The Arcade Fire are brilliant. Not sure you'd call them indie rock either. And The New Pornographers? Rock? Come on.

I think this is merely a case of someone shoehorning a bunch of bands they don't like into a single category to make it sound like some cosmic proclamation of importance.

Exactly. That's what bugs me the most. It's become a "sound" and a fashion.

I am nothing if not cosmic. Me and Jim Morrison, baby...

The Cantankerous East Village Nihilist Hoodlum Collective. Sounds perfect.

Lighten up, Francis...

Unfortunately, I hate it becuz when I turn on the radio, it's there. When I walk into a record store, it's there. When I turn on the TV, it's there.

I made the mistake of buying a few records by the "indie" bands I implicated above last year based on reviews I thought I could trust. I hate them. I should probably trade or sell them.

At the same time, like Lilly, I have nothing against folks who like this stuff. To each their own, live and let live, and all that. But I wouldn't be sad to see all of this indie crap die a sudden death.

I saw clap your hands a few days ago, they played right before sonic youth came on. They're total assholes, they sat in the tent beside the stage while rave covers of metallica songs were played on the loudspeakers. They had a 1 hour set and 1/2 an hour in they finally came out and said "sorry about that" and started playing.

...Total waste of time when I could have been at stage A getting a better spot for sonic youth.

I trust ya on this one

Arcade Fire are the most brilliant live act I've ever witnessed. the Shins are fucking terrible. New Pornographers suck ass. BSS is decent.

In conclusion, shut the fuck up.

If you don't like... make your own or find your own. DOn't call it indie. That no longermeans anything cool. And you want to be cool, right?


(in a less attacking meaning, 'indie' is more of a marketing ploy now. It's become a genre created by bands such as Pavement, B&S, and um... death cab?, and now they get bands who try and sound like them and call it indie. It's always believed that indie was cool and cutting edge, now the big leagues have caught up and watered down to a radio(mtv) friendly varitation of the music that people generally consider indie.

Well for one thing indy rock does no longer mean anything really : the only meaning is rock music distributed on independent label. There shouldn't be any fake aesthetical consideration to it.
Still, people refer groups as diverse as Arcade Fire or Pixies as indy rock. Even sonic youth is sometimes refered to as indy rock !!
And it is becoming more and more a "sign" of musical coolness to be indy.

But I can't really agree with you when you compare The Shins and the new pornographers as being part of the same musicmaking scheme.
The NP are just like your regular rock band with strong melodic hooks, but I can't say that they musically compare with the Shins who are way more imaginative(can't go into the details but the lyrics should give you a clue).

The fact that they make accessible pop music is the reason why they are getting bashed(unjustly if you ask me).

So. Beyond the fact that mislabeling a band as being indy is dishonest to say the least, I really couldn't give a fuck. There's lots of crappy 'really indy' bands and a few inspiring 'fake indy' acts.
Indy isn't a label of quality.

That may have indeed been the case 15 years ago, but the term indie has long since developed aesthetic connotations, as words often do.

Better not to get too hung up on categorisation, it's useful but not crucial.

Sorry man but i don't really get what you're saying.Do you mean that you turn on the radio and all they play is bad indie rock?What happened to ears that sponteneously disintegrate nocive sounds?Do we advertise cars where there's only a desert?Is tv doing my head in?Why do i keep on watching it then?

I stick to avant-garde and experimental now. Sadly too many bands cite Mr. Bungle as an influence and tend to still suck and sound nothing alike.

Ha.

'An experimental mix of diverse genres, just like Mr Bungle' = too unimaginative to even be shitpoor indie.

Yeah, that's what I mean. Essentially.

Yes, there is something wrong with you...Pavement themselves were awesome; it's the bands that try to sound like them that suck (although I have to say I like a few songs by the Sun)...

Even the word experimental is fair game to become tainted by mainstream media and ad execs when more of them get hip to the idea that hundreds of thousands or even millions of American kids would flip for a certain spazzy style if only they were made aware of it.

Words that describe musical genres always go through a cycle, and this is the chronology...

(1) A few musicians begin making music of diverse influences which are so diverse that the resulting new music defies easy genre categorization.

(2) A few musicians become a few more musicians until there are a buncha musicians--perhaps only in one geographical location--combining diverse elements of influence.

(3) Frustrated with having to launch into two or three paragraphs to describe the sound of this new music, either an influential impresario or a writer for a zine or local journal comes up with a single word or short phrase to describe the music, and that word or phrase begins to resonate with the fans of the new music and make some of the uninitiated kinda curious.

(4) As the word begins to build critical mass, promoters of the scene and critics pin the label on a particular band, a milieu of bands, and perhaps also a record label which becomes known for preferring to release records by bands of the new genre. Eventually one or a few of these bands spearhead the growing awareness of the new style.

(5) A second wave of bands most often fail to understand the depth and width of their favorite bands' influences, preferring to emulate only the traits of their favorite bands which they find most appealing. Thus, what was a very broadly-influenced new genre begins to streamline down to a rather inbred form as even later-comers choose elements of influence from an even more limited palette.

Hence, when a whole new generation of young people became fans of industrial music 15 years ago thanks to Ministry and KMFDM and Skinny Puppy, many of those fans could not conceive of the early music of Cabaret Voltaire or Throbbing Gristle as "industrial."

More recently, after the second Lightning Bolt tour played to twice or triple as many kids as the first, there were a few kids who were inspired to wear masks and have antics and be spazzy and play on the floor. And many of these kids only valued these traits, completely overlooking any need to concentrate on creative song ideas or technique. Much of this resulting music was completely unredeemable. Meanwhile, others sought to emulate the playing technique specifically, and some idiot printed it somewhere (and even more idiots printed elsewhere after that interview with Muse which cited Lightning Bolt) as "a new form of music called skronk." And what kids who found Lightning Bolt through the Muse interview don't know is that skronk was something that edgey boppers and free jazz pioneers first did with saxophones and other horns.

In fact, Sonic Youth themselves are a gateway band from no wave and other weird, arty, and edgy forms of punk and (as broadly defined as possible) post-punk. By the early 90's when SY had built considerable critical mass, several bands were emulating certain traits of Sonic Youth's guitarwork especially. Whether they chose to explore alternate tunings or ripped ideas directly from Thurston and Lee, many or most never knew about Glenn Branca de-fretting and re-fretting guitars with almost 50 frets to emulate an Eastern texture or map out on a guitar an Eastern scale. SY just sounded neat to them, and that's what they wanted to do, too.

The post-SY generation of indie-rock had some great bands, but also a lot of crappy ones. The disciplined or very experimental approach to tunings was dumbed down over short generations, and of course, with Nirvana being even more influential during that time, many guitarists were pleased to play guitar with a sorta messy edge...even the pop bands, and hence the Modest Mouse generation.

A step six in the chronology is the introduction of atavistic elements, or elements which have become unpopular or completely missing from music over a period of time, and this can mean strictly retro bands or new bands creatively integrating atavistic elements with contemporary ones, and for the latter especially, a debate will begin in a particular music community over whether they belong in the genre or not, and certain stuffy people who like to pigeonhole everything cleanly and neatly will require a new genre name to describe this band which is straddling one of more fences.

This is why talking about genres--especially nowadays on message boards--sparks all kindsa drama.

True, indie rock has been really watered down to sound like pop punk. They've ruined such a beautiful genre. There was so much diversity and talent in the indioe scen for so long. Now these little wankers have to go and pollute it with their shitty ideas of sounding all the same and making the music strwamlined to fit a more popular notion of what rock mnusic should be. Fuck them all. Fuck them right in their raw, bleeding assholes.

See, Kingcoffee...that's undue strain there. Let the middle mass of today's indie kids and wannabe-cooldads and moms have their indie rock. Just let it go. The word is useless to describe much of any good music, and especially not anything diversely influenced.

And as I've said before and always say throughout my musicology classes...

Music that is diversely influenced may become diversely influential, and on the other hand, music that is narrowly influenced most likely will become an evolutionary dead-end.

Let them circle-jerk each other into oblivion while you enjoy better music of multiple stripes.

I don't mind it. I enjoy Bloc Party, Interpol, Arcade Fire and BSS.

I like Clap Your Hands, The Shins and Arcade Fire, and Jesus.

I noticed the word post-hardcore is starting to get mainstream too. But instead of referring to post 80's hardcore, it refers to post-now hardcore, which is just shitty emo kids screaming. WTF is this Norma Jean shit?

Sometimes I think that maybe I'm just not hip to the times. That if I don't like all this Interpol, Modest Mouse, Arctic Monkeys, Strokes, bullshit, maybe there is something wrong with me.

Reading Our Band Could Be Your Life, there was a lot of hate for New Wave and later on College Rock. But to me now, I see a lot of it has really delightful, consumable, pop music. Echo and the Bunnymen, Adam and the Ants, Elvis Costello, and in the realm of college rock the Pixies and They Might Be Giants. If I was in my teens or 20s when those bands came out, would I have dismissed them as pseudo-underground with a corporate sheen?

But then I think, do any of these indie bands have nearly as much texture about their music as the Pixies? Or can any of them scream like Adam Ant? Or write hooks like Gary Numan?

I'm trying to find the best way to say it, but I might as well be blunt: indie rock is boring. When indie rock singers scream or holler, it just sounds so unrocking. It is like they are fake screaming, and without any spirit, because these are completely brainless entities drugged out on some sort of SOMA like drug that doesn't affect your ability to play tightly in the key of boring slick digital corporate indie rock.

To me right now there are only a few bands making new music that really matter to me: Sonic Youth, Mission of Burma, Shellac, TV on the Radio, (somehow in the indie genre but incredibly awesome) and Beck. That's it. If Gang of Four or the Pixies write new material, I'd add them to the list. I do like Lightning Bolt and Hella, but their music isn't very important to me.

To me, it seems with barely anything that matters, the thing to do is really define your own scene. "My Little Undeground" so to speak. With the internet and the advent of cheap recording, the air is polluted with so much schlock. With all this crap everywhere, I think we've really regressed to a sort of proto-punk sort of era. The support network flooded. A new one needs to be built.

Norma Jean's first album is great. FACT.

I've only heard a little bit by them.

I just got tired of my little pothead brother saying "punk and post-punk blows, you should listen to some hardcore like Norma Jean and Leftover Crack man." Then he'd go hang out with a bunch of kids who I to this day cannot tell apart because everyone dresses and does their hair the same.

I bought him Black Dots last Christmas so he'd know what real hardcore was. He stopped listening to it fairly quickly, and now it is a member of my collection. His loss.

Leftover Crack and Norma Jean aren't comparable. The new cd and old one sound completely different. There are good bands in every genre. Converge and early-Norma Jean are examples of good hardcore bands.

Bless the Martyr and Kiss the Child is a really good album. They then got a new singer as the one on said album formed another band: The Chariot. Oh God the Aftermath is a good album, but I prefer the debut alot more.

You Fail Me by Converge is a really good album.

luti kriss (pre-norma jean) and the chariot sound like the mouth of hell oscillating, meaning it sounds awesome.

The Chariot put on one of the most fantastic live albums I've ever seen. Josh is a super nice guy. My friend has the old guitar player's broken guitar from when the played in town here a year or so ago.

I love how a Christian band sounds like the mouth of hell. They are fantastic.

Maybe things work out easier if you consider a genre not as something a band/song belongs to, but something it interacts with?

I think Arcade Fire have a great album in them somewhere, but Funeral isn't it.

The EP could have been a wonderful album.

i love Arcade Fire, Bloc Party on the other hand can suck my balls.

You know they'd love that as well.

I don't get the hate for Arcade Fire. They're one of the few indie bands with a decent approach to drums that are about today. More love for decent drumming please.

I'm hanging on to my Arcade Fire, Shins, BSS, and New Pornographers, in spite of everything. I heard a Shins song from the last LP on the radio over lunch and decided it was pretty good. Maybe you just have to be in the mood. I seem to be in a much harder "rock" place these days. I pretty much don't trade anything anymore, even the cheesiest stuff, becuz I've learned in my 30 odd years or so of collecting that you never know what you might get a hankering to listen to.

What's happened to the word "hardcore" is a perfect example of the streamlining or narrowing of a genre which changes a word's definition. I never thought I'd see a day when I'd have an argument with someone half my age about what is "hardcore," but now it has happened, as certain myopic kids who misguidedly subscribe to rigidly segregated genre ghettos wanna re-characterize the original "hardcore" of the years 1980-1985 as "hardcore punk."

The whole emocore/screamo, metalcore, and melodic hardcore thing were the ingredients that combined to form this stuff. It's gotten kids away from the DIY punk ethos and rawness of the original HC...all the way to the point where that is actually something to be vilified. And yet, some of the first bands to begin leading toward this trend are totally redeemable. Converge, for one.

As far as it "starting to get commercial," it's waaayyyy beyond that point when you walk into a Wal-Mart or a Fred Meyer store in rural southeast Oregon, and the young men's clothing section is full of distress-dyed hoodies with asymmetrical screenprints of feathered skulls on them. In fact, I was just at the Fred Meyer in Klamath Falls, OR, on my recent roadtrip, and I saw this helplessly nerdy kid out back-to-school shopping with his farmer dad and ultra-frump mom. He was trying so hard to get some of those shirts and hoodies with those prints.

"Mom, what about this?" the kid asked, eyebrows raised in hopeful excitement.

"No way!" mom snapped. "Too goth!"

Reaching for a compromise, kid held up a Nike shirt with a small swoosh overshadowed by a strong "NIKE" inscripted in large orange-glowing outlines and the look of a wrought-iron "NIKE" brand.

"How about this?" he pleaded.

Mom: "That's still too goth!"

Kid: "Do you know what it says?"

Mom: "Nike...I can read."

Kid: "Well, it can't be too goth if you can read it."

Seriously, though...the uniform of Avenged Sevenfold is available in every big box store. By and large--so I'm not talking about anyone here specifically--youth don't know how to rebel anymore. It actually started with my generation, the first to be marketed corporate-controlled rebellion since the "psychedelic era" of 1967-1968 that permeated pop culture. We had "grunge." And since then, with "nü-metal" and "rage rock" and now this "post-hardcore" crap, corporate-controlled rebellion continues, and it only truly counts as rebellion in places like Klamath Falls, OR, where parents never caught up to understanding "grunge"...and other places where the local Bible store is the only bookstore around.

Shut up, gothy.

Too much lecturing and "I was there!" posturing can't get in the way of mutual appreciation of KK Rampage.

That's becaue KK Rampage is phenomenal.

You couldn't be anymore right about this.The real problem with the so-called crap indie bands that prolificate 'on the scene' is that ultimately they are very much their own worst enemy for the limitations that having limited influences implies.The reason why they don't bother me at all is because there is an invisible 'sell by date' attached to their records,existence etc etc.

I somewhat agree. Although you're clumping a whole heap of bands and 'genres' together when alot of the bands and genres are different. The kids are the ones who make the labels, not the bands. Some bands just like the image like Avenge Sevenfold etc. But there is a huge difference between Converge, Poison the Well, and Norma Jean compared to Avenge Sevenfold and the likes, yet they get clumped together because the kids have to have a scene. It like the Blood Brothers said: "The Kids are spoiled rich and don't know shit from shit". It's sad that alot of these awesome bands are now popular within the 'emo' scene, because that scene is totally superficial.

I say listen to what you like. Music is like politics these days. People only sticking to their clique and image.

Kids don't know how to rebel any more? I think that's cack. Not because it's untrue of this generation, but because it implies there was a generation that did rebel. Kids still don't get on with their parents. Kids still resist their parents. In terms of a 'culture' of 'rebellion', kids will always believe that their generation is resisting the older generation, which they always do. The problem is that 'rebellion' is always part of being a stupid teenager, rather than a genuine thing. For all the first generation British punks I know, not a single one held true to its 'revolutionary' ethos. All the ex-hippies I know have short hair and 4x4's. The idea that any generation ever had anything other than a fake revolution is ridiculous to me.

No offence and all that, but I think it's such a risible sentiment, 'kids don't know how to rebel any more'.