Is Indie Rock Sissy? OR: Where have all the cowboys gone?

Those stories about Stephen Pastel were never confirmed

Whaddya mean, "revival"? I listen to God's Balls once a week at least.

Hahaha, you've got my number there.

But seriously, I hate bitching about how indie pop/indie rock is sissy music or some other BS. Sorry tough guy. Why don't you go break stuff somewhere?

Look, indie musicians, though you may detest venereal disease and puncture wounds (though the two match like khakis and cartigans) get over yourselves. Real men make real music, and if you aren't hitting Pete Doherty levels of debauchery... well, you just aren't trying.

Hammer of the Gods was a primer, not a suggestion. Irony is a dead scene. Stashing the bodies of heroin pumped hookers on the other hand is edgy, avant, new and smart.

i mean off the bat might as well note that these are generalities, and there are always a million little exceptions here and there - although i'd say they're just that, generally - and of course british and american conceptions of "indie" differ greatly as far as history and contemporary meaning so that's bound to cause confusion.

but anyway, if you look at indie as a "child" of punk rock (which it certainly was culturally, and mostly was musically) leavened with elements incorporated from classic rock and art rock (and art punk) and more melodic, gentler underground sounds of past and present, then yeah there’s a narrative of less and less overt aggression that's fairly noticeable.

when i'm thinking of representative indie sounds from the various eras, there's a point at which the bands taking their primary cues from punk (the our band could be your life-type stuff) sorta start to fade and there's some transitional bands/sounds. pavement being a good example I think, in that they voiced both a "masculine" noisy fuck you vibe without being meatheadishly aggressive per se, and a "feminine" melodic contemplative one without being totally fey because they could still sabotage their pretty melodies with noise and were obviously coming from a suburban punk background. that equation is sort of the classic indie reference point, i’d say.

also something like tiger trap, who were in no sense of the word an "aggressive" band, but you know, for twee pop they're pretty rockin and were very down with K’s punkisms. i don't hear much stuff that mixes those attitudes in contemporary indie stuff but maybe i'm just not looking in the right places. some of this might be due to nirvana's success too. while you had stuff like the jesus lizard and a lot of those touch and go bands holding it down for the former punk dude nerd contingent for a while, as it continued that stuff rejected melody as much as the melodic contingent rejected ATTACK ATTACK ATTACK sounds and the very little that's left is pumping a dry well creatively speaking.

anyway i don't hear a lot of bands that mix those aggressive qualities with the more melodic ones in contemporary indie rock - most indie, particularly "mainstream" indie, is very very mannered and its confrontationalism/noise/rockingness is pretty much nonexistant, which is fine, but i always dug the thematic push-pull and think it led to a lot of really awesome music. the overall quality of the genre has slipped pretty severely now because the gene pool has narrowed so much.

some of that may have made sense. i don't know.

I like a lot of bands that are somewhere in the middle, like King Coffey's description of the Butthole Surfers before he joined the band, "They just looked like dweebs, but really fuckin' scary dweebs."

Yes, indie rock is perhaps a little too kitschy-melodic and cloying right now. Blame it on the hard drives full of music history that young 20 somethings have to gain influence from. Reich one minute, VU the next, tropicalia, post-punk, no wave, Beach Boys, african fuzz funk jams, ad nauseam, etc.

I don't think indie rock is SISSY per se, but I think the bulk of indie rock that hits the hype meter, or seems to permeate the zeitgeist, is suffering from being too backwards looking WITHOUT adding a few pointers going in the other direction - THE FUTURE. There's too much music to digest, and it's really easy for the modern musician to fall into a niche, one dictated by trend, style, fashion, etc.

Can you blame a 20 year old for deciding to start a band that sounds like the Gang Of Four? Or a 25 year old to round up a bunch of string players and a flautist and start a "collective"? No, because the antecedants are Pitchfork/MySpace sanctioned. It's immediate. Memes and trends can be established and torn down in exceedingly quick time frames.

This immediacy is what makes today's music different from music a decade ago, or two decades ago. In the 80s, Black Flag came to town, tore your head off, then you went and started a band and eagerly hunted down zines or info on other bands.

In the 90s, there was more media support - magazines, campus radio, better distribution for independent releases - but you still had to work at sourcing music. You had limited income, pirating involved taping your friend's cassettes or records.

Today, musicians have the entire FUCKING HISTORY OF MUSIC at their fingertips. Soulseek, BitTorrents, DVD-Rs, CD-RS. How do you create something breathless and original when you're so busy comsuming? You can't. So you emulate, and you make music redolent of the stuff you're trying to digest.

But then, there are all these nu-classic metal dudes who probably know of Sebadoh, but are more useful in a fight than, oh I don't know, Sufjan stevens.

Seriously? Maybe I'm still not clear on what you mean by "aggressive qualities." Bands like Arcade Fire and Broken Social Scene and the New Pornographers, to name a few, certainly combine a "pretty" melodic sensibility with powerful drums and electric guitars. That tension between classical melodicism and rock n roll power is what first attracted me to weezer when I was young, and it still fascinates me today.

Melvins.
No, I like New Pornos and Sufjan and shit but we're talking about two completely different things here.

I thought that that is what made them indie.

You could explain what you mean by "rockin" and "aggressive" instead of just being hand-wavy and condescending. What do those things mean to you? What makes a band rockin and/or aggressive? Because believe it or not, those aren't exactly well-defined, objective qualities.

Is "nerdy indie-rocker" objective enough for ya?

And Bradley on it, too. I do hear plenty of rockingness and aggression, actually. Just not a lot in the acts Steve mentioned.

Today, musicians have the entire FUCKING HISTORY OF MUSIC at their fingertips. Soulseek, BitTorrents, DVD-Rs, CD-RS. How do you create something breathless and original when you're so busy comsuming? You can't. So you emulate, and you make music redolent of the stuff you're trying to digest.

Go hang out with some actual people in bands, ya music nerd ya.

I do think indie rock could be noisier, however.

Plus, they don't rock. </Eddy-invoking nervous cough>

What. The. Fuck. Have you ever heard of amplifiers? I have been to plenty of symphonic performances, and not one has ever left my ears ringing for two days or made my guts shake along with the bassline. There are car stereos more powerful than symphony orchestras all over the goddamn place. People (including myself) bitch about them incessantly.

The strength of a symphony orchestra may have been in its power 100 years ago, but now the strength they have is in their range.

Austin, no, I've never heard of amplifiers. Did you seriously think I was talking about volume? I stand by my statement, but it was just a passing comment.

But you seem to be making some awfully wierd assertions. I really don't understand what you're getting at with a lot of this.

X-post. I do? You mean as regards the timbral range of the symph orch?

on behalf of la monte young, tony conrad, david behrman, alvin lucier, lou fucking reed, pauline oliveros, et al., fuck you.

It's the later Spoon albums and the Arcade Fires and the Shins and the Broken Social Scenes and the last couple of Belle & Sebastians (when they moved from twee to saccharine), all the other bands I've ignored, that I don't get. They aren't soft so much as they're incredibly safe - in a way it's careerist, music that gets you signed to the right labels to sign to people who are just like you. There's nothing sonically/musically/socially challenging to them, they just keep retreading the same poppy territory that's been covered before.

I mean, if you think that "rockingness" means nothing more than "volume," then ok. If not, then I don't know what you're disagreeing with.

Sometimes loudness, if not the point, is at least a big part of the point.

As to the loud sine wave. No, it doesnt rock. But it doesn't follow that there are no legit pleasures or expressions in it.

exy-posty

OK, that's totally a nerdy way to look at it. I'mma gonna make a few 70-min CDs of synthetic sine waves. Who's buyin'?

Fuck the idea that sine waves can't rock. A sine wave is only as powerful as the sound system you play it on. You can't listen to Alvin Lucier on your precious iPod, or your shitbox shelf stereo. You need to BLAST THAT SINE WAVE! Pure, unadulterated power.

Orchestras have timbral, emotional power. So do good rock band.

Whoever lamented the demise of Hot Snakes upthread was so OTM. Why isn't there more of that going down? The perfect balance between visceral rock attitude and the acceptable strains of 90s hardcore (dischord, pre-SDRE emo). Fuck yeah.

perhaps not soft/hard but(just extrapolating from the Aisler example) light/dark mebbe? (not for nothing has the hookers/heroin ref. been taken as a given here, don't know what this loudness stuff is about).
Those bands on your shitlist do share a sunny brassy backward-looking something(of late), questions of quality aside.

It's not just that. A lot of the recent indie rock albums do have a lot of sadness to them, but it's bittersweet emotion or melancholy. What he seems to be asking for is more along the lines of rage or manic energy. Basically, indie rock that sounds like it was made by nerds, not pussies.

Uh, seek and ye shall find dude.

O Rly now?

My earlier post:
Bands like McLusky, Les Savy Fav, The Blood Brothers, DFA1979, Boredoms and all the circa-2000 NYC noise rockers (early Liars, earlier Laddio Bolocko, etc.) have made really rocking music, and certainly quite aggressive.

I was just suggesting something that could be a dividing wedge between the "rocking" and "aggressive" music mentioned by so many in this thread and the Arcade Fire/later Spoon/Broken Social Scene/name your soft indie rock band.

As for heroin and hookers, maybe it's just that indie bands don't make enough money to afford them.

-- Brooker Buckingham (brooker...), July 11th, 2006.

lol, "The Mediocre is the Message"!

Really, I was just venting frustration because I'm feeling a bit afraid that dissonance is becoming a lost art.

(and yes, I admit that most of the Birthday Party are skinny white nerds. but they were SCARY skinny white nerds)

As for indie, I meant intelligent underground rock, kinda. I wanted to say "underground," but nowadays Warped Tour bands count as "underground." Is because all the dark/aggressive/dissonant stuff got subsumed by the goth/hardcore/emo/punk crowd, hipsters got kinda afraid of it, thus the softer side of indie?

I'm not saying that the more melodic, softer stuff is stupid or any less valid. I'm just saying I miss the other end of the spectrum.

And I'm not "determined not to get" anything. Did The Who rock? Did Led Zeppelin? Did Black Sabbath? I'd say yes, and I can see commonalities between them and some of the bands I mentioned which are being derided as sissy. I'm just trying to get to the bottom of the many many assumptions and implications contained in a statement like "X is sissy music" or "Y doesn't rock."

DING DING DING DING DING. I think this is huge right here. Between that and grunge (and its descendents) taking "alternative" flavors of metal to the masses and suddenly you have vast swaths of territory that self-respecting indie people don't want to be caught dead near. Consider also how niche-i-fied indie is anyway, so that if Sufjan wanted to sound like the Dismemberment Plan nobody would buy it (he's already branded), and when Modest Mouse went for something lusher and at turns gentler on their last record it took big knocks from the critics. (They have also been widely savaged as sellouts by lazy-thinking people everywhere - again, see that Nirvana backlash, indie doesn't want its bands to be anything people in general are inclined to like.)

That said: there are still plenty of brawny asshole Dudes left in indie (which is what the question really seems to be looking for). Seriously, go to indie shows, at least around here, and you find a pretty even mix of your skinny white music nerds and guys that would, had things gone a little differently, been blasting some Hoobastank at a frat kegger and high-fiving some of their bros. The cowboys are all around you.

Blind Shake
STNNNG
Signal to Trust
Mute Era
Birthday Suits
His Mischief
Rank Strangers
Seawhores (may be considered noise)
Die Electric!
Malachi Constant
Superhopper

Or, if that doesn't work for you, given that well-disguised chauvanism is as rampant in indie as it ever was, then go back to the social/economic storyline I was carrying on about above.

If me, not so much or not at all. The Aislers Set albums were all good, and my favorite 'indie' song of the last however many years was Sleater-Kinney's "Sympathy." Being aggro and angry and acting like Henry Rollins without a sense of humor - no more interesting than all the bands I mentioned.

i second the suggestion of Todd earlier, and also reccommend The Hunches' second album, 'Hobo Sunrise', and the second album by The Hospitals, 'I've been to the land of jocks and jazz'

Another question would be: does something have to be a little bit sloppy and unhinged to really rock? Sometimes this seems to be the case, but would that mean that a perfectly-performed virtuoso piece, even if its ostensibly "rock music," doesn't really rock? That seems to be part of the sentiment when people bash the usual guitar shredders.