I don't want to get into this debate too much. I think there are still some worthwhile coversations around here (otherwise I wouldn't post here), but I do see leland's point about calling most of the bands metacritic reviews "mainstream" a little preposterous.
----- I’ll be Ben Gazzara, you’ll be Gena Rowlands.
Posts: 5176 | Location: Michigan | Registered: 19 June 2005
Metacritic isn't particularly indie in it's reviews, but there seems to be a majority of indie forum users - that's my opinion anyway.
I just like what I like. Sometimes it's obscure, sometimes it's massively popular - I'm not really bothered as long as it's good (I realise I'm dreadful at commenting on werewolf films but I'm learning).
I've noticed that many of the regular posters on here seem to be quite open minded and although they're outnumbered by hardcore indie people, they win through stamina. This board may change, but a minority of media die-hards will still be here long after indie ceases to be fashionable.
I always find it interesting and I love the debates.
Originally posted by m.leland: You kids certainly did turn this board around the last year and a half. I remember how awful it was in the beginning. People like LinnTate and PhilosopherEric used to say crazy--crazy!--things, like, "I love music," and, "Hey, check out this band." I'm glad you've quieted them down some. The conversations were seriously out of control.
Oooohhhh, I'm pretty much a newbie. Tell me the tales of yore and the conversations passed!!! I've long dreamt that the venerable old folks LinnTate and philosopherEric would respond to one of my posts. That would be the seventh happiest day of my life, bested only by the six days I've been on serotonin reuptake inhibitors.
Posts: 707 | Location: DC | Registered: 05 January 2007
hrmmm, I'll let you guys decide whether that last post was serious. Sarcasm or not, I should clarify though that I mean no disrespect to LT or pE. In fact, I think it was pE who unwittingly convinced me to listen to Powder Burns, which ended up being one of my favorites last year.
Posts: 707 | Location: DC | Registered: 05 January 2007
quote: 2.Do not repeat things that have already been said. This means you are responsible for READING PREVIOUS POSTS before making a post yourself. Obviously, if there are hundreds of posts on a topic, you won't be required to read every one, but you should read a significant portion of them. Users who constantly repeat things that have already been said do not add anything of value to the discussions in our Forums.
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quote: 2.Do not repeat things that have already been said. This means you are responsible for READING PREVIOUS POSTS before making a post yourself. Obviously, if there are hundreds of posts on a topic, you won't be required to read every one, but you should read a significant portion of them. Users who constantly repeat things that have already been said do not add anything of value to the discussions in our Forums.
quote:
quote: 2.Do not repeat things that have already been said. This means you are responsible for READING PREVIOUS POSTS before making a post yourself. Obviously, if there are hundreds of posts on a topic, you won't be required to read every one, but you should read a significant portion of them. Users who constantly repeat things that have already been said do not add anything of value to the discussions in our Forums.
Indie is the best way to think you're engaging in some kind of sub-mainstream practice without actually listening to interesting or challenging music. Imagine you're a reviwer and get paid to do so for Rolling Stone or something. You porbably know a lot about music journalism but not really anything about music, so your tastes are bound by the things you listened to throughout your lifetime (most people have heard and enjoyed pop music). However, you need to add a level of intellectualism (that's the expertise in music journalism part to elevate your taste above that of the common pop-ingesting peon). Indie is the solution.
Indie music is just pop music with weird alterations to tones/production and/or vocal performance. For example, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! are a pop/rock band with slightly off of center vocals and a fun but also self-aware attitude. So you want intellectual escalation (though usually there is nothing more intellectual about indie, it's just that they are ironic/self-aware/elitist) but don't want to stray too far from the pop music we all know and love. Indie works.
Originally posted by goathouse: So what would be "interesting or challenging" in your book? Classical? Jazz? Advanced guitar workouts?
"Challenging" to most indie-music lovers might mean some genres of metal, such as death, grindcore, or black. Of course, for some, "challenging" may just be a euphemism for "awful".
Posts: 873 | Location: Ain'T it stiLl obvious? | Registered: 22 August 2006
Originally posted by goathouse: So what would be "interesting or challenging" in your book? Classical? Jazz? Advanced guitar workouts?
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Originally posted by exkc: "Challenging" to most indie-music lovers might mean some genres of metal, such as death, grindcore, or black. Of course, for some, "challenging" may just be a euphemism for "awful".
I think these comments represent the exact problem with people thinking about what makes music "challenging" or "interesting." I elaborate more on my thread "points of confusion," but I think most people think that to be challenging it has to have this guise of instrumental technicality. Shredding on your guitar at some crazy speed doesn't make the music challenging. In fact, it usually makes it boring. Instrumental prowess is just one trait of a music piece. There is also melodic content, harmonic content, timbre, tone, production, orchestration, dynamics, texture, contour, rhythm, tempo, song structure, phrase struction etc., etc., etc. to consider when creating challenging or interesting music. Indie is generally pop music with slight convolutions in the categories of production/texture/tone and orchestration. Zach Condon loves writing pop music with ukeleles and horns. That is his convolution. My argument is that because most indie is essentially pop music, it's very easy to embrace its simplicity while creating a facade of intellectualism or artistry to validate its "artistic" value.
Now to actually answer the question put forth you don't actually have to leave the indie genre if you don't want to. If you want two bands that are actually successful in being challenging in an "indie" way listen to Xiu Xiu and The Dirty Projectors. First, Xiu Xiu is the quintessential taking-pop-songs-and-making-them-weirder-using-production-and-orchestration-and-vocal-oddities band. They write songs that are tonal and have verse-chorus-verse structure. However, they use insane electronic blipping and production quirks to draw your attention away from their poppiness and affix it to their offbeat presentation. The vocals are also massively melodramatic and just plain weird. They are challenging because they execute well-written pop songs very traditionally from a songwriting perspective but convolute their soundscape so drastically (Zach Condon isn't "drastic" I'd say) that they are able to undo the placidity of the pop paradigm and render the songs more chaotic and visceral than any pop music could be.
The Dirty Projectors are an instance of an indie band that don't write using typical song structures. Their newest album, Rise Above, is a remaking of Black Flag's same album. However, the songs aren't recognizable because they stripped the music of its verse-chorus-verse structure (hardcore is very simple) and broadened the soundscape with weird instrumentation and crazy melismatic vocals. They take simplicity and make draw it out and reinvent it, making previously fast and heavy songs into expansive jams that have a wonderful sense of melody and texture.
If you want bands or genres and artists that are challenging outside of indie. - Post-hardcore has some cool, enticing bands. Thrice are essentially Radiohead for post-hardcore. Their sense of harmony, songwriting, and production is amazing on their new album, particularly on the water disc. Glassjaw is a particularly interesting band. They have created an entire song "Stuck Pig" based off of amp feedback. However, instead of just having noise for its own sake the noise is "pitched" as in the noise has a tonal basis. Other songs by them like "Must've Run All Day" also have amazing atmopsheric qualities. Also their bass playing is very very good. Tera Melos is another band I'd recommend if only for their technical proficiency that comes about in a way that makes "shredders" look like they're bad at guitar, yet isn't dissonant or ugly. In fact Tera Melos is very consonant and catchy. - Breakbeat can be very challenging. An artist like Venetian Snares constructs ultradense beats in asymmetric time signatures (listen to the song "Pwntendo" to get the idea). He also has expanded into sampling Hungarian folk and classical tracks (a la Bela Bartok) in order to get the content for albums like Rossz Csillag..., which are just genius. His new album features him expanding into writing post-tonal modern classical music that is pretty cool in its own right.
This post has gone on far too long but if you have more questions I'd love to answer them.
Also, I don't think it's possible for a whole genre to be bad. Genres are bad, and sometimes artists are even bad. It's the songs they create that can be bad. There are also good artists within different genres. I'll admit that black metal on a whole has a lot of repetition and crappiness, but I think if you looked closer you could find "good" bands, or, at least bands that had musical merit. Take for example the band Wolves in the Throne Room, who are getting very positive press from sites like p4k for mixing shoegaze and electronic influences with black metal.
Genres are a subjective and sensitive thing to use, and I understand that. So let me just say, while I understand that,
GET YOUR SUBGENRES STRAIGHT, PLEASE, SIR.
Xiu Xiu have been called noise-pop (which is what I call them because I know many people who are super-hardcore into them and they call Xiu Xiu that) or avant-pop (shorted from avant-garde pop-- The Wire made this label up, I think, and it's accurate) or post-punk (which is probably one of the most accurate labels I can think of), but almost never indie rock.
An indie crowd tends to gravitate to them, no doubt, but so do a post-punk and avant-garde listeners. So musically and non-musically, Xiu Xiu are not indie, except for the fact that the band isn't signed to a major label.
Wolves in the Throne Room are essentially a DEATH metal band, not a black metal band. They have other more nuanced qualities (My Bloody Valentine-type shoegaze, abrasive electronic washes a la Neurosis or Godflesh) which you correctly identified.
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! are basically Talking Heads retreads, arguably good or above-average ones. They're "indie," economically at least, fine, but more accurately they're post-punk poseurs. And in fact, I wouldn't agree that any member of that band talking to the press comes off self-aware, nor terribly ironic or elitist for that matter. Have you seen interviews with them? They (band mouthpeices Alec Ounsowrth and Lee Sargent) seem like such dreadfully boring personalities.
Forgive me for being genre-ly callous, but I always assumed "indie" to be a shortened form of "independent", so in my head when someone says, "They're an indie band," then I translate, "They're a band that's not on a major label." Am I wrong? It's sort of like how I always figure "pop" is shortened "popular", therefore anything that's not recorded as "classical" or "world" Music I pigeonhole into the "pop" realm, including genres like black metal--and indie. I guess then the question of "Why is classical not popular?" arises and... damn, this shit's confusing. Ugh.
And I agree with playdough--I don't know the deconstruction, reasoning, or meaning of half of all the confusing subgenres. There's like a million of them. I think Music is what it is, and it doesn't always need a linguistic nest.
Forgive me for being genre-ly callous, but I always assumed "indie" to be a shortened form of "independent", so in my head when someone says, "They're an indie band," then I translate, "They're a band that's not on a major label." Am I wrong?
No, you're right. People who identify indie rock with a certain music genre is because they are, like, listening the hype bands (independant or not)and they listen to a specific kind of music, which is various pop categories for most of the people. Sometimes i think that some indie music "fans" prefers to listen indie for the same reasons the masses listen to mainstream pop: to be in a category of people. To be "original" (indie) 'cause you think your different from others, and the masses just listen to what they hear, because they don't really like music or think that it's normal to like what the radio decides which music is great or not for you.
