|
|
Indie Is Not A Scene
 So today I was thinking about something that people might agree with and might disagree with, but give it thought. Why is Indie becoming a genre? When did this trend start? When I started listening to Indie some 8 years ago it was not a genre but a holding place for original thought and sound before it got a name. Indie was a place for bands to go when they did not have a title, when they were something different from pop, rock or metal. It was something electric, something you could not put a name to until people were ready to follow that band and that sound, and give it a name.
Now I can understand giving something a name with Indie in it: Indie rock—sure; Indie Emo—great; but just labeling bands as Indie makes no sense to me. Indie is just an adjective, not a title. The music community defines it as a number of genres, scenes, styles, and cultures of music that differ away from the pop music mainstream. To me, this definition means anything that breaks away from the norm of music. Therefore, everything, in short, was at one time Indie. It strayed away from what everyone was doing at the time with bands like: the Ramones, The Sex Pistols, Black Flag, and (when new wave was king) the birth of Emo from Joy Division. These were all at one-point genres without a name until they were given one. Now, Indie has turned into a genre and why is this? Some of the best bands of today’s subjective standards were at first labeled as Indie: Brand New, Thursday, Appleseed Cast, Death Cab, TBS, (just to name a few) but these bands have moved out and have found a genre like Emo, hardcore, rock, and punk. If we keep labeling bands as Indie, what is the next place a band without a label can go to wait for their scene? I guess you just can’t place a band in a genre that was never a genre to begin with. A word like Indie is, literally, independent from any set genre of today; therefore, Indie can never be anything more than just a temporary holding cell for new sounds until society catches up with a more permanent label.
S. Graves
|
|