Does anyone have that "18 Reasons Why I Hate Indie Kids" article from ages ago?

Why We Hate Indie Kids
(Special Update: really we love indie kids! Also, why go back to whatever BBS you came here from and show off about how bored we made you when you can go to our forum and say stuff there? Service is our watchword.)

Why we hate indie kids:

1) They like indie music. Obviously.

2) Their regulation thick-frame black glasses. No more breakable item of nosewear has ever been invented: on slow afternoons I could happily cruise the streets for hours walking up to indie kids, lifting these ridiculous excuses for spectacles from their filthy-pored noses and breaking them at the bridge. How the indie kid would howl! Perhaps they would threaten to "kick my ass". Needless to say all indie kids have adequate eyesight: any slight impairment of vision is due entirely to their regime of perpetual masturbation.

3) Indie kids are at it like rabbits. Or want to be. Scratch any 'community' or 'scene' of indie kids and you will find a seething cauldron of sexual frustration and backstabbing. Most indie kids are vile to look upon: I think this because I am enslaved by societal standards of beauty.

4) Societal standards of anything are bad, pretty much. Unless it gets you a shag. Or earns you - or more likely your parents - the vast amount of money needed to get through college on some no-mark computer games degree AND buy a billion useless identical records.

5) On the rare occasions when an indie kid does get it on it at least distracts them from listening to indie music. Or making it. All indie kids are in indie bands.

6) Indie is short for independent, because indie kids are not mainstream. No sir. They are individuals. A quick look at an indie kid website will reassure you of that.

7) All indie kids are unique. They are however looking for other indie kids who are unique in exactly the same way as them - cool, huh?

8) Among the unique things about indie kids are their haircuts. The square mainstream observer might mistake the uniform dyed bobs and crops of indieland as the sinister hairstyles of a clone army hell-bent on taking over teenage america and making it listen to At The Drive-In. But such an observer would be a fool. There are crucial differences in the haircuts. Some are, like, really expensive.

9) Some records are really expensive, too. You must really love the music to spend $200 on eBay on a one-sided seven-inch, right? It shows your dedication to music is for real and unique, like your taste.

10) Indie fashions are individual and unique too, and are marked by the indie kid's strong sense of irony. For example, a lot of indie kids like wearing overalls and workshirts as worn by real live working class people. As the indie kid finishes a two-hour shift at Border's they feel solidarity with their working-class brothers and sisters in the bakeries and pizza delivery companies all across the nation.

11) They don't feel solidarity with the suits working in offices, though. Those people are a plastic fake herd of manufactured, soulless brainwashed lemming robot drone sheep enslaved to mass culture pap. (This is true, obviously. But sorry, indie kids are worse.)

12) Not all mass culture is pap, though. Hey! What about those cool Powerpuff Girls?

13) Infantilism is endemic to the indie kids. When was the last time you heard one of them use the word 'man' or 'woman'. Nope, it's always 'boys' and 'girls'. Some girls are 'cute'. Some boys are 'cute' too. The more incurable indie kids use the words 'grrrl' and - shudder - 'boi', for all the world as if they were living in a Disneyworld 1994 Experience ride or fell into a copy of Sassy once and never escaped.

14) When indie kids pair off with a cute grrrl or boi (all indie kids are in theory bisexual, of course. Just don't ask them to do anything about it.) they tend to treat each other like shit and then write it up on their web pages ("I am SUCH the geek"). This is because they are very sensitive, not as the casual observer might have guessed because they are emotional dwarves with no concept of human interaction outside a fanzine problem page. You become sensitive by listening to Belle And Sebastian a lot.

15) All their records sound the same, due to influence inbreeding. The gene pool of influences on indie rock has been shrinking steadily since 1977, thanks to paranoid scenester tastemaking. The constant slathering praise directed at the likes of the Get Up Kids and Sleater-Kinney is the critical equivalent of a one-eyed chinless inbred mutant winning a beauty contest.

16) Indie kids like experimentation, but not too much experimentation. They like extremity, but not too much extremity. They like songs, but they like them to be a bit shy and fuzzed-up and nervous and not too songish. Best of all they like bands which sound comfortingly like the other ones they already know are cool.

17) Of course they listen to other stuff too, carefully weighing it up for its purity of motive and general indie-ness. Other genres are assessed with a practised eye, and only the records which have the most spiritual kinship to indie are acceptable - no attempt is made to take these musics on their own terms, since indie is in any case superior. Eventually a fashionably anti-PC stance allows the indie kid to reject even bothering with hip-hop or dance records - that would after all be 'tokenism'.

18) The worst thing about indie kids is how apalling they are at even being indie kids. After idling their college years going to 'shows' every other day and then spending two years in retail working on a screenplay or writing a novel about following a band or recording a thousand tinny songs on a hundred cheap cassettes and giving them to people they fancy in the hope that a rare Braid EP track might get them a quick fuck on some other indie kid's sofa and pretending to like the Spice Girls and pretending to like the Magnetic Fields and pretending to like each other - after all that they suddenly get a job and start listening to Moby and Aimee Mann. What I ask you is the fucking point?

Tom Ewing and Maura Johnston
2 January 2001

I didn't think this thing was all that funny....I'm sick of these "ranty" blog things that aren't really all that clever....Indie kids are a big, easy target....seems like there should be a better way to do this....The Onion's done a lot of really really funny indie parody stuff.

Yeah all these hipster indie rave bands like Fiery Furnaces, Mastodon, and DFA sound just the same...oh wait.

To change it up slightly-my favorite example of artist hating on his audience or part of his audience or audience bordering his is Robbie Fulk's "Roots Rock Weirdos."

I also really resent the line about indie-kids working two-hour shifts to show solidarity with the working class. I've known plenty of indie-kids that were *working class* themselves, to whatever extent that term is even still meaningful in a service economy. My guess is the authors either had money themselves or grew up somewhere where most people had money.

Braid? The Get Up Kids? At The Drive-In? Powerpuff Girls? It's amazing how much slightly sub-mainstream culture has changed in barely four years. That list seems about as contemporary as the roster for a 1992 grunge festival.

(WHEN WILL THE MADNESS END?!) ;)

also i should just point out that, four years on, i still use the word 'girl,' mainly because i think of myself as one. (what, you couldn't feel the self-loathing in some of those items there?)

ok, back to packing for my trip to dc for the teen beat anniversary shows...

Primarily I don't like the outright nastiness about a bunch of very neurotic people, uncomfortable in their own skin, since I spend enough time in that state myself.

OTM

x-post:

Probably true, but I don't think this article is seeking to benefit indie kids. A different rhetorical slant would have to be taken. (Or maybe not. Maybe this article is brilliantly written to appeal to the dead-pan ironyspeak of indie kids.)

i dont understand this concept!

from an english POV, i thought the strength of the piece was its realism.

The article sucks because it's half about the UK Smiths-idolising Sarah records buying no-friends Eng.lit student indie kid, and half about the US scenester LCD Soundsystem loving indie kid.

this is the half i picked up on, not so much the rest. LCD Sounsystem didn't exist in Jan '01? But B&S seemed to have a bigger cultural presence back then, anyway, that's just my impression -- even if they sell more records now (do they really?).

Oh good God: WE JUST WANT WHAT'S BEST FOR YOU!

I actually read it as being more about post-hardcore but pre-mainstream emo kids, who maybe dress the same as hipsters with their black-frame glasses and ironic t-shirts and wallets on chains, but who aren't as elitist and ahead-of-the-curve as LCD Soundsystem scenesters. They mostly belong to a more conservative punk-rooted subculture.

No. 14 is even more true thanks to the Livejournal explosion.

Can you quantify how much you love music? Or at least say how you love it?

I was thinking about this article the other day. Considering it was the founding block of Freaky Trigger, why haven't FT and their associated members gone apeshit over guys like The Twang and The Enemy? They're basically the kind of bands this article was crying out for.

Rather than being easily beaten up, the average lad rock fan would be more likely to attack a stranger himself (2). The music isn't aimed at women at all, thus stopping an overly sexualised atmosphere at gigs (3). There's a proud anti-intellectualism at work removing the need for degrees (4). These bands actively court the mainstream, the beer adverts, the interviews on Nuts TV (6). Nobody would spend £200 on a Milburn CD. (9). There's an anti-middle class strain running through their music (10). "Living For The Weekend" by Hard-Fi (11). No infantilism at all: Cass Pennant not Afro Ken (12, 13). Lad rock has a strong anti-"feelings" movement, as well as high levels of homophobia, thus ensuring no bisexuality at all (14). Some lad rock bands are influenced by The Specials, some by The Jam. It's a varied genre (15). Experimentalism is actively frowned up by bands like The Enemy, as just being "poncy shit" (16). They don't listen to other stuff, except maybe Clubland Hardcore Extreme 12 (17).

So yeah. Being as The Twang, The Enemy, Pigeon Detectives, Milburn, Make Model, et al were the bands that ILM was crying out for in 2000/2001, why haven't the Poptimist kids given tracks like "We Live And Die In These Towns" and "I'm Not Sorry" the props they obviously feel for them? Or were Poptimists just in love with the idea of violent, anti-feminine Weller clones, rather than the reality of them?

I would post a cogently argued response but instead I'll go 'because The Twang and the Pigeon Detectives are shit?' and 'lol butthurt tweekid' instead.

If any of that argument followed then ILM would have been going bonkers for the Cooper Temple Clause in 2000-01, innit?

Article is basically stuffindiepeoplelike.com though, surely

A lot of "pop kids vs indie" writing strongly resembles the British press's attitudes towards the England manager. "This shouty Englishman sucks! Let's get a sedate foreigner" "THE SUN SEZ: MILEQUETOAST JOHNNY FOREIGNER OUT! Only someone with the heart of St George should take charge of the Three Lions" "Anyone know where we can get a quietly spoken eye-talian?"

Ask yourself this, do you really want to be Marcello Carlin?

Whoa! Don't slip up or get got! (Why not man?)
I'm comin for that number one spot! (Alright)
Rappers swearin they on top! (Nuh uh, uh uh)
But I'm comin' for they number one spot! (Alright man)
Scheme scheme, plot plot (say WHAT?)
I'm comin for that number one spot! (Woo, hey)
Keep it goin it won't stop! (What you doin man?)
I'm comin for that number one spot!

Aren't kids today all rutting like stoats at Skins parties while listening to Fuck Buttons?

Imagine writing that sentence even just two years ago. You wouldn't have a fucking clue what any of it meant.

I still don't!

Skins is an (outrageous, allegedly) UK 'dramedy' about a group of 16-19 year olds in Bristol who have sex and take drugs. Fuck Buttons are a band with lurid artwork who I've not heard any music by but who appeal to people who like Skins.

The rutting like stoats thing = http://www.michaelkelly.fsnet.co.uk/qfather.htm

Fuck Buttons are a band with lurid artwork who I've not heard any music by but who appeal to people who like Skins.

For the miniscule amount it's worth, I don't think this is especially true

I saw Fuck Buttons on a late-running festival stage playing into the timeslot for officially Skins-endorsed band Foals, and the number of kids trampling me to death to stand in front of me and then go "what is this shit and where are Foals" followed by extended yammering right through the fucking band suggests it's not true, but if they've appeared on Skins (and why not? from Bristol, recent buzz, Pitchforked if that means anything in 08) maybe the same people will be delighted with them (hell, don't mind me being old and bitter, but I think Foals are ok too and yet I have just about no idea how they suddenly became cool teenage band of the moment)

Foals were happy to be paraded around by E4 PR types as basically the Skins House Band, plus they're all Oxbridge types so they're not exactly short on people giving them reviews/coverage/cover features as a "favour".

(xpost) Reasons why I hate indie kids: I spent all my money on having more/indier records than them and I still never managed to get any into my bedroom to be impressed by them, dammit.

I don't imagine the band themselves being Oxford dropouts did that much for their musical career tbh (they were doing ok locally before that + probably found most of their fellow students didn't give a shit about their band / much roffling at some of the ex-Oxford bands I've known being part of hot media circus just for where they studied) but I'm sure there's some hair-raising networking behind the Transgressive scenes given the bands they've picked up who never struck me as NME-friendly buzz bands and proceeded to be exactly that.

So yeah. Being as The Twang, The Enemy, Pigeon Detectives, Milburn, Make Model, et al were the bands that ILM was crying out for in 2000/2001, why haven't the Poptimist kids given tracks like "We Live And Die In These Towns" and "I'm Not Sorry" the props they obviously feel for them? Or were Poptimists just in love with the idea of violent, anti-feminine Weller clones, rather than the reality of them?

this is the most mind-boggling thing i have read this afternoon.

^scared of logic

not as scared as i am of a sexualised atmosphere at gigs

Some of these need to be updated. Indie fashion moves on!

For example:
"2) Their regulation thick-frame black glasses. No more breakable item of nosewear has ever been invented: on slow afternoons I could happily cruise the streets for hours walking up to indie kids, lifting these ridiculous excuses for spectacles from their filthy-pored noses and breaking them at the bridge. How the indie kid would howl! Perhaps they would threaten to "kick my ass". Needless to say all indie kids have adequate eyesight: any slight impairment of vision is due entirely to their regime of perpetual masturbation."

Indie kids don't wear those thick frame black glasses any more. They wear these gigantic glasses my dad wore in the 80s.

Like these:

http://i30.photobucket.com/albums/c345/lilmisspriss888/Pink%20Rock%20Candy/AmAp-VintageEyewear.jpg

And they don't like indie music any more. Now it's psych or something.

Question, what's more of a time capsule now, the article, or the idea that anyone would get that worked up about it?

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/10/18/arts/deacon533.jpg

any slight impairment of vision is due entirely to their regime of perpetual masturbation.

tell me about it

or rather, don't

fap fap fap

Hasn't the meathead indie/twee indie divide been around since Oasis or maybe even the Stone Roses? New binaries, plz.

And none of you guys relalise how this looks exactly like typical right-wing American youth who are looking down upon everyone who isn't a typical "jock"?

indie people have always been wack as long back as i can remember them (early 90's) even when the music they liked was far better than it is today.

this must be one of those challenging opinions i've heard so much about

so sick of typical right-wing american youth

And they don't like indie music any more. Now it's psych or something.

oh shi rumbled

Indie kids don't wear those thick frame black glasses any more. They wear these gigantic glasses my dad wore in the 80s.

I can't wear big frame glasses coz my prescriptions too strong, so no Timmy Mallet look for me. Still the black frames.

what makes that list great is really more the tone than the content

Being as The Twang, The Enemy, Pigeon Detectives, Milburn, Make Model, et al were the bands that ILM was crying out for in 2000/2001

Make Model? Are you thinking of someone else? They're more the latest in a long line of "Scotland's answer to Arcade Fire" than anything resembling those others.

The one track of theirs I heard sounded like someone had taken Hard Fi and shoved the chick from Chumbawumba on vocals. Awesome combination.

Eighteen Reasons Why We Hate Infie Kids

(Special Update: really we love infie kids! Also, why go back to whatever BBS you came here from and show off about how bored we made you when you can go to our forum and say stuff there? Service is our watchword.)

Why we love taking candy from babies:

1) They are babies. Obviously.

2) Their regulation pampers. No more disposal item of apparel has ever been invented: on warm summer afternoons I could happily cruise the parks for hours walking up to babies and stripping these ridiculous excuses for nappies from their filthy little bottoms. How the babies would howl! Had they the power of verbal communication, perhaps they would threaten to "kick my ass". Needless to say, all babies could use the potty if they wanted: any slight wetness is due entirely to their regime of perpetual micturation.

3) Their mommies and daddies are at it like rabbits. Or were. Scratch any 'community' or 'scene' of babies with candy and you will find a seething cauldron of sexual reproduction and childbearing. Most babies think they are so cute to look upon: I think this because I am enslaved by mature standards of beauty.

4) Mature standards of anything are bad, pretty much. Unless it gets you a cootchie-coo. Or earns you - or more likely your parents - the vast amount of formula needed to get through day-care AND buy a billion useless identical binkies.

5) On the rare occasions when a baby actually does receive candy at least it distracts them from listening to infie music. Or making it. All babies are in infie pants

6) Infie is short for infantile, because infants are not mature. No sir. They are babies. A quick look at the state of their playpens will reassure you of that.

7) All infie kids are unique. They do, however, look exactly like the other little chubkins who are unique in exactly the same way as them - cool, huh?

8) Among the unique things about babies are their haircuts. The square mainstream observer might mistake the uniform downy pates of infieland as the sinister hairstyles of a clone army hell-bent on taking over toddler america and making it listen to the Wiggles. But such an observer would be a fool. There are crucial differences in the haircuts. Some are, like, really fuzzy.

9) Some stuffed toys are really fuzzy, too. You must really love cuddling to spend all your time dragging around a one-eyed teddy-bear, right? It shows your dedication to cuteness is real and unique, like your taste.

10) Infie fashions are individual and unique, too, and are marked by the grandmother's strong sense of whimsy. For example, a lot of babies like wearing bibs and jumpers with pictures of real, live, cute little animals. As the baby finishes a two-hour nap in the car-seat, they feel solidarity with sleepy little puppies and kittens in sewing baskets all across the nation.

11) They don't feel solidarity with the suits working in offices, though. Those people are a plastic fake herd of manufactured, soulless brainwashed lemming robot drone sheep enslaved to mass culture pap. (This is true, obviously. Mmmm, pap!)

12) Not all pap is delicious, though. Hey, what about those ucky strained carrots?

13) Infantilism is endemic to the infie kids. When was the last time you heard one of them use the word 'man' or 'woman'. Nope, it's always 'waaah!' and 'gooloogooloo!'. Some girls are 'gah'. Some boys are 'gah' too. The more incurable infie kids use the words 'baba' and - shudder - 'brrrrzrrt', for all the world as if they were living in a Disneyworld 1994 Experience ride or fell into a copy of Goodnight Moon once and never escaped.

14) When infie kids pair off with a cute bunny or duckling (all infie kids are in theory polymorphous, of course. Just don't ask them to do anything about it.) they tend to poop and then write in it ("I am SUCH the geek"). This is because they are very sensitive, not as the casual observer might have guessed because they are emotional dwarves with no concept of human interaction outside a bouncer swing. You become sensitive by listening to Barney a lot.

15) All their cooing sounds the same, due to influence inbreeding. The gene pool of influences on infie rock has been shrinking steadily since 1977 BC, thanks to pre-verbal scenester gurgling. The constant slathering praise directed at the likes of little Cody and Caitlyn is the critical equivalent of a one-eyed chinless inbred mutant winning a beauty contest.

16) Infie kids like expectoration, but not too much expectoration. They like zweiback, but not too much zweiback. They like thumbs, but they like them to be a bit soggy and fuzzed-up and not too thumbish. Best of all they like nipples which taste comfortingly like the other ones they already know are cool.

17) Of course they put other stuff in their mouths, too, carefully weighing it up for its purity of motive and general messiness. Other substances are assessed with a practised eye, and only the bugs and dust-bunnies which have the most spiritual kinship to mommy are acceptable - no attempt is made to take these tidbits on their own terms, since ba-ba is in any case superior. Eventually a fashionably anti-icky stance allows the infie kid to reject even bothering with mud pies or cat food - that would after all be 'tokenism'.

18) The worst thing about infie kids is how apalling they are at even being infie kids. After idling their suckling years going to "Nana's" every other day and then spending two years in preschool working on a fingerpainting or writing their first name or coloring a thousand crappy pictures on a hundred cheap coloring books and giving them to mommy and daddy in the hope that might get them a quick hug and a half hour watching the Big Comfy Couch and pretending to like the Muppet Babies and pretending to like the Backyardigans and pretending to like each other - after all that they suddenly get a job and start listening to Moby and Aimee Mann. What I ask you is the fucking point?