Indiephilia!

I know you don't want indie defined negatively, but to the extent that there is an indie aesthetic it is based on oppositionalism, on seeing "our" music as different from the soul-less music of The Man.

The difference is perhaps that reggae / soul (to take my own example) may have a relatively limited defining aesthetic scope at any particular moment, but that changes quite fast. Indie, on the other hand, tends to a much broader aesthetic but moves on much more slowly.

Stepping aside, one thing I've never liked in music is when people criticise music for being "commercial", partly because I remember when I only liked mainstream music and hipsters would scoff at it in those terms. But I do think disliking music for being "uncommercial" is also bad - music should be liked for its own qualities. And I do think in general that indie music just gets on with being music rather than trying to chase market share.

That is what I hate about Blur - they chop and change styles all the time not as the muse moves them but as they see their bank balance shifting.

A slight problem with the position I'm adopting - I'm drifting worryingly into "we mean it, mannnnn" territory.

I think Indie is so prevalent in my musical tastes and musical collection for the reason that Indie is such a bloody catch-all term. It's like Classical - it's come so far from its original meaning that just as now the term Classical means anything with a string section, from Medieval Saltarellos to Baroque string quartets to 19th century Romantic operas.

I guess indie just means "anything that still has guitars" which actually doesn't ring true, either then, cause then how can synthpop bands like Add N To X and Ladytron still be "Indie"?

The most committed indieophile (probably even including myself) will probably tell you "I don't necessarily like indie, I like Pop Music!" but their definition of pop will be an odd one that includes the Ramones and the Smiths.

Whenever we try to define indie we fail. Because there are too many definitions, some aesethetic, and some supposedly financial. So how are we supposed to tell you *what* we like in indie, and *why* we like it when we can't even define what IT is?

Would it horrify people if I told them that the REAL reason that I love the Smiths is not even for the lyrics, even though they often touch my heart and my mind but for those blessed TREMOLOS that Johnny Marr felt obliged to pour over every loving guitar chord. So I like the indiest band in the world for spacerock reasons. So there.

My main gripe abt indie: it is a cultural cul-de-sac. It rarely seems to lead its listeners on to other types of music/ways of expressing yrself, and draws from the smallest number of interesting sources (Nick Drake, Pixies, Nirvana, The Byrds, The Smiths, Primal Scream, The Shop Assistants blah blah)

OK, we'll put it another way. Take your favourite indie band. They are good at what they do. Why is it worth doing?

I'm sorry Tom, a problem here is that I'm not really a theorist of music, more someone who strings together in-jokes.

Thinking about this issue a bit more, the reason I like indie music is that it's G*R*A*T*E.

It just strikes me that with almost every other kind of music there are long justifications available of why it's good, whereas I don't remember reading one for indie. Most indie writers work on the assumption that indie is good and worth writing about and then take it from there, it seems to me.

Like - and I'm sorry to harp on this again - I say "I like [Britney]" where [Britney] stands for all of pop and someone says "I dont believe you" or "Why on Earth?". I say "I like [Pavement]" where [Pavement] stands for all of indie and nobody says "You don't really", very few people say "But why?" and the most common response is either "Yes my favourite album is..." or "No a better band are...".

But there is nothing inherently naturally likeable in the sounds [Pavement] make so why is this interrogatory stage skipped? It seems to be assumed that as a white late twentysomething male who owns a lot of CDs my interest in indie is 'natural' and questioning it would be somehow perverse. This ties in with Nitsuh's thread - do the people who like indie like it because it's made by 'their sort of people'.

Now I'm a bit sad that this thread isn't the celebration of indie I hoped it might be - so I'll leave these thoughts for now and think instead about why indie *is* good.

That is... TEXTURE.

But any "what's so great about fucking indie...?" thread is going to suffer the same fate. No one can agree on what it is. How can you decide why something is great if you can't even agree what it is?

What's so great about fucking hip-hop? What's so great about fucking pop? What's so great about fucking jazz? Can you give an honest and objective answer to any of these questions that doesn't come down to personal taste? You're just overly defensive about your Britney fucking Spears obsession. No one would ask you if you said your favourite artists "Well, what the fuck is so great about jazz?"

And you ask this question as if Britney were the antithesis of indie when, TECHNICALLY, due to her record label, Britney is bloody indie.

I suppose this is why 'we' talk so much about indie in negative terms - it is 'our' music so we feel more qualified to criticise it than music made by those from different backgrounds to ourselves (certain forms of hip-hop, for example).

I never asked for anything objective. I want generalised expressions of personal taste, a bit of enthusiasm.

Fans of hip-hop, pop and (less so) jazz all have to defend those genres, aesthetically, in general terms. In my experience that kind of writing is often illuminating and inspiring, more so than saying "I like it because I like it" or assuming the music doesn't need that kind of writing.

If I'm defensive about liking pop it's perhaps because I'm expected to defend it so bloody often. I was using it as an example to illuminate the special treatment indie gets.

Dave 225 makes some interesting aesthetic points. So it is possible to move beyond "It's the texture" and getting all sweary at the person asking.

I think this is often a good thing.

**Indie music was/is different. It was/is more artist oriented**

This is often a bad thing.

**That is also a reason that indie is very diverse**

What, more diverse than "not-indie"?

**For me indie music is more personal. It talks to me. It shows me that there are people out there with similar feelings and thoughts as me**

Indie rarely connects with me emotionally. Commercial Pop often does - in a simple direct fashion that I love. Dusty Springfield - "What Do You Do When Love Dies", Len Barry-"1-2-3", Abba-"SOS", Daft Punk - "Digital Love" all hit the mark. Most indie doesn't, for me. I don't demand this from all music all the time though, and where indie works is where I might be able to get a similar feeling through sound alone, or some peculiar and unexpected combination of sounds and lyrics.

>>> Fans of hip-hop, pop and (less so) jazz all have to defend those genres, aesthetically, in general terms.

Do they? To whom? Do hip-hop fans really worry about 'defending' their music? I think they have more 'belief' in it than that - and they probably don't care what other people think. (I am not interested in 'defences' of hip-hop, either, so am not likely to ask fans to provide them.)

You'll probably think it superfluous, or at least over-familiar, if I say: I like pop music - so please don't hive off the word 'pop' for stuff that you like and I don't.

Now to answer the question.

I believe that taste is socially constructed. Insofar as I like 'indie', it's because I belong to a historical / economic / social / gender / cultural fraction (ie. convergence of the right factors in all those things) that have made me the kind of person that like it. If I *don't* like 'indie' (which is also kind of true), that also belongs to the same social context - as reaction vs the first set of factors, or whatever.

In other words: the reason why I have *an affiliation with independent-label guitar pop of the 1980s, and some of its appointed precursors (Byrds) and successors (B&S)* is that I am the right kind of person to have such an affiliation - I am the kind of person that you might expect to have such an affiliation.

I think there's still sth more in your question, though: you're saying, maybe: OK, given all those 'constructing' factors and determinants: what do you like about the sound of it? Is that right? I can try to answer that (ie. give you a list of sounds and effects I like), but the reasons for my like might just turn out to be more of the same 'determinants'.

Sounds I like: jangling guitars; 12-strings; chorus FX; shiny, gleaming guitar sounds - these have a kind of visceral effect on me (which is also, I assume, socially constructed).

Tambourines / percussion?: cf. eg. the rhythm tracks on Ride's 'In A Different Place' (in a way paradigmatic for me of some of the Good, though 'limited', things about 'indie'): these do something to me that I have never quite been able to define.

Lyrics: the particular effects that 'indie lyrics' can have: eg: relation to the listener's life: yes, Morrissey is paradigmatic: this can do sth for me (for usual reasons as above). BUT NB: many indie lyrics are also really BAD at doing this, and VERY IRRITATING. (eg: Shed Seven?)

General effect of 'authenticity' that underlies some indie attitudes: real instruments, real people, whatever: as described in Reynolds 86??: dubious and under suspicion, yes: but probably still has some effect on me.

Speed, rush, blast: as in a record like Ride's 'Taste', which is not a terribly 'intelligent' record, but gives me something of the sound and the experience I need.

Possible BAD thing about 'indie': its relative lack of attention to *melody*. I'm no expert, but I don't think that eg. Wedding Present, Darling Buds, were melodic genii. Too much droning and unimaginative construction. I have often thought in terms of 'generic indie melodies' (I have written a few, for pastiche purposes), and would be interested in further definition of them (think Primitives, Buds, Shop Assts - sth about the actual melodic movement is distinctive - I *think*). I have become more interested in (and tried to learn from) 'Good' melodicists: Berlin, Bacharach, Macca, et al. So 'melody' possibly = a bit of a false trail in search for what sounds GOOD about indie.

What d'you think?

My point, marred by my annoyance was this:

This idea that *you* have to defend your Britney-loving POP! tastes, while us indie kids *never* have to critically address our music's merits is utterly ridiculous. In what rarified, elitist, music-geek atmosphere does this happen? IL* and Pitchfork and whathaveyou? Not in the rest of the world.

In the rest of the world (I mean, this is the PUBLIC that is putting these artists at the top of the chart) you don't have to defend loving Britney, but you DO have to defend loving The Smiths every bloody day. I mean, this is a culture which thinks the Stereofuckingphonics are "indie".

Walk into the office where I used to work, where Britneypop or Classic Rawk was the norm, and even owning OK Computer was "daring"... your POP! obsession would not even bat an eyelid. On the other hand, if I dared to listen to music without headphones, I'd be subjected to "Yuck! That's just the same chord played over and over again for an hour with different effects and no melody!" (no, I think you'll find it's the sublime drone texturescapes of Spacemen3) or "Eurgh! What is that caterwauling? Is someone killing seals? Soundss like bleeding whalesong!" (actually, I think you'll find that's the sweeping etherial majesty of Sigur Ros) or "Is that the band that does the song about smack again?" (Grrrr, I think you'll find that's the Dandy Warhols' appealing mixture of pop melodies and spacerock texture.)

What Alex says, for me, hits the mark. I like it because it is just more personal. Contrived, manufactured POP! can occasionally hit an emotional mark (I mean, yeah, you don't have to keep reminding me that my beloved Ronettes were the manufab pop of their day) but mostly it doesn't. I mean, honestly. A song like Bootylicious is proto-dronerock and I love it, I'm the first to admit that. But mostly the genre fails to hit the mark.

There was a crap, crap indie record store in upstate NY that used to advertise itself with the slogans "You don't buy your clothes at the mall, so don't buy your records there, either." When I was a teenager, I agreed, then I decided that it was simplistic and not true. Now I'm coming back to the idea. My ass and my aesthetics don't fit into Top Shop one size fits all. So why should I try to squeeze my emotions and my sentiments and my musical tastes into this reductionist one size fits all music?

Badly produced, tinny, occasionally clumbsy, whinging, self obsessed, overly clever, melodically challenged, and everything else that indie might be, it still fits me better.

I think it's a good thing if you want bland lowest common denominator music designed to appeal passively to as many people as possible, the musical equivalent of Titanic or some piece of Arnold Shwarzenegger shite, or the kind of slard that fills TV schedules. But in any kind of aesthetic terms it's surely a bad thing.

I mean, I don't think that an artist following their own muse without any compromise is of necessity going to produce good work (it depends how good your muse is in the first place), but some commmittee of suits chasing a demographic is inherently handicapped.

back to indie music - if you want a vision of a world of indie-less hell, go read the latest Rolling Stone.

I think the one thing we can perhaps say Kate is that we work/ed in very different offices. CDs I have been praised for bringing in include the Smiths, XTC, the KLF, Dylan, and I had a long and involved conversation with an Icelandic. Most CDs arouse no comment. CDs I have been dissed/teased for listening to include Britney and Five and 'Sparky's Magic Piano'. So maybe we can advance the idea that music listeners feel defensive about the music they find themselves forced to defend in everyday life (wow big idea huh).

(I think offices which play music out loud are crap whatever the CD though. Way too 6th form common room.)

(I am still working on a post about why indie is GRATE though)

Oh aye. My team leader has recently started doing this, much to the irritation of myself and the coworker opposite.

I'm thinking about an proper answer to this thread, and will contribute one as soon as I'm feeling a little less feverish. Props to Pinefox for his response, which I enjoyed even though his definition of indie seems rather different from mine.

Tom E: it's become 'indie vs pop' because you, unlike me, keep using the two terms as opposed.

I'm not sure this quite hits the mark though.

But commercial pop and mainstream rock deal with these issues too. Metal provides a great outlet for alienated, rejected male teens, for example. The key is in Sterling's final clause - **answers not through booty-shakin' or rocking out but lionization of intellect**. Yet, I don't fully buy this - is indie more 'intelligent'? I don't think so.

Well, no, we shouldn't care about this one way or the other unless it turns out to be the only factor on which liking indie rests. Which I honestly don't believe it is. I think what we can say - and it's still not relevant - is that every genre has its share of generic, dull music. The percentage you find non-generic determines the level of interest you have in the genre. Actually that raises a completely different question....

Also note indie-love songs. On ILE's shaggy thread we've discussed how he puts women on a pedestal [then looks up their skirts, but that's a different story] calling 'em Angel and such. But how much more does indie exhalt pure love? This is an all or nothing music, very lutheran, finding yr. own personal connection to god thru study & meditation.

Go ahead and scoff, but a line from Smells Like Teen Spirit sums it up: "our little group has always been and will be until the end".

This is indie's central mythos: the tiny isolated group (or couple - or even just one, like poor old Morrissey) who, embittered and abused by the plebian hordes, retreat into their obscure and beautiful art fueled only by their intense love for one another and/or their longing for those who scorn them (ok...and sometimes heroin). All the key indie bands follow this model: Velvet Underground, The Smiths, Spacemen 3, Belle and Sebastien, The Replacements, Big Star, etc.

Indie is a way that some smart middle class kids find each other and shut out the rest. Is it the sound of kids who have been taught to hate themselves figuring out that snobbery might save them after all?

This is why indie kids are so hung up on sell-out issues - why the Cobain line above was delivered dripping in hot-buttered irony. It's music about the romance of inclusion and exclusion.

And Wasis, likewise, were a band liked by the vast majority of people who somehow thought that liking them made them part of some kind of underground movement.

I'm still on the thing that indie is externally defined - people who like the music only go on about how great it is in response to moaning whiners who feel obliged to diss it.

DV this is mental. People who like it go on about how great it is all the time then bristle when you point out that some of it isnt that great and that their music taste isn't really that broad, I assume because being 'broad-minded' is they think what sets them apart from the 'herd' in the first place. Such people are precisely the same as yr nu-metal kids. However that doesnt mean they don't love the music and this thread is trying to work out why.

I'm well aware of the fact that people from all kinds of economic backgrounds contributed to punk/hardcore/indie rock, thanks. I didn't mean to imply that indie rock could ONLY appeal to middle class kids, was ONLY created by middle class kids, or any other such nonsense. The only reason I used the term at all was to (admittedly clumsily) point out that American culture romanticizes the rich and the poor, but not the middle. Maybe the term "college-aged" is less loaded for you.

What I was trying to get at was the themes and archetypes of indie roc. Bluntly stated: the social rejects creating their own in-crowd.

I agree with DV that there are other subcultures that work on the same dynamic, but I think indie does a good job of making it simultaneously rooted in reality but still romantic - without resorting to the fantasylands of Metal, Goth or Punk.

Nirvana were indie as fuck. He killed himself when his band got too big, what more credentials do you want?

I don't, I like music.

There's only two kinds of music: The kind that Doompatrol and Andrew Williams like, and the kind that I like!

Indie -- my definition of indie, which is American and therefore runs quite broad -- is all about dress-up. It starts from a particular vision of the 4-piece pop/rock guitar band of the 60s, but its goal is not to preserve that vision: its goal is to repeat what Central Indie Influence the Velvet Underground did, which was to distort that vision in a unique manner. Granted, this is how all genres of music develop, but indie is, I think, the genre that has most actively made this quality its raison d'etre -- if we slough off the middling and the mediocre, the bands central to my definition of indie are all essentially aesthetic funhouse mirrors held up to that central ideal pop-band vision (or one another). This is especially central to the shoegazer or spacerock variations of indie (I think this is partly what Kate means when she says "texture"), and it goes a long way toward explaining why genres like trip-hop and jungle accumulated indie audiences (trip-hop was a funhouse mirror on hip-hop and soul; jungle on conventional dance music), or why when we talk about "indie" rap, we're talking about more than the fact that it's on an independent label.

So in this sense, the Indie Manifesto might be: take an existing sound and slant it. Why do I like to hear this? Partly it's that I want to have my cake and eat it to: I want to hear something that contains the central conventional thrills of music but twists them in a way that provides novelty. Why is Loveless so indie- canonized? Because understanding it is a matter of adjusting to the sonic wow-ness of it until you realize: here are the conventionally wonderful songs at its heart. (And note that that twist/slant needn't just be sonic, in the shoegazery "texture" sense -- bands like the Pixies were slanting the very form and structures of the conventional band.) The other reason I like to hear this? Because I think that looking at how something is slanted -- the difference between the starting point and the end point -- allows us to triangulate and see a whole lot about what the artist has to say about aesthetics and how they should be.

I suspect all of this because my favorite thing, while listening to indie, is for the slant of it to suddenly become transparent and allow me to see what's at the core. (I.e., the "this is different" thought vanishes and you see what just is?)

I love everything! I am the message boards! I AM ILX, THE ALPHA AND THE OMEGA.

Perhaps.

Oh, and note also that there's a certain strain of indie -- closer to the British sense of the word -- that just turns out to be the first slant carried over, i.e. Indie Rock Band Variation #1. It's ceased to be a variation -- it's now the thing that's being variated upon -- but it lingers there in the heart of all indie fans who first heard it as a variant, and I think that's what's being attacked when people say "Indie is boring, it's all just the same guitar band over and over."

You're absolutely right: variations that are successful accrete all of these follow-up explorers, who are sometimes very bad. Part of this is okay, really -- maybe the first ten bands to try and further mine Loveless were still doing something valuable, as Loveless opened up pretty rich territory to be mined; it was the 30 after that that were getting slim pickings out of it. That's the bad part, and I think it's exacerbated by precisely those workings that are unique to indie -- i.e., there's ten indie labels in town, and probably one of them will release your pale imitation of a genuine breakthrough.

What's interesting is that it's the pale follow-ups who constitute what's considered the "body" of indie, but in fact they are the ones with the least "indie" impulses -- they are the ones trying to turn a breakthrough into just a general genre, with specific conventions that can be done well or done poorly (or slanted again later, once it's taken hold). If your question is not "what's good about indie" but "why listen to those breakthroughs as genres," indie as a genre with the same sort of stable conventions as any other genre, I'd offer two things: (a) if you first heard a sound as a breakthrough, there is a part of you that will keep hearing that sound as a breakthrough until it's been completely normalized into "genre", and (b) once it has been normalized into a stable genre, you've probably already figured out how to like it as one. E.g., people have quit saying "That band just sounds like Low" -- it's understood now that the whole slowcore / saddo thing is not meant to sound like an innovation in and of itself, but is now just a coherent subgenre that can be done well, done poorly, or innovated upon.

Oh, and note that even if you're just listening to rehashes of Indie Variation 14 as "genre," you're still going to feel 14 breakthroughs away from the Sting song you just heard on the radio.

I don't know if anyone discussed the orgin of the term, but I always thought it came from "independant labels". If you're a band on an "indie", then it follows you're an "indie band". Thus, if the Smiths are on Rough Trade, then they're an indie band. But they don't play "indie music" because there is no such thing. It's interesting to read people trying to define it though. And I could be wrong.

This would probably be a helpful illustration if I had any idea what it meant.

Alright, get back to the important discussion.

i think that in its home-madeness, its idealization of the ordinary, and the myth that anybody can do this, indie (and punk to an extent) offers listeners/fans an opportunity to participate (or feel as though they are participating) in a community to a degree that [britney] pop may not.

part of the problem with this thread is that the us/canada and the british definitions of indie are at odds.

And note that part of my argument in favor of indie -- back when I was young and naive and really thought indie was just better than other genres -- was that "indie" as it was used in the U.S. represented a huge swath of shall we say "progressive" bands working in any number of fields, from Ministry to the Sundays, and thus represented a more free-floating eclecticism than listening solely to radio pop or reggae or house; all that was necessary was for the band to be doing something that seemed new and unusual. The British use of "indie" seems to refer not to the doing of the new and unusual but to a genre that has accreted around a particular new and unusual thing that someone's already done, and I'm not certain how much I can defend that -- it's like trying to explain why the conventions of the 19th century novel are interesting, without recourse to arguing that the novels themselves were good. I think this can be done, but it would be just as hard as explaining why country is good or reggae is good. (What would you say there? That country is "earthy and proud," or reggae is "joyous and soulful," or something equally vague that probably everyone feels about whatever genres they happen to like? Indie-as-genre's qualities seem to be that it's "clever and dreamy," which tells us a lot but not enough.)

Because I think we could get somewhere doing that, and it would force us to examine some assumptions that we probably take for granted -- and to figure out how much we like indie-as-genre because it just happens to be what we grew up on and how much we like it because it has qualities other genres don't.

JAMC, Smiths, Cocteau Twins, New Order, (or even the Weather Prophets, June Brides, Shop Assistants etc) were infinitely more appealing than the slick 80s pop that clogged up the charts or atrocious post-Live Aid/Q-style AOR. I loved the way as a ‘scene’ it seemed more open to other influences and sounds: Renegade Soundwave, early hip-hop, 4AD putting out ‘Pump Up the Volume’, New Order introducing me to electro etc

Then came ‘indie’ generic guitar-rock with the independent ethos of artistic integrity + creativity that labels like Rough Trade had fostered a mere historical relic. Insular, narrow-minded, backward looking ‘indie’ came to me to represent the very opposite of the values I (however naively) I had earlier admired and aspired to.

(Incidentally it helps in narrowing our definition that the UK has a national radio station which has a slot dedicated to indie music.)

there's so much shuffling of index cards on ILM; trying to make up mathematical formulae and laws to explain the fluid and immeasurable.

i like superchunk well enough, and have no problems describing what i like about that band, but i don't think that those qualities are what i like about a genre--i like superchunk, but not a lot of similar bands. what i mean is that i like the superchunkiness of the band, and not necessarily the indie-ness of them.

so how to go about answering tom's question, i have no idea.

I would have liked to see some really straight ahead honest answers to this (Kate's were the closest to that). Funny, I don't think people would have got as hung up on definitions if you asked what they really like about Pop or Jazz or Afrobeat or whatever - you would have gotten more adjective-driven descriptions of the experience of listening to the music itself. (maybe because the rules of what constitutes these genres are more clearly defined than Indie?) Indie, on the other hand, seems to draw out more observations about the social situations and the process by which the music is made.

and "clever and dreamy" works for me, nitsuh.

No Tom, you are the mentalist. i'm quite happy to listen to my music, some of which might be considered indie, some not. You're the one who keeps writing variants of "Why do people listen to all that indie shite?"

1. Indie is highbrow? It speaks in a verbal language that is typically sort of higher-brow "literate" than most other popular genres -- i.e., it is the New Yorker to chart-pop's USA Today or whatever other genre's whatever? (I wish I had British media equivalents: the London Review of Books to the supermarket tabloids, maybe.)

2. It is also musically "considered" enough to be slightly musically highbrow as well, or at least enough so to consider itself musically highbrow and act accordingly? The musical tone you get from indie bands frequently analogizes to the London Review of Books just as much as the verbal presentation does, even if these associations are culturally built and not inherent in the notes themselves. (I think that's partially the case but not completely; "Leave them All Behind," set itself up as Grand Bold Experiment in a way that no non- indie band would really try, right?)

3. Indie tends to be less agressive. It's never beats you about the head with anything; even those Massive Guitar Sound shoegazers managed to still make it subtle by wrapping it around lazy-seeming performance and fairly languid songs.

4. Indie tends not to get wrapped up in the imagery of performance; its pretentions have more to do with the sound of the music itself. You will rarely see an indie band playing conventional music but strutting amidst self-aggrandizing fog and laser shows; you are more likely to see an indie band playing stupidly, unnecessarily, unproductively weird music and yet still staring at their shoes as if nothing's going on.

I'm not even sure I believe all of the above, but maybe they're examples of the types of things we may need to say about indie in order to answer Tom's question.

Note that I don't mean to imply above that a highbrow tone necessarily makes you right -- since music has little content to be "right" about -- but only that it's a different tone in the aesthetic sense. A description of a photograph in the New Yorker and USA Today would largely be saying the same thing, but they would read very differently and you may prefer to read one or the other. And note that arguments in favor of New Yorker-ish things tend to sound a lot like arguments in favor of indie, and arguments in favor of USA Today-ish things tend to sound a lot like arguments in favor of chart pop. (Not that those are the only options -- it's just an example.)

"But it's serious and weighty and highly-considered and displays real intelligence" = arguments used for either the New York Review of Books or listening to My Bloody Valentine.

"But it's fun and pleasant and gives me just what I'm looking for without overintellectualizing everything" = arguments used for either USA Today or listening to Britney.

"But it tells it like it really is for actual people, and that's all that matters" = arguments for hearing the news from people you know or listening to NWA.

I realize this only begs the question of why I like the New Yorker better than USA Today, but I think you guys might have a clear sense of that already.

(You do all realize that this is Tom's revenge for having been called upon many times to justify his love (har har) for chartpop? It's working.)

Does that sort of make sense? Indie-as-genre is still working within the same 3-5 minute 3-6 person verses and choruses Western Popular Music framework as hip-hop or reggae or country or chart-pop do; jazz and classical have their own respective frameworks. And I tried to make it not-a-dichotomy, above, by that third word-of-mouth / hip-hop variant.

liking indie, as opposed to say jazz, might mean having

1. an interest in a guitar-drums-bass-vox instrumentation. obviously the genre plays around within this, but it is still the basis of indie. 2. some kind of faith in the rock song structure, even as it is messed about with. ie no need to move into entirely improvisational forms or entirely free-form modes, even if indie can include bands that approach these. sonic youth, say, or GYBE. 3. appreciation for lyrics that depart from the rock n roll/pop conventions of lurve and so on. preference for non-narrative lyrics. 4. taste for certain sounds: distortion and effects-driven guitar, lo-fi production, drones, etc.

that's a start, anyway.

E.g., if Monk or Schubert sat down today and tried to make pop records, it's my guess that the results would be considered indie.

He underestimates, mind you, the difference between LRB and supermarket tabloid. If the latter = say, National Enquirer - then come on, that's a BIG difference. Even if it doesn't - sod it, it's a big difference. (I, possibly like you, Nitsuh = LRB subscriber.)

Tom E: I maintain that your thread is good and your question is sound. I have done my best to answer it. I don't quite think you have had the answers you wanted (though you have had many other good ones).

I think the geezer Sean, though, is inevitably correct to say indie = Independent, ie. = Economic Base not = Aesthetic Superstructure, you Idealist Foolz.

Really "Indie" = both, as we all know, but we have to factor Sean's point in. Probably we need to see 'Indie' as *historical* - which means seeing it economically, socially *and* aesthetically. Yet what this thread makes me wonder is: in practice, can we do all those things at once? Or to put it another way: can we do any one of those things without (*necessarily*) neglecting the other?

"Slanting and enchanting" is a great description in that it also captures indie's propensity for self-referencing insularity!

I also think that we construct 'indie' from our own personal canons to some extent: it's the ultimate meaningless signifier; though the UK vs US thing does also apply (and explains why Australian indie kids are so confused). Indie rock subgenres represent quasi diversity: thus its possible for intra-genre musical tourism to occur. So my core interest may be spacepop, but I can, say, also be into twee and alt country. Which are different templates (rather than just 'variations on indie'), even accounting for many similar aesthetic choices being made.

This tells us nothing of course about why a listener to underground or mainstream or both enjoys the sounds they do - maybe, in fact, the question as originally asked is impossible. The individual indie fan may loathe the mainstream; the individual mainstream listener may be utterly unaware of any underground activity - but collectively the two musics need one another to remain healthy. At certain times the interrelationship is almost total - these are the periods fans often look back on as a 'golden age'.

And then something else will start serving the catch-all function, and "indie" will mean something specific and unchanging rather than vague and philosophical, just as "alternative" did.

Can I change my menu order?

The argument that indie is "more intellectual" than other music is a pretty pretentious one to make but even so, you could point to a slew of actively anti-intellectual indie artists especially on the garage/neo-punk side of things. Non-aggressive, feminine, contemplative? Sure, but it's also: Rapeman, Happy Flowers, Wesley Willis, Urge Overkill, The Oblivians.

Maybe it can only be defined oppositionally.

The reasons for liking it given by those above who are happy to be described as indie fans ring few bells with me.

I admire non-commercial experimentalism in all artistic fields. Often, I like commercial experimentalism more. Non-commercial experimental recors would be described as 'indie' by many people. So would the Stereophonics. But unlike Kate, this doesn't really bother me and I can't really say that they are 'wrong'.

Nitsuh is too excited by the idea that the problem lies in cross-Atlantic differences in the understanding of the word 'indie'. Believe me, it's just as confused over here.

The reason the term sticks? A mix of all the definitions above. None are definitive, but words are often like that. We have an understanding of what they mean without being able to define them. It's all to do with the way we learn language.

Tom says there's a slot on national radio for indie music. I assume he means the Evening Session. But they play Missy Elliott and the Streets too. Are they indie? Maybe they are, in a looser sense of 'the kind of people who like the records that we call indie tend to like these records'. Which, circular as it is, I suggest is the only definition that really works.

As I said on the other thread, if you need to define these things musically, I can perhaps do that in the way I detail for the specific sub-genres 'indie rock' and 'indie pop'. But 'indie' covers more than those two things.

ICK -- no, I don't think this is true. Something like a sixth- generation MBV knockoff is perceived as non-innovative to us, because we know the history, but the fact remains that they're making records which are intentionally slanted from the main course of what music is. If you haven't heard MBV, you get the thrill of hearing music being slanted. Even if you have heard MBV and know this slant isn't a brand-new one, you may still enjoy hearing music being slanted from, and offering a different take on, the main current of popular music as it surrounds you in stores and on the radio. It only ceases to be a slant when it completely takes over and actually becomes the main course of music.

This is partly oppositional but partly aesthetic. The thinking is that you understand the conventions of the culture at large, and what you enjoy about indie is hearing them subverted. Even the 10th time that subversion is repeated, it's still a subversion, see?

Indie is music of the self-elect-preterite, a scavanger culture by will and not necessity.

But then again, when I think "indie" I'm not thinking of Pavement, Superchunk, etc. (I'm not a fan of straight-up "indie rock" at all, unless that includes something like Versus or Yo La Tengo). I'm thinking "independent-label music, esp. the kind that isn't easily pigeonholed", so again, we probably have a problem with the definition of "indie".

My own interest in independent-label music partly relates to the means of its production -- typically, when it comes to music made after 1980, I have a much easier time finding sonically-appealing records on independent labels, because I can't stand the heavy compression, mega-treble-boost, giant drums, etc. that so many records use. I like the sound of many independent-label records as a thing in itself. It also relates to the willingness of its practitioners to explore ideas that for whatever reason are not generally magnets for the attention of the mainstream. So when I think of myself as listening to independent-label music, I'm casting a broad net that includes Low, Ida, Bedhead, Landing, Arovane, the Need, Kicking Giant, Deformo, the For Carnation, Datacide, Piano Magic, the American Analog Set, even Stereolab. And although many of these bands do "subvert mainstream culture" in interesting ways, that doesn't adequately describe why I'm drawn to them.

I think I meant, leaving aside the social aspect, "subversion" for its own sake. "Subversion" for the sheer thrill of a new perspective, just like a funhouse mirror.

it is a different take on music only insofar as any new music is

The distinction I was trying to make is that indie-as-a-whole (the broad swath of all oppositional musics) is united by having made this it's primary raison d'etre. "Mainstream" listeners are for the most part judging music on its ability to execute certain conventions well, albeit with minute twists to "keep it interesting." "Indie" listeners are for the most part judging music on its ability* to make large-scale twists on those conventions, albeit with enough conventions satisfied for it to still function coherently.

* Not band-by-band, but in general; thus that tenth-generation MBV soundalike is still perceived as contributing to a general twist on What Music Is.

Yes, the thrill of the difference is there, but it doesn't sprawl in all directions, nor is difference the same as newness. Mod-revivalism is v.v. indie but utterly backwards-looking. No subversion there, nope.

What I'm saying now is not so much that "this is what indie is" or "this is why indie is good" -- what I'm saying is that this is the desire that seems to animate much of what indie is, and also the desire that draws people to enjoy indie in the first place.

"Indie: a musical mentality in which dominant and familiar musical conventions are paired with new or different variations on those conventions, thereby creating a potentially exciting tension between the dominant paradigm and alternatives to it."

"Indie: a musical mentality in which the primary goal is to pair dominant and familiar musical conventions with new or different variations on or subversions of those conventions, thereby creating a potentially exciting tension between the dominant paradigm and alternatives to or attacks on it."

I just spent ten minutes agonizing over "the primary goal" versus "a primary goal" in that sentence.

(thus...)

Avant-garde: a musical category in which the primary appeal is the introduction of entirely new paradigms, conventions, or methods to the overall musical vocabulary.

Mainstream: a musical category in which the primary appeal is the effective, interesting, and enjoyable execution of those conventions forming the dominant, most familiar culture of a given community.

I've been listening to the B*R*I*L*L*I*A*N*T Moldy Peaches album a lot lately. And I've been listening to a lot of B&S as well.

Now, what's so enjoying about the Moldy Peaches is their complete ramshackleness, while what's appealing about B&S is their roccocco arrangements and stuff. So why assume that there is such a single respones to "indie" music.

That's if you take me as typical of all "indie" fans, of course.

(Personally I fail to see how E6 constitutes much of a twist on anything - most of it strikes me as simple revivalism of a faded-out part of the mainstream, not to mention most of it strikes me as entirely horrible to listen to. But I'll take Nitsuh's word for it.)

Tom is of course correct, though just to be explicit about it the argument as I would phrase it would be a defence of the musics he mentioned and not an associated attack on indie, which often performs this feat as well.

(seemed silly and crass to repost.)

Which is precisely why indie listeners started digging into house, hardcore, and techno toward the middle of the last decade, and pop at the beginning of this one! Keep in mind your complaint, Tom, about equating "liking pop" with "liking only pop" -- the same goes for loads of indie listeners.

As it stands, a very large number of indie bands did incorporate these influences, and at a comparatively early stage in the game. It's one of the annoyances of the Indie Movement that instead of nurturing these artists critics and audiences repeatedly skewed the discourse towards personalities and "real songs you can sing down the pub", or, in the case of America, a constant and rather stifling insistence on the values of PunXoR.

As far as the "indie movement" and its reaction to those artists who steered toward other genres -- well, I never picked up on the criticisms or insistences you mention, but I've never felt much of a generalized "indie movement" either. This may just be a geographical difference.

All of which is not to attack indie music or indie fans, but to suggest that maybe an appreciation for the middle-garde can only be a partial factor that might serve to explain the success of certain bands, styles and movements, but ultimately falls slightly short of explaining indie as the great big mess that it actually is.

*Point on punxor: it strikes me that grunge, lo-fi, hardcore and emo - the four main strands of US indie unless I'm mistaken - are all twists on or manifestations of a certain aspect of punk (yes there are exceptions like Tortoise style post-rock etc. but the four styles I mentioned could form a comfortable coalition government I reckon). While a lot of bands in these areas do certainly come up with new ideas and new 'middle-garde' twists, I reckon they're ultimately working in a limited range due to that relationship, like a dog running on a leash - note that this does not necessarily have any bearing on the quality of the music.

** I should note that my opinions on this sort of thing are geographically influenced. The effect which grunge had on the Australian indie music scene was to my mind actually much more radical and devastating than it was in the US or the UK.

And yes, I think we've found a point of agreement. The only thing I'd add is that the fact that all indie listeners didn't shift to equally middle-garde genres shouldn't necessarily serve as a blanket indictment: switching listening genres is something of a big move. I imagine a lot of indie listeners just stuck with the program out of sheer inertia, or lacked enough exposure to other genres to be able to revise their opinions of them, or whatever else. Sort of what I was saying above -- the way "new sounds" accrete stable genres around themselves, and certain types of people will go on listening to that sound forever, as a convention, the way boomers might listen to Beatlesque pop or old people might listen to big band music.

* Note -- THIS IS NOT A BAD THING: it's just that we've digested that sound enough to normalize it, and I suspect this'll happen more and more until making a record in that style is the equivalent of, say, making a power-pop record or a typical Brit "indie" record.

*this is not universally true of course, and there's a whole raft of dance fans and musicians that revere the older, classic, established sounds. But thankfully they're not overwhelmingly powerful within the discourse.

It's a fucking cultural artifact.

I see Custos already tried to revive it, but you can't just snap your fingers, say "revive", and expect the villagers to rise up with their outrage and their farm implements. You have to give them a direction. Here's my attempt at same:

How much has the ILM stance toward whatever dichotomy that may or may not exist between "indie" and chart pop changed since late 2001(when this thread first lived and breathed)?

(And if this doesn't work, maybe a whole new discussion with a link to this thread?)

Okay, more serious point:

There are plenty of new ILMers (including myself) who've not had the opportunity to discuss this, and just 'cause we're newbies, that doesn't give the ILM old guard the right to wave their hands so vaguely (been, done, t-shirt bought) and dismiss us.

(Then again, I might be the only newbie who cares... in which case, I'll discover that my own revival of this thread is as futile as that of Custos back in March, right?)

There are interesting points which never really went anywhere upthread on geek-coolness and the 'naturalness' of young middle-class men liking 'indie'.

I think it was on this thread that nabisco, as then wasn't, said some things that have halfway stuck with me, about indie as a kind of swerve from the mainstream which would remain noticeable even if repeatedly diluted.

Perhaps that wasn't what he said, or meant.

Oh well. At least I tried, dammit.

(*Rampaging mob charges up the street, and stops in front of Custos, who is standing there, eating a candy bar*)
ILX MOB: RAAAAARGGH!
CUSTOS: Uh...they went...um...(*points*)...that way.
ILX MOB: RAAAAARGGH!
(*Rampaging mob charges 'that way'*)