What's in a Name? The Decade in Rock Monikers Part 9

We the People The decade of Myspace and iPhone, of personalized content and Time magazine's memorable mirror-covered "Person of the Year" issue, the '00s will likely be remembered as the Me Generation 2.0. But as the passionate politicking on either side of America's widening divide demonstrated, the more our culture atomized, the more we longed for some shred of togetherness. In popular music, that brought us the Most Serene Republic—band name as wish fulfillment? There were a slew of bands with "we" in their names, which often felt like a strategy for embracing their scattered listeners and drawing them close: Cute Is What We Aim For, We the Kings, We Are Scientists, We Were Promised Jetpacks, Here We Go Magic, You Say Party! We Say Die! (a sort of "Up With People" act in the negative), We Landed on the Moon!, Why Are We Building Such a Big Ship?, We Be the Echo, We Are the Fury, We Are the Arm, We Are the City, We Are Voices, We Are Lions, We Are Standard, We Were Pirates, Crack: We Are Rock, We're All Gonna Die, We Should Be Dead, We Are They, We Have Meteorite Sickness!, and way, weeeeay, more. More succinctly, we had the Royal We, the Editorial We and the inarguable We Have Band.

"We have band" - or, as the Minutemen put it (and Michael Azerrad reprised in the title of his overview of the American indie underground of the '80s), "Our band could be your life." Maybe that was the message of Broken Social Scene, which brimmed with an ever-shifting cast of musicians including Feist and members of Stars, Metric, Do Make Say Think (more imperatives!) and the Dears. While one of the dominant trends of the '00s was personalization and miniaturization -- with studios shrunk inside laptops and solo projects like Wavves and Owl City suddenly scrambling to recruit backup musicians upon unexpectedly graduating from the bedroom to the touring circuit -- a counter-trend saw press photos going wide angle and stages sagging, as bands like the Polyphonic Spree, the Choir Practice and the 29-strong I'm From Barcelona swelled their ranks to the point of absurdity, seemingly multiplying (within and without) like rabbits.

Which brings us back to animals. Specifically, Animal Collective. Only four people strong, they nevertheless stayed true to the second word of their name, between side projects (Avey Tare, Panda Bear, Terrestrial Tones, Jane) collaborations with the likes of Vashti Bunyan and remixes from distant stylistic outliers like Dam-Funk. Animal Collective know the power of names, and they know the power of place: one of their early recordings is titled Campfire Songs, and was recorded, more or less as promised, on a cabin porch in the woods. In a wonderful column about the proliferation of back-to-nature imagery in indie rock, Pitchfork's Mark Richardson recently wrote that the album "is wonderfully transportive: you close your eyes, and you are right there on the porch with them. And it doesn't feel like a demo for something else. The songs that make up the album feel designed for one space only: on a screened-in porch in the woods in the rain."

It was a confusing decade, sure: I Am the World Trade Center found themselves semantically on the wrong side of history, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. YACHT (and legions of yacht rockers) aped a preppy '80s aesthetic even as the economy was collapsing around us. Perhaps the less said about Das Racist, the better. But in terms of capturing the restless, homesick, open-armed spirit of the '00s—a new New Sincerity, maybe, that struggled to squeeze itself into the 174-character cracks of an increasingly mediatic culture—no band embodied it better in a single name, than Animal Collective.