Ooh, watch out Dissensus indy-rock haters!

tryptych

waiting for a time
Did anyone see this toss in the Guardian yesterday?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/comment/story/0,,1704890,00.html

Choice quote:

"Now it's our turn to give a smug "up yours" to the punk generation et al. The Arctic Monkeys signal the triumph of a new wave that is going to be remembered as long as any previous heyday. The likes of the Libertines, Babyshambles, Bloc Party, Franz Ferdinand and the Kaiser Chiefs lead an onslaught of indie-rock bands that are selling out shows, storming up the charts and creating a golden age of music not heard since the days of Britpop a decade ago."
 
yeah....

spackb0y said:
Did anyone see this toss in the Guardian yesterday?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/comment/story/0,,1704890,00.html

Choice quote:

"Now it's our turn to give a smug "up yours" to the punk generation et al. The Arctic Monkeys signal the triumph of a new wave that is going to be remembered as long as any previous heyday. The likes of the Libertines, Babyshambles, Bloc Party, Franz Ferdinand and the Kaiser Chiefs lead an onslaught of indie-rock bands that are selling out shows, storming up the charts and creating a golden age of music not heard since the days of Britpop a decade ago."


I read this aswell. First thought - a load of s***. Now I like some of these bands but the article was jus written so swagly....
 

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
Tactics said:
I read this aswell. First thought - a load of s***. Now I like some of these bands but the article was jus written so swagly....
Yeah, likewise. "Well, you can keep your ageing sounds - today's fresh-faced youth are downloading their way to something fresh and exciting." Ha ha ha.
 

mms

sometimes
Slothrop said:
Yeah, likewise. "Well, you can keep your ageing sounds - today's fresh-faced youth are downloading their way to something fresh and exciting." Ha ha ha.

that's how i feel when i hear indie rock oddly.
 
The whole current indie rock movement is just Brit Pop all over again. Its nothing new or exciting. Its just good average music. Musics like Grime and Dubstep are on a whole different level which the mainstream press fail to understand. Hence you get articles like the one above.
 

k-punk

Spectres of Mark
Well, we shouldn't be too cruel, she can only be 16 at the oldest. Another e.g. of youth conservatism I was beating on the CBB thread... teenagers who write like accountants (and who share their tastes)....

This is my favourite, love the way it sounds like really bad advertising copy....

'Well, you can keep your ageing sounds - today's fresh-faced youth are downloading their way to something fresh and exciting. With Rupert Murdoch's networking website MySpace planning to launch a UK-specific version any minute now - giving an initial emphasis to the hugely popular and influential music section - the sound of our times will become set even more firmly in history's stone.'

Doesn't it occur to her that, y know, Indie is, like, an 'ageing sound'.... But her resentment-driven 'argument' is not about sound (or vision) at all, it's only about sales: they must be good, they SELL A LOT don't you know...
 

Buick6

too punk to drunk
The Arctic Monkeys are shithouse. another bullshit here-today gone-tomorrow crap-shit English pop genre.
 

Gabba Flamenco Crossover

High Sierra Skullfuck
I love "a golden age of music not heard since the days of britpop".

Now, stepping over the issue of whether one hears an age, we're a fairly music- and culture-literate crowd here... so how many britpop tracks come readily to mind? For me, it's about 4. I can maybe push to ten if i concentrate on it. Not exactly teeming with brilliance.

But as K-Punk says, she cant be much past 20 at the outside... and I've got a feeling she will look back cringingly on this article for the rest of her career.
 

big satan

HA-DO-KEN!
it really irritates me the way in this country that indie has become a byword for drab, conservative guitar based pop, and that the indie scene by and large is a steadfastly conservative place, and yet the majority of people in to indie are completely unaware of this.
 

shudder

Well-known member
as I said in the other thread, I really think that "indie" on this side of the atlantic is a little bit different.. I mean, we definitely have our fair share of past-fucking (interpol, strokes, blah blah blahs (who I actually like a bit)), but "indie" seems also to incorporate, say, free/psych-folk, and some strains of electronic stuffz... for example, in providence at least, there is definite overlap between the kinds of kids who go to rocky indie shows (often post-hardcore type bands - that's the US meaning of "hardcore", not the uk one!), and the ones at breakcore shows and mainstream indie shows (interpol etc). and we don't have an NME really to hype up that kind of music...
 

Buick6

too punk to drunk
Indie (as it emerged in the mid-late80s) always represented bands who weren't on majors, the sorta backwash of the punk thing (as most punk bands were actually on majors, then when it went outta fashion, they lost interest so the the 'indie' non-major deal happened)

Now it refers to an allusion to a 'sound' that was once on non-major labels.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
"Well, we shouldn't be too cruel, she can only be 16 at the oldest."

I think that's certainly worth saying. The point is, if you are too young to have heard all the bands that these new bands are taking off then they are going to sound fresh. Also, it must be annoying to have your favourite bands dismissed as rip-offs by older people saying that they've heard it before and you are going to try and justify it by any means possible (in this case sales).
The misunderstanding that she makes is in thinking that people who are saying that they've pretty much heard it all before are harking back to the time when they heard it when (in the main) they're not, they want to hear something new.
 
C

captain easychord

Guest
shudder said:
as I said in the other thread, I really think that "indie" on this side of the atlantic is a little bit different.. I mean, we definitely have our fair share of past-fucking (interpol, strokes, blah blah blahs (who I actually like a bit)), but "indie" seems also to incorporate, say, free/psych-folk, and some strains of electronic stuffz... for example, in providence at least, there is definite overlap between the kinds of kids who go to rocky indie shows (often post-hardcore type bands - that's the US meaning of "hardcore", not the uk one!), and the ones at breakcore shows and mainstream indie shows (interpol etc). and we don't have an NME really to hype up that kind of music...

this is definitely the truth, something i noticed over here. indie in england seems to be style-peddling, plain and simple.
 

Rambler

Awanturnik
There really is a style war going on in the music press right now - it seems that every article is now either indie or grime - and both get a lot of support from the mainstream music press.

The grime ones all seem to take the shape of 'this is the greatest music since forever, why the hell can't people notice and start buying the stuff', and the indie ones all hark back - like this - to the old rock tropes that have been with us since the 70s. The Independent, eg, who seem to have an article on Grime every week, have just run a massive special on indie, and today have about 40 million articles on Paul bloody Weller. And I feel a real sense of aesthetic clashes here, as though the indie rockers feel so threatened by the growing attention to a vibrant, innovative, world-class black music scene in the UK that they have to elevate their own tawdry heroes higher and higher. Under what circumstances is an averagely-talented waster like Pete Dickerty held up as some sort of Lennon-Sid-Cobain wunderkind? And on what kind of earth are the Kaiser Chiefs given more than 1 second of airplay to their plodding dirge? At least Bloc Party, Arctic Monkeys and all the rest have the decency to play their songs quick and sneer a bit.
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
Rambler said:
I feel a real sense of aesthetic clashes here, as though the indie rockers feel so threatened by the growing attention to a vibrant, innovative, world-class black music scene in the UK that they have to elevate their own tawdry heroes higher and higher.

hmmm, you sure about this?

why on earth would indie-rock feel threatened by grime? after three years of sustained support and adulation from the UK press at pretty much every level from style mags to the broadsheets and a reasonable amount of record industry interest, grime can barely propel a record into the lower reaches of the chart; the nu-Britpop romps straight in at number one.

i think it's sad that a figure like Dizzee isn't where Arctics or Franz are at, but it makes sense -- what grime is about (by and large, just as repetitious and thematically-narrow as any indie-rock band i might add) simply doesn't resonate very far beyond its own audience, which at this point seems to be not much more than other aspiring MCs...

to me it's actually the similarities (once you get past the music--grime's stalled-futurism versus AM's reenergized conservatism) between grime and the nu-Britrock that are striking .... the vitality and hunger of youth in an environment full of traps and dead-ends .... they are white and black versions, or views, of the same landscape.... neither of them have a vision of how to escape or transcend it beyond "making it"

as if to prove the parallel, the guardian girl that everyone's making fun of... clumsy writer for sure but she also did a piece on grime (kpunk linked to it) and you know what, every point in it is OTM

(except for the bit about NME championing Dizzee!!)
 

Rambler

Awanturnik
It's probably me constructing more than actually journalists squaring up in the Guardian offices, but this how I've started to read things now. (Although I take all your points on board blissblogger.) Dunno if it's so much a sense of threat, but I do feel that the lines between one and t'other are being more thickly drawn than they were in the past - eg britpop and jungle, when it was quite possible to be into both and not feel really unusual.

It's not so much about sales - rock's always going to sell more - but in terms of column inches and critical reaction, the scores are relatively even at the moment between indie and grime/urban, and it does feel as though there's a certain amount of them and us about it - just look at the soul searching that goes on round here when someone admits to enjoying Bloc Party.

as if to prove the parallel, the guardian girl that everyone's making fun of... clumsy writer for sure but she also did a piece on grime (kpunk linked to it) and you know what, every point in it is OTM

Although that does kind of kill my point ;)
 
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