Things What I Like, Day 2: What the Hell is Indie Rock?

Back in the late 90s / early zeros, people were pretty darn excited about something called Emo. No one was quite sure what it was. It had something to do with music that Fugazi invented, maybe. And it was like punk rock, but you could have melodic slow parts and it was more pretentious. The best description I ever heard was "well, they're fast and loud then they're slow and pretty. So I guess it's emo?"

A similar nebulous riddle of identity confounds the term "indie rock." In Britain, "indie" was one just garage rock on independent labels, but then "indie" bands got way too huge to be independent (Blur, Pulp, Oasis, etc.) In the US, it came to mean any kind of rock that wasn't metal and was kind of cool, pretty much. I mean, we know that The Pixies created it, and we know that Modest Mouse were and are perhaps its current figureheads, but we don't know much else. You know?

Whatever indie rock is, I like it sometimes. I like it when it has the following characteristics, in any combination:

• Loud
• Electronic bleepy-bloopy
• Songs about alienation or sex, or combinations thereof
• Kind of 80s-sounding
• Cool basslines

I don't like it when it's:

• Wimpy bullshit
• Too poppy

Happily, there are quite a few bands that have combinations of the good and relatively little of the bad. Along those lines, my favorite new band that is almost certainly indie rock is Wolf Parade, who not only have bleepy/bloopy parts and kind of rock, but they're from Canada, which is to present-day indie rock was being from Seattle was to grunge (think Arcade Fire.)

In closing, I sometimes reflect on the mid-90s, when I was briefly playing bass in a high school indie rock band while also playing bari sax in a ska band. But for a few circumstances, I might have ended up super-into indie rock instead of super-into ska. And that would have changed my entire wardrobe from about 1995 to 2000. The whole thing.

P.S. Addendum: My Italian translation exam was brutal. I've never been less sure if I passed or failed something; the prof administering the exam is a wonderful, sympathetic lady, but I ran out of time before being able to copy over half of my incoherent chicken-scrawl into semi-coherent English. Think good thoughts for me, homies.