How did you come across the indie music genre? What was your path of music taste before you settled on the sounds of Indie?

I first was really into classic rock stuff, but my whole school realized they liked it to I guess. Then I started listening to rap... Yuck, until everyone else started to at least. It was then I became aware that I hate what everyone else likes. Then I listened to Emo/Screamo a lot, and still do, if I'm in a bad mood. I gradually went to softer rock, then indie.

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I didn't really start getting all that deep into music until I was about 16. Before that, TV and radio provided me with enough good, new bands to keep me happy. I listened to a lot of Green Day, Weezer, Foo Fighters...that kind of stuff. Bands I still like, but definitely reached their peak a long time ago (Excepting maybe Green Day.) I started to running low on new music, so I decided to look in some new directions.

Like a lot of people, the band that really got me interested in other genres was Radiohead. They instantly blew me away as something great but completely different then what I listened to. Since then it's been a slow decline into obscurity and music-nerdom for me.

When I was seven, my dad accidentally bought me "Lonesome Crowded West" for my birthday - he mixed it up with another album.

Anyway, after listening to it, they decided it was "bad" music and hid it somewhere in their room...but I stole it back.
Then, I bought "The Moon & Antarctica" at age 10.
But other than that I didn't really listen to any indie, although by association I listened to my cousins "cool" albums: Weezer, Portishead, Radiohead, Elliott Smith, Smashing Pumpkins, etc...
By recommendation, I purchased my very first indie cds in 8th grade (not counting modest mouse): Transatlanticism by Death Cab and Chutes too Narrow by the Shins.
I began exploring "similar artist" recommendations on amazon.com, and found all the other indie bands I listen to today.

Oh, to answer your other question: indie rock/pop music is the only genre I have intently explored and listened to. Even from a young age, I hated the radio because rap and grunge gave me headaches, and I was too cool for pop - except for Mariah Carey. God I loved Mariah Carey.

Edit: I must have been eight years old, not seven when I received Lonesome Crowded West. I was 8 in '98... And the album wasn't brand new..

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Yay, timeline:
Top 40 radio -> pop punk -> "real punk" (think Sex Pistols -> late 90's/new emo -> late 80's/early 90's emo -> screamo -> hardcore/metalcore -> almost everything (including indie)

For some reason I jumped from metalcore to indie in less than a year. I have no idea. I guess I was listening to some indie when I went through my "late 80's/early 90's emo" period.

oh! I remember! More indie rock bands started playing at the venue I went to.

I've always like pop/folk music. But I never really started investigating and listening to a lot of music until I went to college 4 years ago.

For me, it went pop-punk/ska --> non-mainstream pop (think Eels, Ben Folds) --> Radiohead --> Indie --> Electronic

That's the order I got into the genres. I still listen to all of them (though I'm not much in the mood for pop-punk anymore). Mainly, it's electronic and folk music for me right now, with some indie-rock thrown in there.

Hm...I guess I've also branched out from the indie rock genre a bit.

I really enjoy Daft Punk, DJ Shadow's magnum opus, M83/Notwist/ and electro/shoegazer bands, Kanye West, Jay-Z, etc.
Probably my favorite sub-genre of Indie is post-rock, and music where emphasis isn't on the lyrics. Examples: Talk Talk, Sigur Ros, Explosions in the Sky, Godspeed, Mogwai, Brian Eno

I started listening to popular/ mainstream rock in 1997, I was into Green Day, Everclear, etc. I continued to enjoy mainstream rock until around 2001, when 1) radio rock started to get bad (Nickelback arrived) and 2) some friends introduced to me to Burning Airlines and Modest Mouse. I started buying "indie" CDs when I started college in 2002 (Interpol, Sparta, Pixies), and got into increasingly obscure/experimental music with exposure to Pitchfork and other music review sources.

i got into indie rock just about 9 months ago, i got rid of almost my WHOLE cd collection and started over, i have over 100 new cds, and i pretty much find at least 2 good bands a week.

this week it was Broken Social Scene, and Sufjan Stevens.

quote:

Originally posted by MJmovieluver88:

I got rid of almost my WHOLE cd collection and started over

Oh no, you threw out your whole collection? You had to have some great stuff in their somewhere. I never toss out an album. You never know what you might feel like listening to one day. The other day I grabbed my very old copy of The Offspring's Smash and popped it into the CD player. Still pretty good stuff, if you ask me.

My answer to this question is a bit mystical...Thanks to an excellent, now-defunct radio station in Madison, WI, I'd been exposed as a teenager to bands like the Pixies, Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth, Charlatans UK and other quasi-indie groups, and though I liked it, those bands were just kind of there. I didn't pay much attention to genres or seek out albums--I just knew what I liked. Mostly I listened to more mainstream stuff like U2 and Crowded House.

Once I hit college I listened mostly to classical and jazz, because I was a music major. But somehow through the ether the word "Wilco" entered my consciousness. I knew they were a band, and I'm not sure where I first heard of them, but I started noticing kids with their T-shirts and overhearing their name in conversation ....much like what happens sometimes when you learn any new word or concept, suddenly it jumps out at you.

The word "Wilco" gradually became a nagging enigma to me..."Vut ees thees 'Vilco'?" Finally one day I pulled into the Borders parking lot, next to a car with a Wilco/satellite dish bumper sticker. As cheesy as it sounds, I thought, "Goddamnit, this *means* something. I gotta check this out." So I went in the store and found the Wilco CD section, was intrigued by the title and cover of "Summerteeth," and bought it without knowing anything about it or why.

And of course I loved it, and gradually began reading the music mags, branching out to other bands and embracing indie as a whole. Needless to say I'm glad I followed my silly intuition that day...

In high school I didn't really listen to a whole lot of music, I liked classic rock and some of the stuff on MTV, but for the most part I didn't have much interest in it. When I got to college I decided I wanted to start listening to music to help eat some of the new found free time I had. I'd heard a couple of Muse songs I thought were really good and started googling for reviews of their albums. I found one on stylusmagazine.com, which I'm pretty sure was an "F" review of Absolution. I was appalled that they gave it such a bad review and decided to read their best of 2004 list and see what they liked. People were commenting on how much better their list was than this other site called Pitchfork, so I went to their site and read their list as well. I was surprised when I found I hadn't heard of any of the artists on either list. So I downloaded a bunch of albums from both and fell in love with quite a few of them. I branched out from there and these days I listen to a little of everything.

The first thing I ever listened to were the jazz greats: coltrane, cannonball aderly, miles davis, dave brubeck, thelonius monk, etc...

From there I went into this pathetically naive rebellion phase where I started listening to pop punk I heard on the radio, then more traditional independent label punk, and then indie. I think if I had to name my transition artist it would have to be Sonic Youth. I noticed that Sonic Youth had a lot of punk energy but a very different approach to songs. Through Sonic Youth I got interested in the "indie cannon" if you will, buying Pavement, Pixies kind of stuff. Eventually I branched into electronica, IDM, ambient, noise, electro-Acoustic, musique concrete, and contemporary classical.

I basically got into what you would call indie music via getting big into Nirvana when I was about 16 and reading things where Kurt Cobain would mention the Pixies, Jesus Lizard and Sonic Youth and so on.

I didn't start really buying cds until middle school, most of which consisted of godawful punk and ska bands that I look back on with much chagrin. I heard Radiohead's "OK Computer" my first year in high school, realized that music could actually be gorgeous and awe-inspiring as opposed to merely adolescently angsty, and never looked back.

I think some of my first indie rock albums were Sunny Day Real Estate's "How It Feels To Be Something On" and Built To Spill's "Perfect From Now On," both of which I am still completely in love with today.

Metacritic!

Before Metacritic, I though rock was dead. Hair rock killed rock in the 80s. Grunge became a victim of its own success - except for Pearl Jam, all other bands either died (Nirvana) or started to suck (STP). I even got so desparate, I spent some time listening to country (Garth rules!)

Only the occasional decent album by REM or Pearl Jam kept me listening to music. From time to time, I would see a good review in Rolling Stone, and I would pick up something like Ryan Adams, The Hives, The White Stripes, The Strokes.

Then, I discovered Metacritic. Since then, I've picked up a bunch of new favorite acts - The Decemberists, The Hold Steady, Sufjan Stevens, My Morning Jacket, Joanna Newsom, etc.


Thanks Metacritic, for showing me that there is still some intelligent rock music being made.

My tastes were largely prog psychedelic (jethro tull, cream, early pink floyd etc) at the end of my teenage years and then one night in the back of a mates car I heard something new that made my eyes widen and head nod furiously. I asked what it was and the driver said Pixies, Doolittle. I played that album to death and more indie music swiftly followed...

I fell in line with a big geek community of Aquabats lovers, and slowly got into music more and more. Then I really got into Gorillaz for awhile. Then I discovered The Postal Service and Ben Folds on my brother's iPod. After that I discovered The Decemberists, and ever since I've been constantly discovering new bands and hearing new music ever since. That all started about a year ago.

when i was in middle school i listened to bands like matchbox 20, third eye blind, rhcp and other top 40 rock radio favorites. When my uncle moved back to my area, he introduced me to the music he liked, which was mainly pink floyd, zeppelin and other classic rock and a few psychedelics. Keeping those as my favorites, i slowly got into metal, well metallica, and that sort of thing. I spent alot of time jumping between classic rock and more modern rock. Then i went to highschool and was introduced to many more types of music, i loved kanye west, taliv quali, and although different, jack johnson. As i moved through highschool I kind of got bored of my music collection. Attempting to find more music to chill to, which i often found myself doing to jack johnson, i ran across countless indie bands which i loved. Now Id say that my music taste has matured alot, enjoying music from almost every genre, as a result of sites like this.

In the early 2000's I was into Radiohead, Wilco, Ryan Adams, Jeff Buckley, Coldplay, and other more mainstream artists. I guess the Flaming Lips and the internet really got me into more idie artists. I somehow found Yoshimi and loved it. With the help of the net, I dug into their back catalog and found the Soft Bulletin which I found to be absolutely phenomenal and I couldn't believe I'd never heard of it before. A few web searches later and I eventually found Pitchfork around 2003, I guess. I had never heard of Yo La Tengo, Built to Spill, Neutral Milk Hotel etc before Pitchfork.

11 years ago...
I was 14, in my car and my dad popped a CD into the player. I waited until the first guitar strum came in and had an epiphany. This band changed my life. A band that made happy music, A band that made sad music, A band known as Belle and Sebastian. Tigermilk was a phenomenal experience but it wasn't until If You're Feeling Sinister that I developed a sense of what the indie genre is/was. To this date, If You're Feeling Sinister is probably my favorite disc of the '90s and one of the best of all time.