youngadultfiction

Which I stole from here.

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Its the age old question, as old as “Why don’t nice girls like me?”, but this article, though long, po-faced and a bit confusing and shit at times, does attack it from an American perspective, which is interesting.

Indie hasn’t meant anything in the UK as long as I’ve been alive, by which I mean it has meant lots of things but not any I particularly agree with, though there’s no reason why I shouldn’t. When I first “got into” music, it was 2005-or-so and I heard about by bands by reading Wikipedia’s page of “Indie rock bands” (which isn’t there any more, probably because it was the source of constant editing) so indie meant to me: Arcade Fire, Neutral Milk Hotel, …And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead, etc. etc.

But to people I knew at school indie meant: We Are Scientists, Arctic Monkeys, fuckin’ Kasabian (the rock part of indie rock has long since be dropped). It meant that to them because Indie = NME, Indie = MTV2, Indie = Zane Lowe’s Radio 1 show. Which it didn’t to me. And still doesn’t, come to think of it.

In the UK, Indie lost its meaning before I was aware of music, maybe even before I was born. Somewhere between The Smiths on TOTP and Oasis playing Knebworth, Indie lost its meaning. Or maybe it was when the Sex Pistols got famous. Or maybe it was before any of that - it was Joe Meek getting a British novelty hit to the top of the US Hot 100. That was soooooooooo indie.

But, wait, Indie hasn’t lost its meaning, remember - it just doesn’t mean what I think it means. And it never did in the UK, at least to me. And now it doesn’t mean what I thought it meant in the US, as this article examines.

I viewed Indie in two exact ways: Musical and (North) American.

I don’t care if Modest Mouse were signed to a major when I heard them, they were still more indie than Arctic Monkeys - pretty much everyone in Britain has heard “I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor”, less have heard “Float On”.

So I guess I viewed Indie in three ways: Musical, (North) American and Unknown.

The problem of course was that Unknown is always subjective - I didn’t know anyone who listened to Arcade Fire when I was 15, but I still had to wake up at 8am one morning to secure a ticket for their show at a large-ish venue which sold out and was reported in the local press. But, to me, they were still Indie.

And now, 2010, today, everything’s different. Maybe. It is possible I’ve simply stopped caring about what Indie means. But it is also true that there’s been a shift on the over side of the Atlantic which would effect even my parameters of Indie.

Now, 2010, today, Indie is:………..who knows? Its movies and films and food and a way of life and places you hang out and blogs and the way you dress and the words you use and your hobbies and your opinions and the way you walk and the shape of your eyes and your taste in lovers and the books you read and the mobile phone tariff you’re on and your job and the car you drive and what time you wake up in the morning and what drugs you use and everything and nothing at all, isn’t it?

We define music genres - by we I mean people like me who have a deep, unexplainable urge to contextualise music instead of just fucking enjoying it - on our terms, picking and choosing from the sources around us. And the sources around us have increased and, in a paradoxical, snake-eating-tail manner, fed on each other. The biggest source is the internet, of course, where any context can be argued, debated, destructed, reconstructed. But we still have taste makers in print and in the other media, often ones who pick up on the internet who in turn react (usually against) the “mainstream”.

So that is the situation we have - where the personal meanings of Indie fight against each other because no two match up and this fight has got to a boiling point (or is at least approaching it) because its been picked up by the most un-Indie thing imaginable - the mainstream.

Which just gets us to the whole mindfuck centre of the problem, doesn’t it? We cannot agree on what Indie means but we need to in order the stop the mainstream (which we can agree isn’t Indie) co-opting Indie. But even the definition of Indie by what it isn’t doesn’t work; if it did, we wouldn’t have gotten into this fucking mess in the first place. Simple saying Indie = Independent doesn’t cut it, because that doesn’t incorporate what we need Indie to incorporate (e.g. a lifestyle, an outlook, an attitude, a target audience).

There is no answer to what Indie is, and there never will be. But what Indie is and if Indie is dead are two different questions - albeit with the same non-answer answer. Indie, in my view and lots of other people’s views but not everyone’s, is dead because what we took Indie to mean isn’t what those who didn’t take it to mean have taken it to mean. But to those people - who are large and numerous and probably don’t agree with each other - Indie is very much alive.

Does that clear it up?

(the smartest people always end up working for dating websites)