In music media savvy circles like Pitchfork and Gawker, Del Rey was heralded as a no-talent viral sensation whose daddy bought her a recording contract Of course, not everyone was against her – only music fans. By the time she’d finished the evening, the internets were full of barbs and taunts, from actress Juliette Lewis’s much heralded comment that “watching this ‘singer’ on SNL is like watching a 12 year old in their bedroom when they’re pretending to sing and perform” to more typical utterances like, “I’d rather attend Tim Tebow’s Bible camp than have to sit through another Lana Del Rey song.” A few days later, a unanimous verdict seemed to have been reached that Del Rey’s was the worst appearance on SNL ever. Yet as she gripped the mike and began to sing, a wisp of anger began to waft across the twitterverse. With her lacquered red hair swept back like Veronica Lake and a pouty mouth that’s slightly askew, she is beautiful in the way that movie stars in the 1950s were: unique, passive, transfixing. Does it still exist, in Wicker Park, or anywhere else? From the perspective of a middle aged professor, there is no way I can penetrate it if it does, but my guess is that it is still a burgeoning community, both here and in Williamsburg and in Silver Lake and in San Francisco, and in a lot of other places around the globe One sign that it does exist occurred in January of 2012, Lana Del Rey (real name: Lizzie Grant), appeared on SNL to sing her internet-hit song “Video Games.” Clad in a skin tight white gown that would make 99% of the female population of the planet look chubby, Del Rey was a striking figure. And yet, as I wandered about the new Chicago (with my newfangled head phones in my old fangled ears) I wondered about Guyville. No kidding: it’s over – as far away from now as World War II was at my birth. The world we lived in then – our little group who’d always been and always will, until the end – no longer needs to exist in the same way it did: since digital downloading has ‘freed’ music from the corporate world, the indie scene such as it was is now a meaningless construct.

In the late 1990s and the 2000s, Chicago’s boats were lifted with the rising tide, like everyone else’s in America, including those in the indie scene.

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