by Selene Ashewood ’22

Since a new decade started a few months ago, trends are being established as new eras, and fads are being established as new trends. Thanks to recent culture shifts on what the basic teenager is like, indie pop has flooded their and young adults’ streaming services. 

This music genre is softer, has less instrumentals and electronic configuration, and generally sounds like it requires less to produce. Growing numbers of high schoolers and college students are no longer interested in the top forty on the radio unless it’s Billie Eilish. Staple artists of indie pop include Lana Del Ray, MGMT, and Clairo. 

In researching if Clairo even fit into this category of music, thousands of chat forums discussing her peculiar success story popped up. As explained in an article from The Ringer, “To the large majority of her fans, Clairo’s rise was the quintessential anyone-can-do-it success story of the viral era. But a vocal minority took to blogs and Reddit threads to wonder, after digging into her family history, whether it was in fact a more old-fashioned and familiar story than anyone else was letting on.” 

In North Brooklyn, there is a circuit of music venues used pretty much only by indie and underground bands. These venues are mostly concert spaces, but a few are recording studios where undiscovered groups can sign up to record their songs for free in a professional space. An example of this is the Rubber Tracks studio provided by Converse. 

Geoff Cottril was formerly Converse’s chief marketing officer, and one of the executives behind Rubber Tracks. In 2011, he said his reasoning for providing a free state of the art studio was because the company took notice of how much the music industry did for Converse’s business.  This was said right before his daughter, Clairo, would upload her first song cover on Youtube.

After it was discovered who her father was, fans were suspicious as to why he hadn’t been mentioned in any of Clairo’s interviews. Many take this as proof that she was simply set up by her dad and his colleagues to start her career. A less extreme perspective is that her hit songs and her debut album didn’t have much trouble getting in front of producers. Even if she somehow did all of this on her own, it wouldn’t be surprising if we saw her being paid to wear Chuck Taylor shoes sometime soon.