Plans

In this corner, sporting the yellow-and-green trunks and hailing from Bellingham, Washington, we have the bashful boys of Death Cab for Cutie. The appeal and trajectory of DCFC parallels--and is in large part a result of--the growing popularity of youth-dominated communities, both real and artifice, like MySpace.com and, well, high school. For most of the past decade, the newest and most sales-worthy American music trends seemed born in Middle School®. Ten years before that, most music bucks matriculated in CollegeTM. Now, the most important demographic to predicting and paying for pop-culture trends is older than tween but younger than twenty, responsible for successes like the Bait Shop and Under the Cork Tree. Among pre-frosh today, Death Cab means something more than earnest lyrics and jangly pop--it's a phenomenon of generation and identity and a community (with its own language, art, and economy) unto itself.