Arctic Monkeys‘ debut album was simply massive.
Of course, that isn’t telling you anything new. Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, released 10 years ago on January 23, 2006, was the fastest-selling debut album of all-time in the Monkeys’ native Britain, and it moved 1.5 million albums in the UK. No, the massive I’m talking about ventures outside of easily quantifiable metrics like sales. Arctic Monkeys debut was huge both on a personal level and for the still-fledgling idea of a band pushing themselves to stardom primarily via the internet.
I’d like to start with my own story. In 2005, I was all of 15, and I was (and remain) an unrepentant music nerd, digging deeper into the catalogs of the huge artists everyone knows to find B-sides and demos to share with my friends. I got a rush from slipping songs like “Erotic City” into a mix CD for a friend who loved “Little Red Corvette.” (Of course, the B-side to “Let’s Go Crazy” is not a super deep cut, but I’ll counter that I wasn’t even old enough to drive.) It was farther down than what the radio played, and that’s all that mattered. I’d dig through loads and loads of mislabeled file-sharing garbage to find all kinds of things like that to share, mostly excellent album tracks from established artists that everyone knew or ’80s and ’90s also-rans.
Arctic Monkeys were something different. When I stumbled across their demo, Beneath the Boardwalk, I fell for the band nearly instantly. Even more exciting than the exotic — to my young, American ears, anyhow — tales of partying in England was the idea that I was in on the ground floor. This band was the ultimate find, something to hip my friends to that hadn’t been out for years. This was a new, great band that wasn’t just some punk-rock sh*tkickers from a few towns over.
I searched around for more on the band and found a few early mp3 blogs, who all informed me that I was about the millionth kid to go through this process with the band. Didn’t matter that they harshed my trailblazer buzz, I started down the music blog wormhole and never looked back. In a very real way, I have this band to thank for falling into what I do.
But what about those blogs? They were putting in the work, building up the hype, and linking back to the band’s MySpace. Largely unpaid bloggers were declaring this band the Next Big Thing, a Band To Know, a definitive way to score cool points. Every living person has worked furiously since the beginning of the ’10s to scramble away from the “hipster” label as fast as their chukka boots can carry them, but at the time, these websites were absolutely built on being there first. Scouring them was a way to become a resource for bands on the verge, to know about it “before it was cool” (a phrase that soon became so hated as to become a meme).
But I’ll be real, I was a teenager without the necessary self-awareness to distance myself from the hipster narrative. I was just happy to be the first of my friends to know (and I bet if many of those bloggers were honest with themselves, they’d say the same). That excitement, that sense of satisfaction about being the first, is a big part of the reason why Whatever People Say I Am going off like gangbusters was such a big deal.
Here it was, the biggest band in the world. And we planted our fandom flags first. To the large publications who had been caught sleeping, this looked like a coup. A band largely made outside of their sphere of influence was briefly moving Beatles numbers.
Hindsight would reveal that it was less the beginning of a surge and more the crest of a wave. Arctic Monkeys’ debut was the crowning achievement of the unprofessional and unwashed blogger class. Over the next several years, the best blogs got bought out or went corporate. The mainstream world reasserted itself, but not before the crash of Arctic Monkeys wave took its toll. SPIN stopped printing and NME is free now. The band has been called “the group that killed NME,” but that’s not entirely accurate; NME just reorganized and their website gets way more hits than any amateur blogging for fun. And the band? They’re maybe stronger than ever with a Grammy nomination that came as soon as last year.
Whatever People Say I Am and its success showed off the so-called “promise of the Internet.” The one that says that folks without enormous, corporate backing — doing things for the fun of it — could hit it big and make change. It didn’t last forever, but for a brief moment, the kids and the blogs had won.
