‘She’s Got You High’: the most 2000s indie song of all the 2000s indie songs?
As the obligatory 20-year nostalgia cycle has finally caught up with every millennial’s misspent youth in the Y2K era, it’s easy to forget just how much bad music there was in the 2000s.
While a plethora of genres was enjoying a period of commercial rejuvenation or exciting new foundations—hip hop, grime, R&B arguably ruling the roost of the day—the charts early on were otherwise saturated with soft rock drips like Travis or Starsailor heralded as the new artists of indie credibility simply because there weren’t any other options, and the soundtrack to teen rebellion was the down-tuned, nu-metal silliness that dominated Kerrang or Scuzz with obnoxious grate.
Then, just as NME began to lapse into an existential crisis, down floated from parted heavens the album that would save rock. In such a tepid climate bereft of the slightest edge, The Strokes’ Is This It was slavishly received as Sgt Pepper‘s…, The Velvet Underground & Nico, and Beethoven’s ‘Symphony No 9’ all at once, rather than a bang-average rehash of New York garage done way better previously, all indulged in by skinny-jeaned sons of enormous privilege and wealth—frontman Julian Casablancas meeting guitarist Albert Hammond Jr as students in the elite Institut Le Rosey private boarding school in Switzerland.
Digressional rants aside, what followed was a crushing artifice that was heralded by the UK music press of rock’s glorious return. Let’s be clear: Is This It, through trust funds and canny timing, did indeed usher indie’s great return, yielding groups like The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Bloc Party, Franz Ferdinand, and the occasionally brilliant Arctic Monkeys to an assured path toward alternative royalty, firmly booting post-grunge and rap-rock into the sun. Yet for every Up the Bracket or Your New Favourite Band was a tsunami of Topman sponsored-indie shit like Razorlight, The Pigeon Detectives, or, shudder, The View.
As indie curdled across the 2000s, offshoots had started to emerge. One camp had slapped each other with dayglo and poured a fetish for ’80s retro culture and cheap synths in the short-lived new rave blip, and another went for faux-anthemic mush reaching for a pretence of emotive affirmation with formulaic guitar hacks and beige, wallpaper arrangements.
Enter Mumm-Ra. Formed in Sussex’s Bexhill-on-Sea and fronted by James New, Mumm-Ra swiftly won a legion of dedicated fans amid landfill indie’s height doing their very best to irk everyone else with their by-numbers twee, contrived cult cartoon name and reports of bringing on a fucking duck toy mascot called Matthew on halfway through the shows. Their biggest single, and the third from their sole album, These Things Move in Threes, is either a whimsical traipse down a 30-something’s memory lane or a wormhole to everything horrible about the late 2000s.
Released in 2007, ‘She’s Got You High’ breaks one into a cold sweat the moment its dreary guitar chimes in, sounding like the generic bed music that would score the BBC’s roundup of O2 Wireless Festival. New’s vocal delivery couldn’t be more 2007 if it tried, that unmistakable yet impossible-to-define singing effect interchangeably from a million bands that littered the pages of NME or played on MTV2 every five minutes.
Yes, ‘She’s Got You High’ is the sound of a 2000s music industry crumpling under the weight of its moribund saturation, but is it good or bad? It’s neither. It’s just that song from that band named after a ThunderCats villain that’s now on a Waitrose advert.
