Hipsters, Scenesters, music fans of young and old, we appear to be at an impasse. We all love to hear new and innovative music, but I fear we have to retire the word “indie” when describing what we listen to.
Let’s face it, the word has lost pretty much all meaning in the context that it’s used these days. You could really get away with it in the 90’s when it referred to independent music in its purest form. Back in the days of major record labels dominating the musical horizons, independent record labels saved originality by not only allowing creativity to continue, but by encouraging it.
Currently though, the majority of popular music is found on independent labels. Quite frankly, in the majority of conversations about bands, “Indie” hardly refers to who is distributing music but instead to a particular sound.
I think before we get into the language debate, we need to know just how we got here.
Remember “Alternative” music? I sure do. Until 2003 all I listened to was Alternative music. You’ll remember that Alternative included everything from heavy rock to experimental music a la Radiohead circa Kid-A. But then something happened that suddenly turned Alternative into yet another bleak form of music. Every Alternative radio station began to play music that had at least five variations of the same band. Pearl Jam was largely considered a cornerstone of Alternative music. Then Creed came along, followed by Stained and countless other bands that chased that same formula for success. Soon enough, fans of music that was once a champion for sounding different were inundated with the same crap they were trying so hard to escape. It was dull, lifeless, uncreative music that not only lacked inspiration in itself, but failed to inspire us.
In late 2003, there was a new beast out there gaining a lot of momentum. Fed largely by the internet, fringe music was gaining more traction every day. This is the only time you will ever hear about file sharing as a means for saving the music industry. The fact that someone could hear an amazing band in California and send it to someone across the country bypassed the need for regular radio airplay. At this stage, most of these bands were on independent labels at the time. It was around here when Indie really began to take hold as a genre. For the most part though, things were still relatively kept in check.
I think it was movies and television that really saw the Indie phenomenon take off. Now in the mix were some young people in the industry who were hip to music and keen to put it into their work. Say what you will about movies like Garden State and the laughably bad television drama the OC, but whoever picked those soundtracks had a great ear for good music off the beaten path. While those programs may have catapulted bands like the Shins and Modest Mouse into the mainstream, there was now a hungry beast to be fed. Everyone liked what they heard because it was - go figure - GOOD MUSIC for a change!
It’s at this stage where I personally think everything went off the rails with the word. After all, you can’t have an immensely popular group of music without a name. So the world began calling everything they heard that sounded a little bit different from what they were used to “Indie” (much to the chagrin of diehard fans of independent music who had supported the industry all along).
In the end, this is what I like to refer to as “THE BIG SWAP.” “Indie” simply replaced “Alternative.” Although I don’t think “Alternative” really took notice.
So now we find ourselves in the place we are right now; stuck with a word that’s used to describe a shitload of music, by not describing it at all.
If there’s any solace in this whole debate, it’s that we may have come full circle. I’m extremely hesitant to say that any true music fan should start using “Alternative” to describe music again. But at least it looks like the industry is once again using the word properly.
Of all the places to look for proof of this, you can find it in this year’s Grammy nominations in the Alternative category. There you will find the Arcade Fire, the Black Keys, Vampire Weekend, Broken Bells, and Band of Horses. Each one of those bands all sound very different from not only the bands nominated in other categories, but more importantly, they all sound different from each other.
I’ll admit that it looks promising; but we still the problem of how you should describe each of those bands. As nice as it is to see recognition for creative and original music, the grouping of all those bands together in one genre certainly gives the impression that they all share a similar sound.
When in reality, you couldn’t be more wrong. More to come on that later.
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