It always felt fitting, in a way, that Drag City abstained from participating in the tech-dollar feeding frenzy that is the music streaming ecosystem. It suited the music the Chicago-based independent label has issued over the years: freaked-out, wide-eyed, with an ear bent ever so obliquely toward the traditionally unit-moving sounds of rock and pop. Even if the sounds their artists issued were disparate, they tended to be united in this sort of observant outsiderdom. They were shaggy-haired zoners, hippie-ish skeptics of capital. That they were conscientious objectors of the streaming wars was right, in a cosmic sense.
But the world changes, and even as some of the labels most notable acts were still lobbing cherry bombs at streaming giants, they decided to port a majority of their catalog to Apple Music and Bandcamp last year (though the latter the use mostly as a webstore: only one track from each of the releases is streaming there). They didn’t make any public statements about the decision, as far as I can tell, but the seal was broken. This past weekend, when a significant portion of the catalog came to other streaming services like Tidal and Spotify, it was more or less the fulfillment of an inevitability—a final acknowledgement that ( sigh) this is the way we’re going to be listening to music now I guess.
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But the loss of one of the streaming service’s last great holdouts is ultimately a gain for you, the theoretical Spotify subscriber who does not own physical editions of Drag City records (obviously, go buy those too). If you’re not a music critic on Twitter or a big old nerd like me, there is a decent-to-good chance that you have stumbled upon this link with only a passing familiarity with the label outside of a handful of excellent albums by Joanna Newsom. I have bad news for you: those have yet to make it to Spotify, on account of the service being, in her estimation, “a villainous cabal.” Who am I to argue?
The good news though, there’s now hundreds of hours of other music with a similar spirit—a long history of hyperliterate deconstructionists busting up the established history of this thing we call rock music and reassembling it in their own image. Some of the label’s most notable acts are still holding out from Spotify, et al., but below is an education of sorts on the sorts of freaks who’ve inhabited the label across the decades. You may know some of these—and if you work at a left-of-center-leaning record store in the Midwest you will certainly have gripes with my skewed collection of records below—but if there’s any you’ve never heard, you’re going to want to spend some time living in their strange worlds.
(Update: Since the original publication of this article a number of Royal Trux’s records have made their way to streaming services. Consider those equally essential.)
Various Artists, Hey Drag City (1994)
Gastr Del Sol, Crookt, Crackt, or Fly (1994)
Flying Saucer Attack, Further (1995)
Silver Jews, American Water (1998)
Loren Mazzacane-Connors and Alan Licht, Hoffman Estates (1998)
Edith Frost, Telescopic (1998)
U.S. Maple, Acre Thrills (2001)
Sir Richard Bishop, Polytheistic Fragments (2007)
Scout Niblett, The Calcination of Scout Niblett (2010)
Bill Callahan, Apocalypse (2011)
Ty Segall and White Fence, Hair (2012)
Bitchin Bajas, Bajas Fresh
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