Indie: definition - independent, as in independent record label i.e. – not affiliated with a major record company.
It may be stating the obvious but it does seem to have been forgotten.
The term ‘indie’ has been plagiarised to mean any UK group with a guitar. Indie was traditionally the underbelly of the British/US music scene. It was stuff that couldn’t get near a big record label. It was a catch all term for thousands of different bands that were making music they wanted to make with little chance of commercial success and even less of signing to a major. It wasn’t a sound, it wasn’t a look and it only got radio play from guys like the late John Peel or Steve Lamaq and Jo Wiley.
Then, just as it did with punk and then rave, the music industry consumes it and offers up a piss-watered down homogenised version, one which is marketable and which predominantly consists of a. four a. pretty boys with guitars, skinny jeans, big hair and a cardigan. b. Four geeks with electronic equipment skinny jeans and guitars. Subversive it isn’t.
It was the Britpop era which would signal the interest of major labels and the end of indie (in the UK at least). A plethora of British guitar bands, many talented, all marketable, all seemingly appeared at the same time as part of a ‘Britpop’ scene, even though some of the bands had been around for years.
It’s worth noting that at the time Oasis were signed to Sony and licensed back to Creation in the UK as they couldn’t find a US indie label big enough to support them. U2 on the other hand were signed to Island Records, an indie label, (they even helped keep them afloat during the eighties before the inevitable buy-out by a major occurred). So the band synonymous with indie wasn’t really, while the other – the band synonymous with extravagant stadium tours and pestering world leaders was the one with the better indie credentials. It all gets a bit confusing.
Perhaps we are all innocent victims in this, manipulated by major record companies in the quest for our cash, but I hate hearing talk of ‘indie kids’, ‘scenesters’ and of reading in the NME that indie is a look or a way of life. What pretentious bollocks! Did we not learn anything from Jarvis Cocker’s Mis-shapes? It was supposed to be about the music, not how you looked.
From everyone from The Pixies to Belle and Sebastian, from REM and U2 (alright, maybe not the best example) to Carter USM to The Fall, indie music and it's fans were diverse to the extent that the only thing they had in common was that they were not signed to a major label. They certainly didn't conform to a fucking 'indie' look and it wasn't 'a way of life'.
'Indie' isn't cool anymore, it's pretentious and boring.
Posted In Comment, Feb 03 2009.
Words - The Ginger