Why modern Indie music sucks
We’ve been saying it for a while now – the Indie music scene is a joke and bogged down in all-too-similar bands flogging the same dull by-the-numbers music.
How fitting that The Independent newspaper should be laying the smackdown on Indie music:
John Niven was an indie fan in the 1980s, an A&R man in the Britpopping 1990s, and is now the author of Kill Your Friends, a sadistic satire of the record industry of which he was once an enthusiastic member. “I was in Gap a few weeks ago and there was some sort of generic indie music playing,” he says. “I was with a friend who’s a promoter and a bit younger than me. After about three or four tracks I asked him: ‘Whose LP is this?’ And he said, ‘No, it’s a compilation.’ Every track sounded identical. The guitars, the production; all these bands sound like they’re made in the same studio with the same producer. It’s such a ball-less, soulless, generic whitewashed indie sound. You could probably take a member from each band and throw them together in a new group and no one would be able to tell the difference. They’re completely interchangeable. Scouting for Girls are like the sound of Satan’s scrotum emptying. They’re abysmal.”
Another excellent quote about the new wave of Indie bands choking the charts…
When I glance around the bands that are supposedly ‘indie’ today, I don’t see any attitude. I don’t see any content in their records, any political interest in the band members. They’re a terrible generation, unfortunately, but they’re becoming famous overnight and selling a lot of records.
Plenty of scathing remarks about Scouting For Girls, and an impressive history of the Indie scene and its slow death (culminating in another scathing remark about Scouting For Girls), this article makes a lot of sense.
But there’s one question remaining – who will reclaim Indie for the people? Or should we just give up now and pre-order the new Britney album?
Chat about this on the Unreality TV Forum »
the issue isn’t the musicians, but the listeners. i mean, sure, indie musicians should be more creative with what they’re doing and not just be writing Sonic Youth tunes for heart patients, but it’s also the listeners. if the music sucks, then it is the listener who should speak out and say “hey, what’s up with this crap you’re putting out? get off your asses and do something important!” the indie music coming out of RISD and the city of Providence RI is very revolutionary, recreating (and destroying) the ideas and preconceptions of music. maybe indie artists should get an education in composition and learn how to work like a punk rocker.
I think alot of it is that many listeners are not fully aware of what else is out there, there are some great “independent” bands out there but they are not being listened to. It is also up to the musicians who are popular to push themselves and not make the same album seven times and look into the music of other cultures and origins. Much of music is fashion anyway, there are a lot of kids and teenagers, both listeners and musicians who just copy and don’t really care about the music and don’t think about everything possible.