How to Avoid Being Called an Industry Plant
Or, why does everyone hate Wet Leg so goddamn much?
There’s nothing a frothing, new music hating public loves more than to hate on pretty young girls playing rock music. And there’s no better fodder for that hate than Wet Leg.
If you’re scratching your head, I’ll bring you up to speed.
In the summer of 2021, a catchy, tongue-in-cheek, almost monotone song with lyrics simultaneously coy and outrageous started making the indie rock rounds.
Within months it was inescapable. Soon, a second single joined the first: catchier, raunchier, more absurd.
Industry plant rumors started flying immediately. Whispers and suspicions about Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers, the pair of innocent-looking young women behind the music, ran rampant.
Where did they come from? How was it possible that Domino had already signed them? Did they actually know how to play instruments? Did they write the songs themselves? What was with the whole prairie-girl-singing-sexy-songs schtick?
By the time their self-titled debut came out in April 2022, Wet Leg had already divided listeners into two polarized camps:
The obsessed fans (mostly women), and
The outraged keyboard warriors (mostly men).
Neither the Harry Styles’ cover of Wet Dream, nor the band’s double Grammy win soon after that, lent them much credibility with the second group… though of course their fame continued to skyrocket.
Three years and many festival circuits later, Wet Leg has released their highly anticipated follow-up album, Moisturizer.
I had hoped that the discourse (as the adults think the kids say) amongst the detractors would have mellowed out a little bit in the interim.
No such luck.
What even is an industry plant?
You’ll likely find as many opinions as there are supposed plants, but there’s certainly a vague agreement on a few elements:
Unlike “real” musicians, who have to work at their craft and hustle relentlessly before anyone takes notice, industry plants emerge fully formed and label-backed. They are children of celebrities, well-connected, and have the full weight of the music industry (that monolithic beast!) propping them up.
“People online seem to think that someone is an ‘industry plant’ if they appeared out of nowhere. But that is often precisely how fame works, especially on the internet.” -
Where people are divided is whether so-called industry plants have any talent, whether they know how to sing or play, whether it truly matters if a musician is a plant, or whether it’s possible to confirm that anyone was “planted” in the first place.
If you ask me, the only true industry plants are pre-fab bands made by TV executives for game shows or other multimedia entertainment: K-Pop groups, boy bands, and the ultimate industry plant to end all industry plants — The Monkees.
What is it exactly about Wet Leg that makes them so easy to revile?
Wet Leg formed through good old fashioned school friendship, so accusations of managerial manufacture are unfounded. Yes, it was in a fancy music school (and we’ll get to the implications of that a bit later), but it does make it difficult to claim they have zero ability. They compose their own songs, play their own instruments, write their own lyrics… it feels strange to suggest otherwise.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder of course, but their actual music (which I adore, for what it’s worth) isn’t anything particularly novel or shocking. I would have almost been more understanding (though no less annoyed) if the most commonly levied criticism against them were that they were too derivative of older bands — Pavement, Sonic Youth, The Breeders. But that’s not the issue.
No, their existence is somehow an affront to music itself.
Naturally, Wet Leg isn’t the only band to hold this dubious honor, but they have a lot in common with other artists that have been bullied in the same way:
They’re women. It doesn’t matter that they’ve added men to their official lineup; too little too late, at this point. They started off as a “girl band” and that’s what they’ll always be.
They’re “selling sex.” Even before Rhian’s recent transformation from prim schoolgirl to hotpants-clad shit-stirrer, the band was accused of relying on their looks to get by.
Their music is fun. Fun music is hard to take seriously, especially when women make it. Pop music has morphed into a
”girl’s genre” over the decades, so we generally allow them to have their silly fun. But rock? Why, that’s a man’s game. We don’t let women rock unescorted unless they’re going to give it the reverence it deserves.
“Ultimately, the legend of The Rockstar is as tired as the men still clinging to it. As long as we continue to revere these ‘bad boys,’ rock will remain a geriatric boys' club, stuck in the past and out of touch with the present.”-
The indie credibility test
I can already hear you bristling.
“But there are plenty of women who fit these criteria and don’t get accused of being industry plants! Lots of women play rock! Maybe if Wet Leg bothered to make good music nobody would accuse them of anything!”
And to that I say:
The fact remains that the combination of fun + female + sexy is catnip to those who love to cry “industry plant.”
Behold my highly unscientific diagram.1
When I first showed an unlabeled version of this chart to a friend, he immediately dubbed the top right “the misogyny quadrant,” which I think does an even finer job.
Regardless, if you accept this stratification, and I know that’s a big if, you can see some patterns emerge.
Serious + not sexualized = critical darlings before poptimism took hold. Real music as defined by the gatekeepers.
Fun + not sexualized = laddish fun, quirky nerdery, or maybe pop punk. Unserious in the acceptable way.
Serious + horny = yearning, romantic, possibly political. This is the stuff of poetry, so it gets a pass.
Fun + horny = DANGER ZONE… for the girls, gays, theys, and POC.2
I didn’t intend to exclude men from the “horny” side of the scale, nor to exclude women from the “lads” category. You could throw Harry Styles, Troye Sivan, and Jarvis Cocker in the top right, and Kimya Dawson in the bottom right. And many others besides.
The lethal combination is having fun while being hot and also a woman.
I think you’ll find that with limited exceptions, women manage to escape “industry plant” territory only if they stay serious or tone down the sex appeal.
If they make fun music, it can’t be sexy.
If they make sexy music, it can’t be fun.
If they make fun music that’s also sexy… well, they can’t be women.3
But wait — where’s the “rich kid” axis?
If I could add a third dimension to that graph, it would be rich vs. working class. We all know how difficult it is for musicians to break into the industry, so anyone with a leg up is an automatic villain.
Perhaps you remember The Last Dinner Party, who had one of my favorite debuts of 2024.
Even more than Wet Leg, the manic pixie dream girls from the Isle of Wight, these five (FIVE - my god!) posh prep school grads could barely get through an interview without having to defend their honor as musicians.
In a world where successful, major label bands have to couch surf to make profits from touring, it’s not exactly punk rock to flutter onto a festival stage carefree in lace and brocade.
We root for the proletariat, not the bourgeoisie, and we love to see a band that earns their keep. So much so that many people have come to expect that musicians suffer for their art. If simply wanting creature comforts is tantamount to selling out, then we certainly can’t abide the silver spoon.
Unless it’s attached to a dude.
You know what other bands are full of rich, art school kids and/or nepo babies?
Black Country New Road. The Strokes. black midi. Inhaler. Blood Orange. MGMT. Sufjan Stevens.4
Where are their industry plant accusations?5
Perhaps there is some accounting for taste
Music taste is personal. It’s deeply rooted in our own nostalgia. Hell, I rely on that nostalgia to make music recommendations for you. I’m not fighting it.
But I do wonder why it so often has to be the sole lens through which we decide whether to accept new music. Especially “controversial” new music. Or maybe just when that music is made by women?
We all have our personal pantheons, but in this case the only connection between Wet Leg and the older bands this guy compares them to is that they’re all women. Yikes.
If they’d been women who had influenced Wet Leg, or who at least had a similar sound, I don’t think I’d have noticed anything amiss.
As it stands, the argument here seems to be: "I grew up with women who sounded like this, so these women who sound like another thing entirely are bad because they don’t sound the way I think women who rock are supposed to sound." Is that meaningful critique? To me, it just sounds like gatekeeping masquerading as nostalgia.
To be clear:
You’re not obligated to like any music by any artist.
You don’t need a good reason to dislike them, either.
Ideally, you’ll give a little thought next time you dismiss a new release out of hand, and question where your immediate negative reaction may have come from.
Or you can skip the self-reflection entirely.
Pay what you can for a subscription.
I already regret my placement of Black Country New Road, so all of this is obviously up for debate. I’m just ILLUSTRATING A POINT, okay?!
If there’s any true exception to this, it’s age. You get to be a fun, sexy woman if you’re also older. Age adds gravitas naturally, but also a host of other problems.
Or at the very least they can’t just be women. It helps if they have a a man or several in the band — think Confidence Man or L'Impératrice. Yes, I know Wet Leg officially has male band members now, but recall that they established themselves originally as a duo. The internet never forgets (and neither does their new album cover).
“But what about Clairo or Maya Hawke or…“ CHECK THE DIAGRAM, like what did we JUST talk about.
I didn’t say they deserve them; these are all great musicians. And yes, there are women in some of these bands! But they still aren’t “girl” bands.
The older I get the more I want my music to be fun. I’d much rather that than a bunch of dudes being all, “Pain… think about it, yeah?”
I love this piece. I know it’s not the point you were making but I do find myself critiquing music by just asking, “Does it have a good beat and can I dance to it?”
It's gotta be hard for some of these self-deigned gatekeepers to see how irrelevant they've become. I lot of the screenshots you posted read like death rattles.
As for Wet leg? I said it earlier; their first record was great. Haven't listened to this one yet, but I assume it'll be good too. And if not, so be it. Doesn't mean someone else won't fall in love with it.