This winter, Fox Searchlight pictures released yet another movie in their “quirky indie comedy” department. The movie was called Juno. It was about a girl who gets pregnant, and chances are you’ve seen it. Because if you haven’t, I’m surprised, seeing as I don’t know a single person who hasn’t at this point. These kinds of “quirky indie comedies” have become quite the new trend. Little Miss Sunshine, Garden State, and Juno have all become smash hits among the teenage crowd over the past years, and honestly, I’m getting slightly worried.
None of these three movies were actually that bad. As a Steve Carrell fan, I enjoyed Little Miss Sunshine, and I did like most of Juno despite some horrible dialouge…I swear if I ever hear the saying “honest to blog” in real life, someone will end up in some serious pain…but it wasn’t all that bad. Garden State, however, generally sucked and has to be one of the most overhyped comedy/dramas in recent years. But this isn’t even what bugs me.
What bugs me is the increasing trend of the “indie ____ (fill in the blank)”. Fill the blank with movie, music, TV show, or whatever else you’d like. For example, if you’d like to put “mittens” in there, that could work too. Anyway, “indie” as a genre is generally a false term. Looking at “indie” rock as a whole genre is wrong. Saying that, for example, Boredoms and Iron and Wine are in the same genre is just not true. “Indie” is a blanket term describing a musical or artistical aesthetic. An aesthetic that exists outside of the maintream terms of art such as movies and film. Independent films or music is generally more daring and creative when compared to it’s mainstream counterpoints. It’s the difference between Ben Folds and The Fray. Ben Folds is willing to try out new ideas, experiment, and challenge himself and his audience. The Fray want to give you pre-packaged crap that you’ve heard a million times before.
That’s exactly what you’re getting with movies like Juno. All the producers behind the movie did was dillute the colors a bit, throw a few references to Sonic Youth and the Melvins, all underscored with a soundtrack by Belle and Sebastian, Cat Power, and the Moldy Peaches. Aside from that, the movie is as conventional as everything else being pumped into your theater. Again, that’s not to say it’s a bad movie, but it’s also not what it advertises itself as. A real, genuine independant movie would not be screening at your local multiplex. You’d have to dig deep to find it. Juno, however, is playing at your local multiplex. And not due to word of mouth alone.
The reason this bugs me is that you know after the success of Juno that we’re going to start seeing more and more of these “quirky indie comedies”. And with every single one of those, a little bit about what makes the indie aesthetic so interesting will be muddled together with something that’s really just the usual mainstream dressed up in indie clothing. This is when the “indie” aesthetic become compromised into a trendy new style, being sold to the masses via generic teen flicks that use soundtracks that include Built to Spill, Iron and Wine, and Minus the Bear to build up some “indie cred”. Personally, none of these movies will ever get “indie cred” until they feature something like Xiu Xiu in the soundtrack. I would kill to hear “Fabulous Muscles” or “Boy Soprano” being played over a scene of a quirky teenager walking doing the street doing quirky things.
When you start selling indie as a trend, as a style, or as anything more than a general aesthetic, that cheapens it a little bit. This October, I went to see David Bazan play a show in Cleveland, and every fucking kid there was dressed the exact same: faded jeans, incredibly tight button up checkered shirts, those weird conductor hats worn slightly sideways, and every single one of them had that awkward looking beard thing doing on. Anyone who wasn’t dressed like that got glared at. Where the fuck is the community, the feeling of “we all like the same music, we all connect with it”? It’s slipping away to make room for fashion statements and indier than thou attitudes that essentially killed other underground aesthetics such as punk rock, metal, and no wave. This is what happens when an aesthetic starts to begin being sold to people as something else. It become diluded into something else, something much more unpleasent.
The idea that you have to dress or look a certain way to listen to independent music only arose after it became a mainstream commodity, with indie-lite bands being sold to teenage kids through TV shows like The O.C. and other generic teen dramas. Only once marketing companies started saying “hey, that fat douche from Death Cab For Cutie dressed like this! We could sell that to people!” did it start to stop being an aesthetic and start being a genre, a description of a style of mid-tempo pop music.
Mainly, the reason this bothers me is because of the fact that indie music, unlike so many other underground music scenes, has existed for years without really being compromised in any major way. While various movements of the indie scene such as punk rock, grunge, or industrial start to grow in size and become mainstream genres, the movement as a whole had never really been brought up into the spotlight. Attention was paid to specific generes, not the aesthetic as a whole. And this is why the scene was able to constantly evolve and re-charge itself every couple of years. When R.E.M. and Sonic Youth became popular, the Red House Painters and Pavement took over to create new styles of independant music. When they got popular, Elliott Smith and Pedro the Lion stepped up to do their part. It’s a constant process that worked because indie was never seen as an actual genre, just a general outline on how the bands approached their style. “Indie” was just anything under the radar rather than a sound.
This changed around 2004 when Death Cab For Cutie began growing in popularity after the success of the Postal Service as well as the use of Death Cab on various bland teen soap operas. Death Cab had long been the darlings of the underground, something which baffles the mind since they’ve never been much more than mediocre despite the massive amounts of buttlove that Something About Aeroplanes, We Have the Facts and We’re Voting Yes, and Transatlanticism got from the indie community.
Death Cab are the musical version of Juno: Death Cab were never much more than a low-fi version of most generic alternative rock bands. While most of their albums are at least listenable, some of them even have songs that I do readily admit to liking quite a bit, they’re still nothing really that special or unique. Yet people that don’t really listen to indie music proclaimed them to be one of, if not the, most amazing and creative indie bands to ever exist. This, of course, is not true. Because of Death Cab’s relative safeness, they became superstars when they jumped to a major label and released Plans, an album that stylistically does nothing different than their early work, but has better production value, and apparently this is the same as being either amazing or horrible, depending on who you’re talking to. Anyway, when Death Cab blew up and became one of the biggest bands in rock during 2005, they became synonomous with indie. This, of course, is what’s killing indie.
Death Cab’s sound has now become the standard sound of what people think indie should sound like. This, in turn, leads to other bands developing a sound similar to this in order to reach further mainstream popularity. And like all rapidly growing snowballs, this leads to more and more bands trying to sound like this, which makes people think that indie has a unifying sound, which in the classic sense, it does not. In turn, this makes indie much more marketable to the masses. No longer will people have to know the difference between post-rock and twee-pop, because those terms are irrelevant. Indie is no longer an aesthetic, but mid-tempo pop music being made by guys wearing checkered shirts.
Now that indie can be sold, there’s a chance that it may die out to some degree. People may grow tired or irritated with it, and stop trying to discover new bands because they get tired of the more watered down stuff. I know speaking about myself personally, I held out on modern indie music because I assumed that it all sounded like Death Cab. I was wrong in my assumption, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not the common assumption being made. And that doesn’t mean that there can’t be anything done about it.
It’s not that I’m the snob who doesn’t want anyone new to listen to my music, or the person who doesn’t like when bands I listen to get popular. I really do generally enjoy that I know someone who went out and bought If You’re Feeling Sinister by Belle and Sebastian after seeing Juno, and I like knowing that friends of mine are listening to good music like Sonic Youth and The Apples in Stereo rather than crap like Nickleback and Hinder. But at the same time, I do dislike when something that I deeply care about gets misrepresented and sold as a package by people who don’t understand it to people that understand it even less. And it’s not even that I dislike the idea of people getting into good music through listening to stuff like Death Cab or seeing shitty movies like Garden State. Hell, I got into punk/indie/alternative/ect. by listening to Blink 182 and Green Day in Junior High. Like I said, I just dislike when something gets misrepresented and called something that it isn’t.
Currently listening to: The Sea and Cake- One Bedroom.
Agreed. ‘Indie’ is getting co-opted by the powerful - like they do to everything that they think will work for them.
I was complaining to someone about this very thing the other day, and they recommended the book “The Conquest of Cool.” The subtitle is “Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism.” Sounds depressing. Also if you look it up on Amazon, the related titles, like “Commodify your Dissent” sound equally depressing. They might be good reads, though.
And Juno was just appalling.
Nice blog!
I like the word “indie” a lot, and I liked the word “alternative” a lot, back in 1992 when the word had meaning. What I liked about “alternative” as a word was that it was so perfect a description. It described a mindset, a commonality, versus actually describing the music itself. It was a way to categorize things that were perhaps disparate and to find what made them the same– a way to say that you liked Bjork, Nirvana, Portishead, Nine Inch Nails, and Belle and Sebastian, all groups who sound absolutely nothing alike, but if they were all playing at the same festival, would make sense, rather than be just whatever is the top bands for the day.
Then of course the word “alternative”, which used to have meaning, got co-opted. It was being used to describe things like Matchbox 20 and Creed– what in the hell is “alternative” about that? How did this word, whose literal meaning is “to be different”, get stuck to shit that was the definition of mainstream?
The same thing will happen to “indie”. It’s frustrating, but already there are “indie” bands that aren’t really independent at all.
There’s two upsides to this.
1) The word “indie”, unlike “alternative”, actually describes the distribution method used to get you got the album. Nowadays things like “labels” are completely irrelevent. EVERYTHING is going to be “independent” sooner or later, meaning nothing will be.
2) Indie music, by definition, is underground. Underground music has a way of reflexively reacting against the mainstream. All these mid-tempo bands will become more and more mainstream, and reflexively, new bands will form that will be a reaction against it, meaning in a few years will have a few Dinosaur Jr. or Sebadohs making noise and causing earaches. And then when those bands have gone mainstream, we’ll have mid-tempo stuff again, then back to erratic noisefests, on and on until the sun goes burns out. As long as you keep your ear to the ground, you’ll always be happy.
@CRS- I’m curious to know, as far as your second point goes, if you think the whole cycle is happening a lot faster these days (whatever “these days” means. Let’s say, as opposed to the pre-internet days). It seems to me that something barely has a chance to be underground before it’s glommed onto by the big corporations and mass-marketed. Which means it’s difficult for an underground phenomena to evolve slowly before it gets too big and then dies. From this standpoint, you can see why some people don’t want the things they like to become popular- it’s not so much snobbery as it is protection.