"Indie"

I had a conversation with a friend of mine on a coach yesterday about the current music scene. It became interesting for me when he said he absolutely hated "indie" music, which initially made me sit and think. My understanding of the term was 'any band on an independent music label.' How can you hate a band solely because of their current label stands on it's own legs in the music industry?

But then I remembered. Thanks to Q and probably some perverted game of Chinese Whispers, indie has a million-and-one meanings nowadays, and changes from person to person. I asked him what indie music was.

"Indie music is an (English) northern man singing over four chords about how he looks forward to a good piss-up on Friday night."

Of course! Taking his response loosely (as I often do), I realise he's obviously talking about Arctic Monkeys indie. He's talking about Kaiser Chiefs indie. And if for this example, we replace

"northern" with any strong accent, The Libertines, The Kooks, The View, Klaxons and so on. I'm sure Kate Nash would make it in here, she's like the lady version of these guys.
If I were to use his definition, I would have to agree with him. I also am not fond of indie music.

But then again, I like music that other parties would class as indie,

such as Psapp or Ambulance LTD or Final Fantasy. All three very different from each other, but still pigeonholed in the same

genre. More importantly, all three don't sing

about working class situations in a strong english accent. In fact, all three are from the other side of the Atlantic!
Of course, the whole western world also get into a confused mash of what indie music is.

Very popular acts such as The Arcade Fire, The Flaming Lips, Kings of Leon, Radiohead and The Killers are also listed as indie. As with Björk, Death Cab for Cutie, Beck, Franz Ferdinand, Placebo and so on.

Then you get older bands often grouped with indie in some kind of pre-indie link, such as My Bloody Valentine, Josef K, The Stone Roses, Jesus and Mary-Chain, Talking Heads and even The

Velvet Underground.

Instrumentation might have something of a hand in this. They don't want to impress you solely with their guitar, nothing too metal, nothing too progressive. They might not care about a rich perfect recording, imperfections can be welcomed with open arms. Some of them aren't afraid to use a xylophone, saxophone or stylophone if they wanted. Acoustic guitars will be found somewhere or everywhere.

Lyrically, they can sing about absolutely

anything. Alcohol, semen, robots, girls, Franz Kefka, whatever.

Indie is the worst music genre.

There is no common link that holds all indie bands together. Every other genre works like this:

a has x
b has x
c has x
x is common in this genre.

With indie it's like

a has x
b has x and y
c has y
d has y and z
e has z
a, b, c and d are all indie because they can be linked together.

But I assure you, a doesn't sound a thing like e.

This leads me back to my friend's definition and the bands he considers indie. Why are those

bands considered indie at all? I think it's one of two things:

• These artists, as with most artists, started out on small labels. Making them remain "indie" even after they are bought out by EMI.
• Lyrical content is often very explicitly brought down to the consumer's (i.e. the common working-class man's) level. And usually each word can be taken at face value without the need for thought or imagination.
  

The latter point is most likely what also makes it so popular, since these kind of people make up a majority of the popular music consumers in the United Kingdom. That's also the reason why bands like that never make much of a mark stateside, these songs just reek of British culture.

In twenty years these songs will sound so unbelievably dated. I've been trying to avoid politics throughout this post (which is really impossible when writing about a music movement), but they will most certainly purely exist as a reminder of what the country was like

back when no one wanted to do anything. That is in the hope that people will be doing things by then, of course. People would be wondering if Britpop ended at all.

God, it's like the greasy, unmotivated stepson of the punk movement.

I prefer to consider indie music the same way I'd consider any other art form with "indie" in

front of it (indie film, indie comics, indie design). A small collective of DIYers standing up against the mighty publishers and labels and forming a small, but successful little niche for themselves.
This would include bands like The Delgados, who owned their very successful scottish music label Chemikal Underground Records purely from scratch and with little money in 1994. This will also include lo-fi royalty like Daniel Johnston, R. Stevie Moore and Nick Currie, who prefer making albums in their own home with often terrible self-production and absolutely no input from their music label, but still release brilliant records nonetheless.

But now I don't have a genre. My definition does not describe a style of music. It decribes a style of making music, but not a style of music.

If any genre can be pulled from this, it'd be that the music doesn't necessarily have to be pleasing to the ear. It can deviate entirely from the poptone laws that create the perfect number one hit, and it usually does. But it doesn't have to as to be "indie".

All in all, I hate the use of the term "indie music". Not even a thousand word article brought me any closer in understanding what it all means. From what I can tell, it's just a lazy blanket term for artists that can quite easily be put in a more suitable slot.

Tune in next week when I rant about how much I hate the "alternative" music genre! Or not.