SiriusXMU Top 500 Indie Songs of All Time: 500-451

I-I-I-I never said nothing... Remastered too, must be 2x as good. Liz all the way.

That is a great one, and would have been my vote if not for TV on the Radio's titanic DLZ.

The Rat is about 400 spots too low

Yeah, there is going to be a lot of "too lows" during this. The top 20 are no better than any random group of 20, at least in my humble opinion.

Still, it was a fantastic listen for those of us on long car trips over the weekend.

I am a Scientist just over Coffee & TV

Liz

'Burn the Witch'

Elevator Operator

Nina’s in the bedroom

There's a lot here I don't know. Of the handful I do know, I love Magnetic Fields, Pulp and Blur. Pulp gets my vote.

so you quote love unquote love me-gotta go with Stephin Merritt here.

Do You Remember the First Time?

"Little Fury Things" over "Seed Toss" of the ones I know. There are a lot I can't recall to mind immediately or just didn't hear. I might listen to more before voting but it's unlikely that something will beat "Little Fury Things" tbh.

Damn it would have been amazing if Magnetic Fields had included a cover of "I Am A Scientist" on I.

Ha, was going to say pretty much exactly what Sund4r said.

love little fury things AND i don't believe you. this list is pretty good, like 75% good stuff and 25% landfill. makes me a little wary of what they have ranked higher up, but we'll get to that later, i guess.

oh yeah, and fucking dramamine, also probably 400 spots below where it should be.

yeah as great as Modest Mouse was they really nailed everything on the very first song

These are my favourites

Japanese Breakfast - Road Head
The Magnetic Fields - I Don't Believe You
The Walkmen - The Rat
Phoenix - If I Ever Feel Better
Cut Copy - Lights & Music

Will probably vote for Japanese Breakfast as I'm still playing that album constantly.

This top 500 is inessential imho, the most interesting things are in the bottom numbers per usual but there's also a gross over-representation of the same acts:

15 ARCADE FIRE SONGS (!)
10 BEACH HOUSE
8 BELLE AND SEBASTIAN
7 BON IVER
7 COURTNEY BARNETT
8 DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE
7 GRIZZLY BEAR
7 INTERPOL
13 LCD SOUNDSYSTEM
13 MODEST MOUSE
9 PAVEMENT
10 PIXIES
15 RADIOHEAD
12 TAME IMPALA
11 THE NATIONAL
7 THE SHINS
14 THE STROKES
8 THE XX
9 TV ON THE RADIO
10 VAMPIRE WEEKEND

These sum 200 songs out of 500 of this countdown. They really should have limited the number of songs per artist. If not might as well made it a top 500 indie albums instead of songs. As it stands it becomes tiresome to keep hearing the same artists every couple songs.

Some of those could totally be justified. Others ... no way.

to be fair, if you took a top 500 from a classic rock station, you'd find similar ratios for the number of led zep, stones, boston, etc. songs.

it's a radio list, this is par for the course, just with a different generation of rock songs.

Wtf, do LCD Soundsystem even have 13 songs? Aren't there, like, five songs on each record?

im a fan of lcd, but you know that they're digging a little too deep when watch the tapes finds its way into a best of anything countdown.

There are 17 LCD soundsystem songs with their own wikipedia pages

I really have no idea what "Indie" even means, are we just talking about stuff that's not on a major?

Yeah, I find it pretty confusing as well. There's a free trial going on so I heard some of this on the way home on a road trip, and I thought, "Fake Plastic Trees" ... indie?

Some of those double digit acts, I can't name more than one or two songs.

And, like, a couple of songs after "Fake Plastic Trees" was "Slack Motherfucker," and I thought ... indie!

i think it means "stuff that sirius xmu would play"

or alternatively, stuff pitchfork liked

I voted "If I Ever Feel Better".

I like Courtney Barnett but the fact that she has 7 songs on this countdown is beyond absurd.

the radiohead song and the byrne/st. vincent song are in my library

i don't know any of the others

I really have no idea what "Indie" even means, are we just talking about stuff that's not on a major?

A lot of these were released on majors.

Just another marketing term.

Dramamine
over
Rid of Me
I am a Scientist

Have a feeling all my votes will be from the 90s.
From what I remember, I was in a better place in tge 90s.

I think this is the full list: https://pastebin.com/raw/D2xfZVAz

It's a little intriguing for me to consider what older music is included and excluded, esp relative to earlier definitions of 'indie'/'alternative'/'modern rock' (Spin's Alternative Guide may e.g. be an interesting comparison):
- zero Velvet Underground/Stooges/Lou Reed/Patti Smith/Television proto-punk
- zero classic punk rock (Sex Pistols, Clash, Ramones)
- one song by Joy Division but no Jam, PiL, or Wire
- one song by the Smiths that is neither "How Soon Is Now?" nor "This Charming Man"
- no R.E.M., Cure, or Siouxsie & the Banshees but one Jesus & Mary Chain song and one New Order song
- Sonic Youth (8 songs), Pixies (10 songs!), Pavement (9 songs), and Dinosaur Jr (5 songs) but no Husker Du and
- no grunge, including Nirvana
- but a Jawbreaker song
- eight songs by Sonic Youth that at least start out in the exact same order as their most-played tracks on Spotify, such that "Incinerate" is their third-greatest song
- PJ Harvey, Liz Phair, and Bikini Kill but not Hole

I don't believe I've heard any of the songs in this poll.

Indie used to mean artists not signed to any of the 4 major labels or its subsidiaries, it wasn't originally intended to stand as a musical genre. But then it got reevaluated as a term for jangle rock/punk rock et al. Then the major labels started buying the popular 'indie' labels like 4ad and Sub Pop and the term became even more insignificant. It ended up just being another name for "alternative rock" from the 00's onwards.

(and ofc definitely nothing that could have ever been called 'alternative metal', even Jane's Addiction)

It is hard for me to imagine anyone loving the Strokes this much.

you mean enough to rank one of their songs the 475th best of all time

Ha, that I get! "Last Nite" is #6 and they appear 14 times in the top 500, though.

damn I like nyc cops better than any other song on this list that I’ve heard

Oh, I like the Jawbreaker song a lot. I never heard all of that album.

looking at the list and, particular, sund4r's analysis of it, it's, you know, a corporate radio playlist. we're probably past the point where any trenchant observations about "indie" music as a corporate phenomenon are past their sell-by date, but it's a pretty decent model for the way corporatization of music (or anything, really) works - you do some market testing and you pick the most "popular" people out of whatever group you're testing, and you base your business model on those people, not on their work. by pushing those people, you skew people's reactions further towards the people you're pushing, and you continue down with the "big fish eat the little ones" approach until you have a radio station that's all radiohead (or bad company, or whoever the "winner" is) all the time.

“I am a scientist”

The 500 looks like a hastily completed homework assignment by one person.

I'll bet the final 50 looks pretty good, though.

i think it means "stuff that sirius xmu would play"

I think this is probably the most accurate explanation. A lot of those acts not included have their own stations, like 1st Wave and Lithium.

Yeah, I'm not even saying it's bad. I just think it's interesting to see what this station picks and chooses: if Arcade Fire, Radiohead, and the Strokes are the centre of your world, they seem to think the Pixies would be the most important band of their era while Husker Du, R.E.M., and Nirvana don't belong on the same list at all.

It's almost as if all lists are dumb and arbitrary.

I can only speak for myself, but Pixies were definitely the biggest eighties band when I was an indie head. Nirvana was so last decade, R.E.M. were making horrible new albums at the time, and nobody knew anything about Hüsker Dü. But everyone listened to Doolittle and Surfer Rosa. I can see it's an American indie station since there's no Stone Roses on there.

The Danish equivalent station is making a top 365 this year, one song a day, and it's absolutely hilarious. I'll definitely poll it all once they're done. It's Mew, then Queens of the Stone Age one day, Blur the next, then a side project by a Belgian singer who the host saw live a few times ten years ago, then Mew again. So much Mew.

Yeah, I just find it interesting and intriguing (the only terms I used) to see what choices, arbitrary or otherwise, various institutions make about these things. I'm not sure it is totally arbitrary: I suspect that a lot of fans of 00s indie do feel similarly about those bands, which feels like a shift in perspective to me (xp as Fred is helping to demonstrate).

I guess the Killers are too mainstream for them?

Mew probably are my favourite rock band of 2005-2015.

Like, I thought the Pixies' biggest claims to fame were i) influencing Nirvana and ii) getting a song on the Fight Club soundtrack, but I doubt this station's listeners are overwhelmingly fans of Nirvana or Fight Club.

Mew probably are my favourite rock band of 2005-2015.

― All along there is the sound of feedback (Sund4r), 29. maj 2019 16:15 (fifteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

He, in Denmark their main claim to fame is still Frengers from 2003. They played it all in full at a 15 year celebration last year. Played a few hits first, which meant they played Special -> Zookeeper's Boy -> Am I Wry? No -> 156 -> Snow Brigade. That was a good twenty minutes for me.

There's really not a lot of specifically NME indie on there. No Killers, no Libertines, only one Franz Ferdinand track. Quite interesting.

http://blog.siriusxm.com/who-topped-the-indie-500-countdown-from-siriusxmu-and-pandora/

SiriusXM’s indie-music channel SiriusXMU teamed up with Pandora to count down the top 500 indie songs of all time. The Indie 500 Countdown was tabulated taking into account over a decade of SiriusXMU airplay and “thumbs up” ratings from millions of Pandora listeners. Now that the broadcast has aired, here is the final list, which you can now listen to On Demand on the SiriusXM app!

it's science!

👍👍👍

"Borrowed Time" by a mile. Thrilling, extraordinary, almost dangerous. A band that has never come close to the overwhelming urgency of that song again.

I really have no idea what "Indie" even means, are we just talking about stuff that's not on a major?

― frogbs, Tuesday, May 28, 2019 6:53 PM (two days ago)Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That's what it meant in the '80s. From the '90s onwards it just became another word for alternative rock, a bit like that ridiculous word beginning with B that suddenly appeared in the '90s in the UK.

The other day, I started listening to a Spotify playlist I found of the whole list, starting from #1. I skipped the Strokes and LCD Soundsystem songs but, otherwise, it was all pretty enjoyable up through "Love Will Tear Us Apart", after which I was good. Damn, does it feel like they got this thing down to a specific aesthetic, though. A far cry from e.g. the Left of the Dial 'alternative' comps where you could get Bad Brains, the Chameleons, Faith No More, and TMBG on the same disc.

I doubt there will be a better song in this list than "Coffee + TV."

SiriusXM usually sounds painfully unadventurous to me.

"this list is pretty good, like 75% good stuff and 25% landfill."

for real, wtf list puts Porches and Japanese Breakfast over "Little Fury Things"

I blame ILM for convincing me to enjoy "Step Into My Office, Baby" for several years.

"Staring At The Sun" is probably my favorite from this genre, and it's at #107 so I stand corrected re: the Blur track.

"Genre" lol

Is this a genre?

dude, remember Yuck? that first album was some A+ all-the-best-indie-rock-bands-in-a-blender

i can't vote in these. too hard.

rid of me vs. never said vs. transatlanticism vs. the rat? c'mon

and that Band of Horses song is pure magic!

1st Yuck album = dope AF

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Wow, I've never heard of the winner.

the middle 8 is so cringey bad

The middle 8 is fine, it’s basically the buzzcocks’ ever fallen in love.

Anyway, I voted for the rat, mostly because drums

DLZ, you deserved better.

Oh man, I hadn't figured on ties for the Top 5. Will have to consult my team to figure out way to do this.

Top 5 to move to championship round are The Rat, Do You Remember the First Time, Little Fury Things, I Am a Scientist, Dramamine/Rid Of Me