friends& - Man of Constant Sorrow

Here, at last, is a music video that understands the true tragedy of the 2000s indie rock era: not the music itself, but the Pitchfork score. A 5.7. The film lingers on this number like a coroner noting cause of death. Director Nate Wilson, working alongside Dozzy Chroma, has constructed a short work about the specific grief of caring deeply about something that the internet has already decided is mid, and he has done so by setting it in a futuristic Williamsburg populated by stomp-clapping street performers who behave as though Arcade Fire never stopped being important. This is, in its way, a document of a very particular kind of suffering.

The anti-commercialization thesis sits at the center of the project with the confidence of a man wearing a vintage flannel to a board meeting. The video's concern with selling out belongs to a long and honorable tradition of bohemian anxiety that stretches back well before the current cycle of social consciousness reached its present intensity. What is notable is how the film deploys its critique: not through earnest speechifying, but through the image of two people dissolving into ketamine use and mutual emotional destruction because the algorithm did not love them back. The lecture energy is present, but it is at least wearing interesting clothes. The anti-capitalist undercurrent is real, though it is the anti-capitalism of someone who genuinely loved LCD Soundsystem, not of someone who has read the syllabus.

The social markers here are sparse. The cast is diverse in the way that a Williamsburg street corner simply is diverse, without apparent programmatic intent. There are no LGBTQ+ themes, no climate concerns, no body positivity messaging. This is a film about indie rock grief, and indie rock grief is, historically, a very specific and not especially intersectional affliction. The project scores low across most of our diagnostic criteria, which is either a mark of artistic focus or evidence that the filmmakers were too busy reckoning with their Pitchfork score to attend to the fuller curriculum of contemporary cultural obligations. Both explanations are plausible.