Indie pop and Rockism

Those two tapes would be brilliant for a two-part C90 Go! if anyone fancies it. (I could always do it but I think my C81 is in my parents loft).

It seems to me that I remember reading the term used that way in the American music magazine Option. Of course, they would also have used terms like hardcore, avant-noise, etc.

i haf found c81 but not c86 (which rather shockingly possibly means i haf played the latter more recently than the former)

i wd sorta like to do a c90 on them both but i am so behind wiv stuff promised to for FT it seems inappropriates

Someone else can look up C86.

c81 side two:
Shouting Out Loud, Raincoats
Endless Soul, Josef K
Low Profile, Blue Orchids
Red Nettle, Virgin Prunes
We Could Send Letters, Aztec Camera
Milkmaid, Red Crayola
Don't Get In My Way, Linx
'The Day My Pad Went Mad', The Massed Carnaby Street John Cooper Clarkes
Jazz Is The Teacher, Funk is the Preacher, James Blood Ulmer
Close to Home, Ian Dury
Greener Grass, The Gist
Parallel Lines, Subway Sect 

Velocity Girl, Primal Scream (Creation)
Happy Head, The Mighty Lemon Drops (Dreamworld)
Pleasantly Surprised, The Soup Dragons (Subway Organisation)
Feeling So Strange Again, The Wolfhounds (Pink Label)
Therese, The Bodines (Creation)
Law, Mighty Mighty (Girlie)
Run to the Temple, Bogshed (Help Y'Shelf) [BOB SNOOM TO THREAD!!]
Buffalo, Stump (Ron Johnson)
Sharpened Sticks, A Witness (Ron Johnson)
Breaking Lines, The pastels (Glass Records)
From Now On, This Will Be Your God, Age of Chance (Riot Bible)

side two
It's Up To You, Shop Assistants (53rd and 3rd)
Firestation Towers, Close Lobsters (Close Lobster)
Sport Most Royal, Miaow (Venus)
I Hate Nerys Hughes (From the Heart), Half Man Half Biscuit (Probe Plus) [NOTE: INDIE INVENTS 'I HEART THE 70S' etc etc]
Transparent, The Servants (Head)
Big Jim (There's No Pubs In Heaven), The MacKenzies (Ron Johnson)
New Way (Quick Wash and Brush Up with Liberation Theology), Big Flame (Ron Johnson)
Console Me, We've Got a Fuzzbox and We're Going to Use It (Vindaloo)
Celestial City, McCarthy (Pink Label)
Bullfighters' Bones, The Shrubs (Ron Johnson)
This Boy Can Wait (a Bit Longer), The Wedding Present (Reception)

Mark says: erm i think the name for the phenomenon which changed this is OASIS!!

Sandy says: I think the name for the phenomenon which changed this is grunge and baggy - it didn't exist before that.

Mark says: post-punk indie (79-82, say) was fanatically anti- rockist (it's where the term arose), because it read the pistol's message as "rock is dead long live freedom"

Sandy says: post-punk indie (79-82) was enthusiastically pro-rock, because of the Public Images message 'You never listened to a word that I said'. The term (in its current meaning) arose after this period when, post-punk bands turned into rock bands and new-pop bands emerged (84-86). The term lost all meaning and any potency in 1986 when New Pop decreased - probably fix the time as the first Jesus and Mary Chain album.

Mark says: The C86 "movement" canonised a version of 60s "rock" (jangly guitar basically, byrds-to-VU third) as the truth- bearing countercanon: it was still eg anti-metal/prog (but also anti- disco and somewhat anti-rap)

Sandy says: The C86 era gigs I attended at the Splash 1 club and other gigs at Daddy Warbucks in Glasgow during the formative period were just people who liked all sorts of music. Sly Stone used to turn up often during the DJ sets. Dance Music and Rap were perfectly acceptable music. Trouble Funk could fill a dance floor. Prog less so, but it was Punk Rock that was important. Wire were much more important than Buffalo Springfield. VU album 2 was as important as VU album 3. The Stooges were seminal, the Ramones more so.

In a C86 fanzine I was (uh) 'associated' with called Coca Cola Cowboy. There is an interview with Sonic Youth (actually done in Daddy Warbucks) at a gig there about the time of Bad Moon Rising. 'Who are all these shite bands' asks Thurston when being handed the previous edition of CCC. 'We don't know' lie the CCC guys. The flirtation with cutie-tweeness was short and minimal for most folks - its absurd to think this was all that was happening in the mid 80s guitar music.

Mark says in the UK no one would have called the minutemen-SY- husker du crowd "indie" in the mid-80s, tho: i dunno, art-noise, post- rock, hardcore even (maybe...)

Sandy says: Forced Exposure magazine started turning up on sale at A1 in Glasgow (I still remember buying the one with Lydia Lunch on the cover in 86) many indie fans at the time were interested. were very interested. The requirement of 'twee' hadn't really been added to indie. There was certainly no incompatabilty with liking Husker Du and Big Flame. I would have called them indie and would have had been right.

1. Although I regard indie '81 as MY era, and I once owned "C-81" for a few days, I only remembered about half the tracks. Not really canon- forming at all now you examine the list closely, is it? Lots of acts that had already passed the point where they were the zeitgist (Buzzcocks, Dury, Cabs, Cooper Clarke, Subway Sect... even The Specials, tho' they were No.1 again that year with Ghost Town).
2. Whereas I guessed 17 of the acts on "C-86" before mark posted the list, even tho' I've never heard it. Quite what that says I don't know.

For me, indie (POP) and rock (Serious Music) converged at a time I think of as the rise of the psych-MBV / Spacement 3 / Sonic Youth: I suppose '87 / '88. This echoed the late 60s great bowel shift from psych into Rock: once as tragedy, then as farce etc. Historically questionable, no doubt, but you will never convince me otherwise, because that's the point when I went "ew, this is all too rockist for me" and moved on.

Did 'paisley' underground bands have that sound?

SST type bands were far far better. They took the punk sound but they were also aware that psychedelia and prog existed. The UK indie bands went for the 3rd VU album for inspiration and that's why most of it is crap.

Cavanagh's book= Is there a more thouroghly researched book that any of you have read? The birth and death of 'indie' are all in there.

i don't think and didn't say that c86-ness DOMINATED, i do think however think it helped establish (or maybe render public and concrete) a link between "indie" and retro-rock (which had been brutally broken by post-punk) => tweeness as a plague certainly came later, though it was already evident (c86 was NOT considered representative OR polemically and intererstingly interventionist in the way c81 was, I wd argue => but i was still just a teenyweeny idealistic punter in c81-days, an embattled and pissed-off and alienated journo in 86, angry that my paper was pushing such garbage)

i know because i was trying to write about it that it was pretty hard to get american "post-punk" (eg forced exposure type) guitar music taken seriously at the nme at that time (ok maybe what the nme said or did didn't determine how anyone else in the country felt in which case hurrah!!) (i remember having argts along the lines of "if you like sonic youth why don't you like big flame you big snob"... ans at the time = big flame make poor records...)

i don't understand what you're saying about pil: how ON EARTH were public image a "pro rock" operation?

if you're saying that the WORD "indie" did not exist prior to c.84 i think that's probably correct: it was still called "independent"/i think the indie zeitgeist was anti-rockist (along with all the anti-racist/anti-sexist stuff) (and the subsequent interest eg in jazz and african music) (and y'know the evolution of say the clash on sandinista!: i think the c81 proves that (yes it has some "rock" on it eg wah! heat, but very very very little what was considered "rock" at that moment) (obviously as this word has itself shifted meaning quite a lot there is room for disagreement or confusion) [the owners manual that comes with includes a guide to the INDEPENDENT DISTRIBUTION NETWORK]

you're probably right about grunge: the oasis suggestion was just a guess (though i think there is a creation good => creation bad aspect here, which was possibly subterranealy prodding me)

no surprise to me that the glasgow perspective is very difft to the london perspective

haha now i think about this with a bit of hard perspective i realise for example that in 1981 i would have argued that JOY DIVISION were "not rock" because [er er luckily i nevah had to defend this position: "because i like them and i hate rock" jeepers, but there it is]... but the specials and the beat and all those were NOT ROCK and costello was NOT ROCK and etc etc (so no i don't understand when you say "pro-rock", unless you were playing tygers of pan tang as well as scritti politti)

Was that a band, or is this Elvis Costello? (I don't understand why he wouldn't be considered rock.)

ok this is not a very statement is it, since ppl keep misunderstaning that i am saying. by "movement" i believe i mean d.kelly, n.taylor and a.thrills, ie not a movement at all, by canonised i mean, crowded out interest in a wider range of stuff at the mag — viz jazz, african, reggae, soul, avant-weirdy whatevah — despite (i wd say and said then, though their market research insistently disagreed) considerable reader interest (as proved i am gratified to say by alexander blair's description of tastes in glasgow "indie" clubs ... rap was a more complex issue, cf THE HIPHOP WARS!!!!¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡!!!!!!!!

"jangly guitar basically, byrds-to-VU third" = my sneery description of contents of c86 itself, unfair i know to eg bogshed, but just compare the range of c81 to c86 (pere ubu to linx!), the c86 intent just SHOUTS we are narrowing your tastes down for your own good, and creation WERE ALWAYS a retro-label (i like the byrds and vu third and some creation releases BUT THEY WERE REACHING INTO THE PAST FOR VALIDATION WHICH PiL WERE NOT).

This matters less to me now as i am immensely old and "the only thing to look forward to..." etc etc...

(i mean, not to start a fight as it is mere terminology and words and all and of no great consequence — and also i am busy wrestling with mr tim "stockholm gothster" hopkins in the epic youth-vs-flame throwdown — but REALLY he is NOT ROCK)

Maybe I have a personal and idiosyncratically inclusive definition of rock without realizing it. (I have a feeling that when I was a kid I would have called a lot of the soul that I heard on the radio "rock," not knowing any better.) But a song like "I'm Not Angry"? Not rock? Listen to that guitar solo. Then again, I would probably consider "Green Shirt" to be rock, too. Am I the only one here who considers much of his music to be rock? If you don't want to argue it, that's fine: it's not a very interesting point.

(I'm not getting a lot of work done today.)

DeRayMi I have started a thread on it.

- I think mark in (rightly) damning the limited scope of c-86 is being a bit harsh on the NME since that was the state of UK indie IIRC outside the megabands (Smiths, Cocteaus, Depeche Mode, Fall). Interesting challenge: come up with a better tape, if we can, without using non-UK acts - I shall reflect on this over weekend;

- did we not prove by science once that JD = disco?

Geir what bands are in your indie canon?

From the mid 80s onwards:
The Stone Roses, Jesus Jones, The Charlatans, Blur, Oasis, Pulp, Suede, Dodgy (arguably not indie), Ocean Colour Scene, The Bluetones (debut album only), Travis, Coldplay, Kaiser Chiefs, The Kooks, Franz Ferdinand. Those are the GREAT indie bands from this era.

― Geir Hongro,

I can't say I have ever considered Jesus Jones or Ocean Colour Scene indie at all (not since the 1st album anyway, and NOONE considers that a great album either)

And Coldplay are just not indie in anyway.

because they were smoother, more well-produced, more melodic

In other words, they weren't really indie.

From "Parklife" onwards, there was no opposition between indie and production values anymore.

jesus christ, they're SIMMONS pads, not simmonds

From "Parklife" onwards, there was no opposition between indie production values anymore.

Aww man can this not be a play-with-Geir thread?

(Hahaha although his sense of an "opposition between indie and production values" is kinda funny and relevant given the discussion we were having and the thing I was trying to say about lots of indie/indiepop production types being style propositions in and of themselves -- which, NB, I can't believe I got through without pointing out "lo-fi" as the obvious example, a way of recording that soon enough wasn't just meant to be tolerable or forgivable ineptitude but an interesting set of sounds in and of itself, a resonant style)

Indie in the 80s and indie in the 90s were different simply because the 90s differed from the 80s.

In the 80s, indie wanted to be everything the typical synth-based mainstream pop of the time was not.

In the 90s, the mainstream had been taken over by hip-hop and dance and it was more natural for indie to be everything hip-hop/dance were not.

Production values were not neccessarily opposed to hip-hop or dance, but a lack of production values wasn't quite as important as it was to be alternative to the mainstream in the 80s either.

Indie in the 80s and indie in the 90s were different simply because the 90s differed from the 80s.

truthbomb

I hear the 70s were also different from the 60s!

The 1880s and the 1890s were pretty much the same though.

I liked Nabisco's long post. It moved the discussion on, for me - it made me think.

Some of what Hongro just said in his post may have been true, as well, actually.

well it's true the 80s and the 90s were different

Lo-fi and DIY are mentioned (dr and tape releases are THRIVING), these things do still exist. It's just the mainstream music press(inc NME etc) just aren't interested anymore.
But then again, who is interested in the mainstream music press anymore?

DJ Martian

Does he actually read it though? ;)

Pinefox did you go in for DIY/tape trading at all? Do you buy home made cdrs by bands? It cant just be indie rock/punk/metal/psych folk/noise/drone bands who do all this. Surely DIY indie pop still exists?

And yes, Geir, we know you're not interested in lo-fi production or tape/cdr trading as you prefer cd and high production values.

A lo-fi production may be worthy if the melody is good (and the vocals mixed high enough for the song to actually be heard), but I would always have preferred it hi-fi. :)

But I find todays "indie" as you call indie, too overproduced. Indie rock (or indeed rock in general) especially shouldn't be too produced as it sucks the life out of it.

10 seconds till Geir pat response #2354, "There is no such thing as over-production"

Pinefox did you go in for DIY/tape trading at all? Do you buy home made cdrs by bands? It cant just be indie rock/punk/metal/psych folk/noise/drone bands who do all this. Surely DIY indie pop still exists?
― Pfunkboy Formerly Known As

I don't know that much about any of this but yes, it does - this year I have put out two eps on 3-inch CDR, on this label:
http://www.cloudberryrecords.com/

OK so now we appear to have "Indie Rock" and "Indie Pop"

Um, wasn't that the donée of the thread? And certainly of the thread revival?

I haven't read it all. I don't know what Indie Pop is though, to be honest. Are Belle and Sebastian really a pop band?

Music doesn't need "life". It needs detail and sophistication. The more details the better.

Postpunkers were never afraid of production values.

And neither were most indie bands, they just couldn't afford them.

This thing about indie bands deliberately sounding messy and underproduced is largely a myth

I think it is fair to say that some could afford production values back then. It was more of a trend. But still, of course Britpop had larger budgets than 80s indie, which is part of why Britpop was more produced.

My two main pet peeves about 80s indie production are not that much about budget though, rather about way too much reverb and mixing vocals way too low in the mix.

The financial constraints are consistently ignored tho, most indie bands would have given their right bollock to spend 3 months in the Bahamas with George Martin producing them, but who was going to pay for it?

And that also goes for affodring rehearsal time in proper rehearsal studios AND affording proper equipment

I don't exactly disagree. It may have become sort of an ideological thing among some indie fans, but it is true that 80s indie would have been more produced had they been able to afford it.

One would expect that Factory Records could have afforded a larger production budget for the first two Happy Mondays albums though, considering the money that was being spent on cover design.

Well pashmina was only talking about the bands he did sound for I think, Tom. Not indie rock or pop in general.

Just looking at pinefox's link. What band are you in PF?

The only band there I've heard of is Je Suis Animal, and only because they get mentioned a lot on the watercooler thread.

The First Division (sold out!) and The Arc Lamps (available!)

Tom D: for definition of indie pop, see Nabisco article linked to upthread;
or indeed (I've only just looked at this)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indie_pop

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/article606267.ece

http://www.indie-mp3.net/C86%20Essay.pdf

http://unpopular.typepad.com/unpopular/2005/07/c86.html

Musically its key characteristics were jangling guitars, a love of sixties pop and often fey, innocent lyrics.

Geir should like it then
x-post

And I did. Particularly when they turned off the reverb, put the vocals more in the forefront, and separated the instruments somewhat more in the stereo sound. :)

that squeaky clean indie pop sound of the late 80s. who listened to this stuff? what cultural moment did this kind-of music fit into?

and can burt_stanton make a thread about them?

Yes. I was looking through youtube and it seems like ther'es a milllllllion of these bands that have this sound somewhere between the Wild Swans and Sarah Records. I guess people were really into it? Was it something that happened parallel to the Sonic Youths and Spacemen 3s of the time? Also it's too cold to leave the apartment.

Type faster, maybe you'll stay warm that way.

that stuff was one of chief reasons why I spent the late eighties listening to KNAC and KDAY (metal and rap respectively). pls to turn volume up above 3 and not romanticize awkwardness, sexlessness.

but yeah there was a minor cult around it - I always hated that they called it "pop," as if there were some aesthetic/formal quality that makes something pop when it seemed to me that whatever pop's aesthetic/formal qualities might be at a given time, music isn't "pop" unless it appeals to lots of people. I mean: I can totally see the argument "the following qualities make something pop whether people like it or not" as long as there's a qualifier before it: sixties pop, eighties pop, Urban Cowboy boom pop. But when you build a whole new subgenre around these qualities and call it "pop" when a huge part of the subgenre's character depends on its appeal to a small subculture, then no, that's not pop, and besides, a number of these bands seemed to have thought they would have been more popular in an earlier era, which, y'know, no, & besides nostalgia is obnoxious.

I would guess that the members of Belle & Sebastian have an alarmingly complete collection of this kinda stuff.

Burt is stabbed and while pursued by the children, is assisted by a child named Job. Realizing the situation his girlfriend is in, Burt follows Job and Sarah to the cornfield. Meanwhile, Malachai has turned on Isaac when the latter refuses to try and use Vicky as a lure for Burt, Malachai decides to have Isaac crucified as another sacrifice. Night falls, and the ritual begins.

I always hated that they called it "pop," as if there were some aesthetic/formal quality that makes something pop when it seemed to me that whatever pop's aesthetic/formal qualities might be at a given time, music isn't "pop" unless it appeals to lots of people.

You appear to be mixing up pop with popular music.

Pop is a musical genre, characterised by being more melodic, more "produced" and with less rough edges than "rock"
Popular music is a sociological phenomenon describing whatever is popular with the masses.

Well, I'm not talking the stuff that's totally tweeish and gawky, like the Pastels and all that shit. The stuff that comes from that tradition but is slightly mainstream but still "underground" ... that really clean "alternative pop" 120 Minutes used to play in like, 1989 or 1990. Did it inspire people enough to see it live? It doesn't make much sense to me.

Pop is a musical genre, characterised by being more melodic, more "produced" and with less rough edges than "rock"

I know some of you like to think this, but the term pop is short for "popular." As far as I'm concerned if it's not popular then any attempt to claim the "pop" mantle is just weird cultural self-positioning.

Also, the so-called "rough edges" of rock are every bit as produced and fussed-over as the "smooth" ones of pop

...and if it ain't classical nor folk (ie ethnomusic), it's popular music, despite trying to quantify its popularity.

I was going to say that "pop" was also a part of that "serious music" v.s. "not so serious" (i.e. pop) dichotomy.

Indie pop also sounds better to the indie pop fan's ears than "wimpy faggot music" and other descriptions gruff non-fans probably gave it ("losercore" being another possible description).