99% of indiepop is crap

What it *has* done for us is allow those with genuinely good ideas - but whose ability (to give those ideas broader appeal, to focus them, to play them properly) is questionable - the chance to make records anyway, and some of those records have been great. But they've never been as great as "Ticket To Ride", or "Uptown Top Ranking", or "Bernadette", or "Dancing Queen". What's more, as ideas in general become more and more marginalised in society (and in what constitutes commercial pop), indie groups grow less and less useful, less and less "alternative" daily.

If you *do* have a good idea these days, the last place you're going to take it is indie music.

Are you using 'indie music' to mean indiepop there, cause at least the latter is a genre, whereas 'indie music' to my mind covers too broad a multitude of sins for your statement to make sense.

Marianna, perhaps looking for good new indiepop records is like looking for good new rockabilly records.

That being said, what I really want is for someone to give me a list of some of the current gold nuggets of indiepop. I may have even found one today unwittingly on the Sound of Young Sweden vol 2 compilation - Melodica "Wait for a decade".

my new motto.

although this is a 100% crap question.

I'd like the same thing. I thought that I didn't like indiepop anymore given the fact that I hadn't been really interested in a new indiepop record in years and the only things I've been mildly interested in are dinosaurs left over from the Sarah days (new Boyracer, Marine Research/Tender Trap, etc.). But then...I spent the day at work listening to a cd full of mp3s that I made a few years ago that was mostly indiepop and I enjoyed it quite a bit. I'm not sure if this was just nostalgia or if it means that I really do still like it.

One thing I've noticed is that most of the indiepop bands I see hyped these days (sorry, no concrete examples come to mind) are merely aping the Belle and Sebastian vibe, and although I like B&S, I only need one. When I was into indiepop I preferred the noisy end of things (Beat Happening, The Yummy Fur), and maybe my problem is that no one is pursuing that side. Or maybe it was just the thrill of the new, and now that the genre is showing it's age (and so am I) that feeling can't be captured again. I'm sure that there are a lot of people here who would like to proclaim the death of the genre, but I'd like to be proved otherwise.

Somebody with an indiepop background recommend a nugget, already. Stop the insanity.

On the other hand, the few good things I have heard lately that I've liked a bit have come up from random places... The Screen Prints for example were found on a Earworm comp - the most indiepop song on - and a fantastic song.

What I wonder is if during the whole C86 era, there were loads of bands popping up that were just completely average. The ones we listen to today, are those the good ones that have stood the test of time, or are they all the ones, including the average ones, and we only listen to them for nostalgia, not for anything great?

What is the best indiepop song of all time? Hey Hey Girl by Rocketship? Girl Daredevil by the Bomb Pops? Velocity Girl by Primal Scream? (or All Fall Down by the same). Just a Girl by the Pale Fountains?

I just need some inspiration to go out and buy some records.

I quite like the fairways song I downloaded.

"Rain Stops Play" by Wolfhounds.

You know, Marianna, I think there's something of a burn-out period that's bound to crop up with indiepop: the basic idea of the scene is a good one, but it only really needs 10-20 groups to follow up on it, not the vast swath of anyone-who-can-find-instruments-and-act-twee that we see right now. (There's also a really striking traditionalism within the genre, where the constant insular lionizing of a particular and already-rudimentary sound means that nearly every band is doing the same thing: see also punk in 77, really, hence both genres relying really heavily on compilations.)

Anyway, once the essential germ of the indie-pop idea has excited you via a certain number of albums, you're left with an indie-pop field in which no one is doing much to advance on that idea; punk lead very very rapidly into a very creative explosion of post- punk, whereas the indiepop scene seems to committed to maintaining itself as "lifestyle music" to really make any jumps outward. Dustin could probably do it, but he's not really trying.

That said, I think American indiepoppers started doing some decent things with the synthpop influence a few years ago, and I'm thinking that this is the first hope in a while for indiepop to branch interestingly outward into anything that's not just a meaningless homage to things that were done well enough 5-10 years ago.

The one indiepop single I love right now: Happy Supply's "Health Place" -- I think there's an mp3 in here.

So we accept that twee Merseybeat-punk guitar groups are, as a whole, incapable of creating anything you could really think of as a new presence in the world, bound both by their incompetence and their general forebearance. But most of what's considered left-field in the indie "world" sounds very bland to me; always makes me think of the Sartre quote Simon Price used to be fond of, about the man who lives in a hollowed-out tree finding infinite variation in a square foot of sky (a friend of mine edits a death metal mag, and by his own admission, the same thing applies in his job). I'm no more in touch these days than I need to be, which is hardly at all, but I hear things like Mogwai and it just sounds like kids having a laugh, but never actually laughing. It seems so odd, what this kind of group does: taking an experimental approach to making music, but applying such tight boundaries to the experimentation that you never get anywhere at all. You certainly don't hear ideas, anyway. Not good ones, given space to breathe.

I'd say making a good indie guitar pop record this century is like making a good modern country and western record - if it's going to be anything more than a genre pastiche, you're really going to have to go some. And if you're smart and talented enough to pull it off, many will wonder why such an original artist chose such a restrictive genre in the first place.

It is, arguably, all down to a matter of taste. Andy K one time berated me (politely!) about chasing down 'fourth-rate shoegazer' records when I could instead be using the funds to subscribe to MTV Classic and seeing all the early Gary Numan and OMD videos I wanted (and I do want to!). And yet I still have that desire to find more which others may dismiss as not as up to snuff (and Andy knows what he's talking about -- just ask him about his Ride reviews in the AMG) but which still give me that certain hit or something.

The palette may be limited, the square foot of sky restricted, but it still glows brightly. It just seems to me that it's better to think of yourself at the center of a mirror ball that's actually made of glass and transparent, where all the outside light shines through in different directions, but also bleeds into each other. Then you have the world to enjoy, and not just one view.

I don't think the search for current indie-pop (however defined) should be dismissed unless someone says that's the only way forward. Then it's not a search but a blinkered crusade.

Arguing that independently released, not-specifically-populist rock records have never been as "great" as "Ticket to Ride" "Dancing Queen" is like arguing that, say, independently released films have never been as great as "Star Wars," i.e. there's a problem with the way you're putting the question.

But I'm glad that people have offered up some names and acts that I haven't heard anything of! And I'll even give the Camera Obscura a second chance.

yes they have: night of chill blue by the chills beats all of these. And even belle and sebastian (who I mildly dislike) are at least more mysterious than all these.

as for where the kids take their good ideas nowadays - let me know a better destination. Romo? weblogging?

How can anything be more mysterious than "Dancing Queen"? It sounds like a song created in an ice sculpture.

Ned - the true essence of mystery is when you mysteriously decide to make music that is crap. I mean this quite seriously: there's an air of sanctified weirdness for me in the work of Biff Bang Pow or B&S that I just don't get from Taylor's list of canonical "good" recordings. I mean "Ticket to Ride" may be better, but it really is too boring to even think about.

I mean this quite seriously

I fear that from my standpoint, this is your problem.

After almost a decade of arguing rabidly for relativism, I don't feel guilty or hypocritical for thinking The Beatles are better than Biff Bang Pow or something. Far from setting up any "canonical" list of "good" recordings, my point is that "Uptown Top Ranking" represents a peak of imagination, ingenuity and purely musical excellence that makes it, to my mind, an equal to Beethoven's 9th in terms of its power to startle and inspire. As a pop song, it's nothing special; put it next to "Good Vibrations" and a musicologist would cackle. Harmonically, it's even less advanced than "Foggy Eyes" by Beat Happening, which is another great record. But the performance, the production, the arrangement and the purity of the idea make it very special indeed. Now, you might find some of these qualities in, say, Belle & Sebastian, but I think it'd be hard to argue that any of their songs are as fully-realized and near-flawless as Althea & Donna's hit (which, incidentally, I recently heard on the radio in a "Records You're Embarassed You Ever Bought" feature: "ho ho ho" chuckled the DJ as it faded out, "it sounds as bad now as it did then!"). In fact, I'd say that B&S are aiming for exactly the same kind of touching simplicity and neatness of expression, but as far as I'm concerned they've never yet managed anything that even comes close. I dunno, I sometimes worry that too much simplistic discourse has blunted a lot of people's feeling for music itself, but that's another story.

"I fervently believe the kids with good ideas nowadays are taking them elsewhere than Bernadette." What on earth is that supposed to mean?

Anyway, indie - be it indie rock or indie pop or post-punk - accounted for about a third of all the CDs, maybe slightly less. The musical and emotional distance covered by the CDs I'd lumped into this category is huge (though still a tiny proportion of the distances covered by music-as-a-whole), and my general feeling that I didn't actually want to listen to much of it is a reflection on me, not the style. But 'indiepop' as discussed here is a small fraction of 'indie' as a whole, and yes, it seems to me that it *is* quite a narrow and restrictive fraction. Despite Marianna's repeated pleas, there's very little recommendation happening on this thread, and almost no justification for the music under attack - Nitsuh says that the basic idea of 'indiepop' is a good one - but why is it?

The last 'indiepop' record I bought was the Montgolfier Brothers' album, which came out ages ago and I picked up last Autumn. I think it's a very pretty record and strikes me as the kind of thing 'indiepop' fans might describe as 'good' - but I almost never want to listen to it, because the feelings it describes and conjures - wistfulness, resignation, quiet infatuation - seem so wearily familiar to me and have done since about a year after I first tuned into Peel. The 'mystery' talked about on this thread seems to me to be often a kind of faffy, noncommital, vagueness. And this I think is as much to do with the style as me.

As for the other issue, I would hope that this forum is the sort of place where people who love Bernadette and Dancing Queen and Uptown Top Ranking can congregate and talk, otherwise there's very very little point to it.

Short version: the last half of the 20th century saw the development of a popular culture in which it was rarely considered very cool to get excited about a great number of basically enjoyable things, of which we'll take kittens as emblematic -- the idea is instilled in kids quite early that "coolness" (which for kids = "value") lies in rejecting these simpler, more childish pleasures, or anyway being completely unaffected by them and professing them to be silly. To focus on the U.S. for a second: this attitude was, in the 80s, best typified by west-coast hardcore, which tried very hard in every possible sense to present itself as, well, fierce, from the bands to the fans themselves. (Imagine Henry Rollins as the face of this.)

The key concept to the American strain of indiepop lies in a paradox that I think is pretty rich and interesting, which was the decision to completely deflate the fierceness of the hardcore punks by essentially outdoing them: by taking their own mantras of non- conformity and applying them toward all of those "simpler" "childish" pleasures that these supposedly daring non-conformist punks wouldn't have been caught dead engaging with. I hate to engage in the following bit of inaccurate legend-building, but honestly, the occasional antagonism between Calvin Johnson and Henry Rollins sums it up: Hank came and postured and yelled, Calvin came and threw you candy. And that's the snotty dare at the center of a lot of the indiepop that I like: "What, are you too cool to enjoy candy?"

eg it's never JUST receding concentric circles of obsession, viz: twee has pretty tunes = your mom might like it = what kind of fucking tard is IN PRINCIPLE against "your mom might like it|" esp as your mom (ok not yours tom and not mine either, but the moms of plenty here) may have run with wilder scenes than you the Righteous Teenpunk quite grasps etc etc

First, I think indiepop of the tweeer variety translates well because the material it's working with is really quite fundamental, both musically (that basic well of 50s-60s happy-melodic pop that was really one of the first "international" fundaments) and emotionally (this vaguely-universal childhood joy / wist / nostalgia spectrum) -- not to mention the "cute" response being generally shared, as demonstrated by, say, Hello Kitty. Based largely on those pop-musical fundaments, what you end up with is very much like an alternate version of chart-pop -- except for the key difference that indiepop strips away the idea that the "stars" (and by extension the music) are meant to be outwardly tough or sexy or even "cool," really. It's chart-pop for the idealized-world twee of something like Amelie, hence Amelie as the ultimate indiepop star: simple pleasures, no posturing, not even any ability or inclination to posture. The best indiepop bands tend to be the ones that sound like groups of 12-year-olds in garages in impossibly sunny small towns (which might explain why people with pleasant sunny middle-class backgrounds are much more likely to go for this stuff.) (Come to think of it, the Monkees' television show seems relevant here, as do bands in cartoons.)

(And actually, Tom, I might argue that in a sense the philosophical basis of twee is the same thing that's going on with a track like "Digital Love," which digs to the core pleasures of a genre -- core pleasures most people go into "cool" mode and dismiss as not nearly fierce enough for them -- and basically throws that reaction back at you, asking you to stop posturing and just enjoy them because they should, at root, be enjoyable. There's the same note of defiance back in the core of it.)

I'm starting not to like the "that's good at first, but where does it go?" argument, insofar as it assumes that everyone listens to music like ILM posters do, keeping careful historical track of where things are headed. In the grand scheme of things, hardly anyone listens to indiepop. This means there are countless 15 year olds out there today who could stumble upon it and see the genre as a whole as constituting this good idea at its core -- and only once they've listened to it for five years will they start wondering "what's next" and so on. Not to mention which as long as there is music that is trying to impress you, there will always be the excitement of the core indiepop idea -- so long as there is hip- hop on the radio, there will be this weird thrill in stumbling onto an obscure network of happy bouncy melodic bands either (a) telling you, with occasional defiance, that there's no point to the cool-guy posturing so it's la la la pop time, or (b) trying to make pop records so pleasant and melodic and likeable that the more extreme posturing on the other end seems, well, pointless and embarrassing.

That said, the core ideas of indiepop have shifted, I think, but unfortunately not in a good direction. But I'm tempted, for some reason, to make one of those arguments where you stupidly dare someone, like "I *dare* you to listen to 'You and Your New Boyfriend' and tell me you don't at least sort of see how useful this genre can be."

There was a lot more (and a lot better organized) that I had for this, but I can't quite keep it all straight. The complexity of the reasons I once liked indiepop were actually a whole lot of why I liked it: there seemed to be this very complicated trick in its center.

I don't mind some of this twee stuff, or the odd amateur pop song, it's fine, it's great - assuming there's a decent tune there in the first place, because God knows there's not much else going on to entertain you. But it's such a backwater in terms of music generally...I liked it at 15, because it was my own personal thing that I loved and no one else seemed to understand, and I can appreciate a good example of the genre nowadays, because I understand it as a harmless confection. I just think that there are people (not necessarily *here*) fervently discussing the ins and outs of some Pastels rip-off band who've never even heard "Big-Eyed Beans From Venus" by Captain Beefheart, or a Lee Perry album, or whatever. If you're so inspired by music that you want to explore the stuff they don't play on the radio, then opting for a route that takes in B- sides of 15-year-old Sarah singles or washed-to-rags pub rock schlock before it gets to Kraftwerk or John Coltrane or Marvin Gaye seems rather like attempting dentistry via the arse.

(Ultimate twee analogy for Tom = Saint Etienne, incidentally, straight down to the Field Mice cover.)

Don't forget, we started off talking about genres, not records. No one's yet come close to justifying why so many people take the indie genre so seriously, when it's such a debased and retro form. I mean, I keep an eye on it, because I know that really good records will originate there, maybe one or two a year. But I don't have any faith in it, I don't particularly follow it, and when I do hear most of what people are raving about, it's usually so dreadful on all levels that I laugh out loud.

Not sure where the bit about being "condescending" comes from. I explained carefully why I wasn't fingering you people as musical ignorami or anything, and I don't see what's wrong with looking a little critically at people who do consciously cleave to one musical form and let the others slide, especially when it's a genre as minor as indie. I think those people *are* fools, and they *are* fooling themselves if they think they're music lovers of any kind at all. That's not to say that there's anything wrong with liking an album some students made in their spare time more than you like "Rubber Soul", or something like that. That's up to you.

- I do like "y" better than "x" in some cases, but these are exceptions. Generally, the qualities of "y" are a hindrance to acheiving Greatness (previously demonstrated by myself to be an objective state not open to interpretation, such as "liquid" or "dead"). Although nobody has even suggested that amateurism is better *per se*, be advised that I'm not having any of it.

-Although no one has DEMANDED a justification of this genre but myself, I remain pleasantly above satisfaction on this point. Nitsuh, your patient and eloquent suggestions of some of the genre's relative merits are white noise to me.

-"Condescending"? Me? I never said you were "Ignorami", simply that you are "fools". Because you are. That puts you beneath me, not the other way around.

Right, then. Anything else?

(It does possibly if you're thinking of it as being Death Cab for Cutie or Belle and Sebastian, but as for honest-to-god Lois / Tiger Trap / Tullycraft fans it's quite meagre. The last band I've seen make any major splash out of the true "pop" scene was the Aisler's Set, and that's probably because they're too good to really fit in.)

Did you all decide that the solution is to seek the ideals praised in one genre in sonically more diverse/appealing form when you tire of the initial genre? (i.e. beat happening good, twee band x not so good because they do nothing new within the genre & offer up no ideological advancement?)

I think Mr. Parkes's arguments were spot on in regard to being able to obtain the same emotional response from widely varied songs, lyrical content not withstanding.

the same can be said of any small subgenre; see punk & hardcore & noise & post-pavement indie rock & bebop & dub & IDM & anything else for abundant examples of . this renders even arguing about validity-within-a-genre useless because ANYTHING can be criticized as "just another ____ band" (whether the criticism be valid from the perspective of the genre fan is another story.) i.e. "Go Sailor may be just another indie pop band, but Kraftwerk were just another motorik krautrock band"--i.e. "My taste = better than yours DESPITE MY ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF YOUR PREFERRED GENRE'S VALIDITY FOR WHATEVER REASON" == a pretty weak argument.

Well, isn't that the point?

But seriously, is this argument just a waste of breath, despite being articulated way better than 99% of ILX?

???

this thread is a little confusing.