I can remember the first time I heard the word “indie,” though I don’t remember the name of the band described. It was during my freshman year of college too many years ago. I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t know what the word meant but the lead singer looked sort of South-Asian so I thought it might be a reference to his ethnicity.
Flash forward to the present and it’s safe to say the term “indie” has passed its arch. While once referring to solely undiscovered artists producing music without the backing of major labels and providing an alternative to top 40, it now encompasses mainstream trendiness - tight t-shirts and skinny boys that are the standard, not the alternative. From first hearing a band described as indie to now seeing middle-schooler hairstyles with the same descriptor, the trend, the style, the meaning of indie has gone from peripheral to pop to passé. There will always be underground music and music more appealing to the masses. But “indie” now exists as both and neither. One sure indicator that a trend has run its course is CNN’s level of awareness.
Similar to indie, I remember as a sophomore in high school hearing about the drug ecstasy for the first time. Not till after I graduated college did I see a CNN report on “the new club drug, E or X.” Needless to say, the Wolfe Blitzer crowd is a little slow on the uptake. This week CNN.com posted an article about the “new” phenomena of bands producing and publicizing their own music. Their description of why or how a band does this is accurate enough but I take issue with CNN treating this as novel. They seem utterly ignorant of the music industry’s current normatives and give credence to a legitimacy gap that closed long ago. Independent endeavors follow a well worn path. The corporate construct model for album sales still exists but its informed by (and no longer superior to) non-major label tactics. The Killers are not representative of what’s forward thinking and new. They’re the corporate construct version of what’s forward thinking and new.
The mainstreaming of indie leaves those concerned with credibility stuck in a losing game of indier-than-thou sanctimony. Criteria for authenticity tighten as taste gives way to snobbery. If you find a band you like, and dare show interest in it, the self-appointed indie puritans are quick to disparage your discovery as too pop, too normal, not underground or different enough. All the while their lock step conformity is the ‘normal’ they claim to abhor. Indie is, of course, an abbreviation of independent (not ‘Indian’, I now know). But, given the current use of the term I have to ask myself – independent of what? Music produced independent of financing from a major label? Maybe. People independent of popular trends and the need for mass approval? …probably not.
