10th
hellohazel asked: I wanted to ask about your thoughts on the idea of "indie music." I am confused by people thinking indie music is a genre because, to me, the word indie is not a genre but a label assigned in the music world to musicians who are currently signed to independent musical labels. So, indie music has no sound or style. The "indie world" has criticized Lana Del Ray for trying to "be indie" but honestly, do you think a musician can act or sound indie? Indie doesn't describe how the music sounds, right?
When I was a teenager, indie really did signify an identifiable sub-genre of rock with its own set of aesthetics - Pavement, Sonic Youth, Liz Phair, Guided by Voices, Archers of Loaf, Sebadoh, Helium, Sleater-Kinney, etc. - but even by the mid-90s, “indie” was really more of a word describing the culture of a particular social sphere. And into the last decade, it became “hipster.” And part of the problem people have with that word is that no one ever has a good definition for it. And the big reason people don’t have a good definition for it is because “hipster culture” is a big tent that includes a lot of different types of cool people, different strains of subcultures sort of bleeding together, and things going in and out of fashion. So from “indie” and “hipster,” we can really just draw a line connecting a lot of different cool people who have something like a similar background and taste. It’s good that things evolve and change and that different sorts of music and styles can be accepted within this culture, but it can be really confusing too, because you can start defining things by “rules” that were long since abandoned. That’s why you get a lot of anti-hipster humor that makes fun of Millennials with ideas that were made cliché mainly by Gen Xers.
