Independent Music Part 2: I Depend on Me

When I was in high school, it was "alternative". Practically everyone listened to alternative music, and the bands that they referred to under that umbrella term would make Thurston Moore turn in his grave, were he dead. There was nothing alternative about Blink 182. How can you be alternative when you sound like everything else? Alternative to what? Beethoven?

So the truly alternative amongst us listened to Beethoven (sometimes; actually not that often, but we liked to say we did), jazz, emo (before it was cool) post and proto punk and Pink Floyd, and bemoaned how banal "alternative" music had become. Then we discovered, in our first few years of Uni (country kids were always a few steps behind everyone else), that Indie was the new alternative. If you wanted to shun mainstream music, you simply looked to the bands that were not signed to majors - which, I guess, excluded Sonic Youth in their days of being signed to Geffen, but musically they never sold out, so we could forgive them.

Now, it seems, Indie really is the new alternative - in the sense that everyone is listening to Indie, and it's hard to know what to believe in any more.

Or is it? Now, maybe I'm just getting soft in my not-so-old age, but I have to admit I like that "Hide and Seek" song by Imogen Heap, and it doesn't fuss me too much that some of my Year 9 students like it too. I'm also not deeply concerned that it was played on "Australian Idol". At least Dicko had never heard of it. And just recently I've started to listen to Deas Vail, the latest Christian Indie thing, and like them, even though there's nothing remotely ground-breaking about their pure and innocuous blend of "Jimmy Eats Death Cabs of Cutie at the Coldplay Symposium". They write great songs, they perform them well, and the sound is familiar and friendly. And, you know, when I want to hear the direction of truly interesting indie, there's always mewithoutyou's latest release, where conventional song-structure and musicianship are considered things of beauty but bores forever.

There's a place for both the cutting edge and the straightforward. We only need to fear what's happening to "indie" if we start to find that there's no place for the cutting edge anymore. If we start to lose any sense of what being "independent" means, and there ceases to be any artistic freedom in the recording industry, then we should worry. But for some artists, being brilliant upholders of the indie genre is all they should be expected to do. They're not selling out. They're just doing what they know best, and doing it well - and I'm not going to stop them from doing that.