti-folkers have not, but as i sit here listening to Drunk Girls and Angelika, it seems like they are just trying to stay one step ahead of being so last year.

i just reread everything above and realize that i might come off bitter about how the world has treated anti-folk vs. how the world has treated (what i’ve identified as) trend-hoppers, BUT I’M really NOT, because in like the weirdest twist of fate in the music business i can think of, the movie that moldy peaches songs are the heart of made $150 million at the box office, the soundtrack sold more than every devendra banhart and lcd soundsystem album ever combined, and the world has ironically made kimya dawson rich. so it doesn’t matter that Pitchfork will shit on anti-folk forever, and fall more in love with james murphy every day. the public has spoken about what kind of indie will cross over. humanity loves this song. really this whole thing reminds me of that rap adage, “get money stay true.”