Retro artists who epitomize a pre-algorithmic era of music discovery
Retro-pop artist Cindy Lee doesn't give interviews, doesn't use social media, and rejects the demands made of independent artists in the streaming era. Photo: Megan Garvey/Illustration: Jackie Ray/NPR Hide caption
Toggle caption Photo: Megan Garvey/Illustration: Jackie Ray/NPR
Retro-pop artist Cindy Lee doesn't give interviews or use social media, refusing to comply with the demands of independent artists in the streaming era.
Photo by Megan Garvey/Illustration by Jackie Ray/NPR
As the headline conveys, this is a happy indie fable for 2024. A veteran of the late 2000s underground stalwarts has released his 32-track magnum opus without any promotion, via a dodgy download link designed like a GeoCities website circa 1997 by the Heaven's Gate cult. That album, Diamond Jubilee, can't be found on your favorite streaming platform, except, as it happens, on YouTube, which offers the double album as a two-hour listening challenge with no break between songs. Suddenly, Pitchfork is singing its praises, bestowing it with the highest score the review site has given to a new release in four years. In an instant, the name on everyone's lips was Cindy Lee, the flamboyant onstage persona of Canadian musician Patrick Flegel, whose post-punk band Women enjoyed a hot, fast rise in popularity for several years before breaking up in 2010.
Flegel doesn't use social media, doesn't give interviews, releases records on small labels or alone, and is almost entirely removed from the marketing and distribution paradigm of the streaming era. “Right now I feel like being an outlaw,” Flegel said last year, urging artists to remove their music from Spotify, where they're “begging for a penny per play” (next to the free album download link on their website, there's an option to suggest a $30 donation). “If I can do it myself,” they continued, “I want to bet on myself and have total control.” And yet, within days of the Pitchfork review, Cindy Lee's 27-date spring tour sold out. Whether that's ultimately a good thing or not remains to be seen. The day after Lee's show at Milwaukee's Cactus Club on May 3, it was announced that the remaining 12 dates were canceled for personal reasons. Either way, this story is the stuff of independent musicians' dreams from 20 years ago. But things are very different now, which is to say, much worse. At least, not for indie musicians, not for someone like Spotify CEO Daniel Ek. Scroll down on the company's website and you'll find Flegel offering harsh words for Ek (“Spotify's CEO is a thief and a war pig”).
It's easy to praise the vintage charm of Diamond Jubilee's presentation, but it's not so easy to pinpoint the record's timeless sound. Those who have heard the raucous angst of much of Flegel's past work may be surprised by its lightness, or what you might call easy listening. Like many others, I discovered Cindy Lee's music in February 2020, when her ghostly-sounding fifth album, What's Tonight to Eternity, was setting a perfectly dark mood for the year ahead. Flegel had been working on Diamond Jubilee since at least that year, and at the time referred to the work in progress as a feel-good counter to the “gloom and taboo” of her previous records. Ambitious yet accessible at the same time, the deceptively refreshing record collector rock feels years in the making.
Youtube
Like the midcentury girl group at the center of the mood board, Cindy Lee's songs are about love, especially love lost. Lee is lonely, melancholic, and on a Greyhound to the Canadian border with only her memories. Depending on where you're from, you might follow these wistful melodies back to the Ronettes and the Righteous Brothers, stopping along the way in the Motown soul, Velvet Underground fuzz, and camp cool of bands in Russ Meyer movies. Or maybe you were hanging out in the blogosphere 15 years ago, when bands (female and otherwise) were warping retro pop sounds en masse, and it was as if every young urban millennial was rewatching Twin Peaks at the same time. Lately, I've been coming back to the blog-centric era of music discovery with a nostalgic affection that should only be felt for first love. It would be great to be a music lover in the pre-algorithm era!
Cindy Lee plays these songs as a fallen diva. In her black beehive wig, gold sequin dress and white New Balance sneakers, she looks ready to fall into disgrace at any moment. I half expected to see them slumped outside the Cactus Club, smoking dejected cigarettes, like the cartoonish versions of them on the cover of Diamond Jubilee. The show was scheduled for 10pm, but openers Freak Heat Waves took to the small stage near 11pm to a polite room full of punks on dates and nerds past their bedtime. Like Lee, the Canadian duo's sound is more subdued than before, the band's post-punk rage cooling to a simmer of trip-hop as Steven Lind's vocals drift by in a sleazy, time-stretched purr. Perhaps the name sounds familiar to you. He's the only one named besides Flegel in the Diamond Jubilee credits. (Flegel wrote, performed and recorded each of the record's instrumental parts to a digital eight-track, while Lind's contributions were occasional, mostly synthesizers that arpeggiated and swirled like a pot-addict's iTunes visualizer circa 2009.) There were no introductions, though Lee appeared onstage, eyes downcast, to accompany the Freaks on the 2023 song “In a Moment Divine,” his mood unclear. The expressions written on their impassive faces were unreadable; too harsh to call them shy, but deeper than apathetic. Happy? No, not really.
Then everything disappeared except for Cindy Lee and her cherry-colored Telecaster guitar, strapless and wielded like a weapon. I'd never seen anyone play guitar like them before, with the kind of unpretentiousness that only someone who'd made a deal with the devil could muster. The music seemed to come from a long time ago, its sharpness almost painful, its dreamy melodies punctuated with screams of feedback. Lee played over a backtrack of instruments, gazing beyond the crowd into some mysterious horizon. At times, they set aside the TV and sang in heroic falsettos, “The deepest darkness, the deepest blue…” (Writers liken the atmosphere of this vocal performance to Roy Orbison's scene in Blue Velvet, but I think of James' high-pitched, earnest girl group in Twin Peaks.) Sometimes a song was followed by a muffled “thank you” or a curl of ruby-colored lips that suggested a smile. The 45-minute set ended with three songs older than Diamond Jubilee, concluding with an instrumental (2020's “Cat o' Nine Tails III”) that drew a moment of stunned silence from the room, then an erupted cheer as Cindy Lee departed.
I myself am not as principled as Flegel, nor as savvy as I was in my DIY-obsessed youth. I was embarrassed when I vainly tried to burn Diamond Jubilee to a CD, only to discover quickly that my fancy laptop had no means of doing so. Was I really happy to let technology companies restrict my access to something that makes me glad to be alive? (Hopefully, by the time you read this, the external CD burner I ordered will have arrived.) I have become uncomfortably familiar with that feeling of helplessness, of being able to do less than I used to, despite the supposedly infinite options available to us in this modern age. How quickly we forget that we have other options, that the tech industry's obsession with scalability need not be our own. When music critics write about the success of Diamond Jubilee, they tend to celebrate their triumph over their perceived irrelevance, and in their newfound hope, to quip about it, to extol themselves with questions like, “Is Cindy Lee the future of music?”
To be clear, no, it doesn't have to be. I don't expect the Diamond Jubilee to be a sign of anything. The Lees expressing themselves with such excitement are nothing but themselves. So when Freak Heat Waves announced on Instagram that the rest of the tour was cancelled “due to reasons beyond our control,” I felt oddly relieved. In an age dominated by fan service, it's easy to forget that it's personal. My intuition, and the message posted on their website before the frenzy (“This will be Cindy's final US tour”), lead me to feel that this may have been the last show we've seen of Cindy Lee. What we're left with is the music. It's not a glimpse into the future, but a reminder of what we already knew: that art is for us to make in any way we choose.