Interesting thoughts in The Observer...
Yes, TLDR, but give it a go:
The arts column
My message to eager indie bands: ban the bombast
by Kitty Empire
Sunday February 11, 2007
The Observer
Is it me, or is indie rock getting bigger? Surely we can all agree that there is a lot of it about. In naked sales terms alone, dishevelled types with guitars have been shifting very nicely of late. Snow Patrol sold the most albums in the UK last year - 1.6 million - narrowly edging out Arctic Monkeys. The year before, Coldplay's X&Y led the sales chart. These popularity contests so often used to be the preserve of pop acts, like Robson & Jerome or the Corrs; light entertainers with nice teeth. The national mood, it seems, has grown sombre, and now requires pianos and big, melancholic singalongs about chasing cars. Even more weirdly, pop is now the preserve of adults. Kids like the Kooks. Their parents buy Take That albums and have a secret thing for Girls Aloud.
Not content with lording it over pop like a soloing guitarist might straddle a monitor, indie rock has also become louder, more bloated, more prepotent. Size is now everything in contemporary indie rock, and big is good. Where once indie rock bands wanted credibility, now they want to be U2.
In June, Muse will play two nights at Wembley Stadium. Not the Arena, but the really big, rebuilt place. One night is already sold out. Muse, it must be noted, are a band for whom no crescendo is too steep, no arpeggio too progressive, and no conspiracy theory too outlandish. While rock bands of the past couple of years - Kaiser Chiefs, Arctics - have been writing about getting lashed on Saturday night in Sheffield or Leeds and the realpolitik of getting a cab home afterwards, Muse deal, quite matter-of-factly, in supermassive black holes. They sound like a banshee caught in a CERN particle accelerator.
Then there's Springsteen. Not Bruce himself, of course. He has wound down his sound over the years, and taken to playing bluegrass protest songs. But the influence of his most anthemic records can be felt like some wayward pulse in a number of unforseeable places. The Killers, for one, abandoned their piquant synth-rock to head down the wide open roads of prime-era Boss. Although some of their second album, Sam's Town, has grown on me, it's hard to deny that the wannabe epic-ness of the Killers second album grates. You can see them trying, straining. And that's not attractive: to matter, size must be effortless.
Indie darlings Arcade Fire have got the Springsteen bug too, as their forthcoming album, Neon Bible, attests. Recently even the Manic Street Preachers have got in on the act, promising 'Springsteen-esque long sets' on their forthcoming tour. I must remember to download Sudoku on to my phone in time for that one.
It's not just the Killers. So many follow-up albums have fallen prey to bombast in recent times. It's an affliction not dissimilar to Second Album Syndrome (where a band spend all their lives building up to their debut, then flounder when required to produce a second record). This outbreak of gigantism - let's call it Elephantiasis Of The Second Act - tends to hit the album after a band's breakthrough album, although EOTSA can strike at any time.
Coldplay's X&Y, for instance, was a bit like A Rush Of Blood To The Head (the band's benchmark) injected with collagen. It was plump, sure and ambitious, but not a little hollow and vapid compared to their best work. EOTSA! Brian Eno - a key player in U2's success - is said to be working on Coldplay's next one: cue very, very large whooshy noises.
More recently, at the coalface of American teenage rock, emo has gone from being the angry music of inadequate outsiders to a mass market phenomenon. Both My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy have produced inflated follow-up works. Fall Out Boy named their last album Under The Cork Tree. It's a reference to The Story of Ferdinand, a classic American children's story in which a pacifist bull spends his time sniffing flowers under a cork tree, refusing to fight matadors.
Now their new album is called, without a hint of nuance, Infinity On High. FOB's quirks have been smoothed out in favour of super-sized, easily-assimilable power-emo. Rocks, dude! EOTSA to go. My Chemical Romance, meanwhile, have mutated into a hybrid of Queen and baroque-period Smashing Pumpkins and - like some indomitable Cold War sci-fi miasm - can only get bigger until they complete their takeover of all Western youth.
A similar bloat is afflicting domestic indie rock production. Razorlight went from scrawny to brawny by wearing white and writing songs with the word 'America' in the chorus. They, too, bulked out their sound with the sonic equivalent of protein shakes. It paid off, sure: their last album sold double-platinum. But what charms that band had have rapidly dimished. Bloc Party's new album was over-produced by Jacknife Lee, the Irish knobsman who's done U2 and Snow Patrol, and is currently wielding his oversized mitts across the Editors' comeback.
Historically, indie values (derived from punk) dictated that big was bad. Britpop changed the national musical psyche when Oasis and Blur made ambition a virtue. Nowadays there is still a lingering tension between bands wanting to be big and bands being seen to want success too badly. Naked ambition, and the vast sounds that accompany it, are still thought of as rather vulgar. Not for nothing is Johnny Borrell up for Villain of the Year at NME's forthcoming awards.
As Kaiser Chiefs prepare for the April release of their second album, Yours Truly, Angry Mob (the follow-up to Employment, which has sold around three million copies worldwide), they find themselves at a critical juncture. Having ballooned from feisty Britpop throwbacks to stadium-sized leaders of football chants, they are at severe risk of EOTSA. If a band are big enough to fill arenas, the logic seems to go, then they should sound stadium-sized. QED. So, have the Kaisers made a witty, zeitgeist-pantsing masterpiece chock-ful of vim and tunes? No, they've made a big record that wants to be taken seriously. 'It's not so much heavy as bigger-sounding,' bassist Simon Rix has said, 'like Queen.'
How many it will sell remains to be seen: not all instances of supersizing reap dividends, as the Darkness learned the hard way. But for now the obesity epidemic in indie rock looks set to grow and grow. Can we persuade our bands to try a little less hard?
What do you think? review@observer.co.uk
Coldplay are Indie?
The Darkness are Indie?
In UK parlance, yes!
Indie is about the style and sound, not the financial backing of the label [in UK terms]
blow patrol
Yes, I think there is a definitional problem here.
She is complaining about arena rock being arena rock because she's under the misapprehension it's not arena rock.
But most of the bands she's talking about are straight-up old-fashioned arena rockers.
Muse is a prime example. How is that anything other than prime-cut arena silliness? Where is the "indie" (a term that isn't defined in this story) in Muse?
When did Kitty go from NME singles biarch to OMM scribe, HEB?
i gave it a go. got about halfway, thought "this guy's a fucking twat" and gave up.
sorry, HEB.
It's been a long time since Factory records was founded.
It's a difficult contention to sustain, especially with no definition offered.
Kitty left NME around the time it went crap - with CMcN.
She was the new bands editor anyhow
this gal. whatever.
I thought it was an interesting counterpoint of the firework career argument.
Y'know, getting upset when your little band wants to be U2
pixies.
Well, the NME has always been a key driver of the firework career phenomenon. So it's perhaps not surprising that she doesn't want to address that.
Email her and ask.
She does reply, albeit not immediately
haha the article is a load of bollocks
wow. I could only read about 2 lines of that...
Well, the NME has always been a key driver of the firework career phenomenon
On a slight tangent, the review of the Klaxons in NME went on to mention how har it is for the to throw the 'Albatros' of new rave from their necks.
yeah, the albatros you created CUNTS
NME are satans
Was thinking about this.
Perhaps if you substituted the word Indie for Alternative it would translate better?
"When ya can't fit it in ya mouth!!!"
I wish my name was Kitty.
I realise that is completely irrelevant.
I'll call you Kitty if you want, Fe.
long before the observer does a story on it.
In the UK, the term "indie" doesn't mean what it does elsewhere. An "indie" band is a group who make their career by taking the sound of one or more underground bands from a few decades ago and dumbing it down for mass consumption, whilst instructing their stylists to put in lots of "alternative" and "underground" cues into their look. NME is their Smash Hits.
Alternately, an "indie" band is any guitar band who are younger than Genesis.
Kitty is back again...
We won the indie wars - but at what price?
Indie is now completely mainstream - but is this really victory, or has The Man co-opted it from within?
by Kitty Empire July 8, 2007 8:00 AM
Time was - around 1987, say - that men wearing cardigans and big specs were fey, bookish types clutching bags full of seven-inch singles released on independent labels. They never had sex.
Nowadays you can't move for beddable fellows in cardies. Fey is hot. Despite the rise of digital music, vinyl is defiantly fashionable. And 'indie' - that sensitive runt of the music litter - is the great new craze 'sweeping the nation'. Well, at least, according to that dolt kicked out of Big Brother before it even got started. So hegemonic is indie that Glastonbury-goers now complain about there being too much middling indie dominating the bill. So exactly how did hell freeze over? When did plucky 'indie' win the war?
It's hard to pinpoint. In the early Nineties, there was much gnashing of teeth in NME about the Indie Chart, a playground in which cardigans and guitars had once loomed large. Which records qualified as 'indie'? Only those on labels financially independent of the majors, or merely those distributed by independent distributors? And did splitting these hairs matter one iota now that the 'indie' charts were full of happy house records? So-called 'indie' music had its roots in the post-punk period when tiny record companies sprang up like weeds, touting guitar bands to a discerning audience of politicised students and their ilk. Within a few years these DIY cottage industries were being trounced in their own chart by micro-capitalist ventures touting disposable European dance music. Cue semantic meltdown. 'Indie' became less a business model, more a state of mind, an aesthetic. More specifically, it became a style of guitar music whose branches sub-divided and trailed off further underground to bide their time.
Then, without warning, pop music - indie's sworn enemy - shut up shop and went home. As the Nineties segued into the Noughties, no one young wanted fizzy, manufactured music any more. Suddenly, kids wanted the Kooks. Within a generation, fast guitar music played by underfed boys (and the odd girl) crossed the bridge provided by Britpop and became cool. Indie became popular with the very people who used to torment indie kids. Cultural ironies don't come much sharper than that.
Now 'indie' is the mainstream. It's amusing to see fans of manufactured pop as embattled and tribal as fans of the Wedding Present once were. But is this really victory, or has 'indie' merely been taken over by cultural venture capitalists who are asset-stripping a British institution until it is unrecognisable? I think it's a bit of the former, and something of the latter.
Some would argue that indie's triumph has been at the expense of other promising genres. British R&B, seemingly in the rudest of health in 2003 when Jamelia's Superstar reached number three in the charts, has died a death and grime, the other great noughties hope for black British music, has failed to make any significant commerical impact.
So indie has eclipsed all. But there are signs that it is using its power responsibly. Babyshambles and singer Kate Nash feature on east London rapper Lethal Bizzle's latest album; Dizzee Rascal guest-starred on the last Arctic Monkeys single. By hitching a ride on indie's coattails, grime may yet translate some of its critical acclaim into record sales.
And of course, with the advent of social networking sites, music is only getting indie-er - at least by the standards of the old DIY business model. The internet functions as both shop-front and distribution network, cutting out the major-label middleman. Revived indie labels and new boutique operations are thriving, as Jude Rogers discovered when she went in search of the original spirit of indie for the Observer Review. You almost feel sorry for wounded giants such as EMI, bleeding from a thousand cuts, but you don't mourn the commercial stranglehold the majors used to have. Music has genuinely become more of a meritocracy, and we have 'indie' - whatever that is now - to thank.
Lots of comments too...
this woman has a fucked-up understanding of the meaning of the word 'independent' (as im sure has already been mentioned in this thread...)
friggin indie.
I remember a somewhat similar article in the guardian last year (I think) about the appropriation of indie music from days gone by for car ads and what not today.
Indie in the UK is the 'style', not the label
hmm. I think Kitty is pretty much on the money. whenever i think of indie meaning financial backing, or the lack thereof, i never think about modern bands. I always think of the late 80s/early 90s. I just think people in 'indie' bands take it as more a form or style of music nowadays, not a way of life. Which is why majors have been able to jump on it and whore it out for all it's worth.
i think Connor McNicholas is somewhat to blame too.
everything eventually gets absorbed into the mainstream, it's like natural selection within popular music. though it does differ with an australian context.
same deal with the whole 'alternative' tag. acts under this umbrella sell many more records than the so called 'popular' acts.
Can I just note a quote from switchy, right here: ''You know who it's all about for me? THE CARPENTERS. no seriously, fuck the indie bands''
JUDEE SILL, Patinka. and The Carpenters.
''Indie'': anything that's not hip-hop (''hip-hop'' includes rap, grime, R&B, reggae and such)
And here is Jude Rogers' take on changing definitions of ''indie'':
Trouble in 'Indie'land
Miserable no more: Smiths label sold off
by Katie Allen, media business correspondent
Tuesday 24 July 2007
The Guardian
The music group Sanctuary is selling its stake in Rough Trade Records, the label that first signed the Smiths - famed for their 1980s miserablist hits - to the long-established independent Beggars Group. Sanctuary is set to announce the sale of its 49% interest in the loss-making label for a cash sum of £800,000.
The disposal of Rough Trade, which counts Pulp's frontman Jarvis Cocker and Pete Doherty's Babyshambles among its acts, comes as Sanctuary is about to be taken over by the world's largest music company, Universal.
Universal is thought to be mainly interested in Sanctuary's merchandising arm and its artist management business, whose roster includes Elton John. Sanctuary's shareholders have until Thursday to accept Universal's 20p-a-share offer.
Beggars Group, which was founded by the key independent music labels figure Martin Mills, will be able to incorporate the stake in Rough Trade into a business whose catalogue of artists includes The Fall and John Cale.
Rough Trade, founded by Geoff Travis, was born from the successful independent record store in 1978. Sanctuary joined forces with Rough Trade in 2001 with the intention of helping the label expand in the UK and abroad. Although Rough Trade has worked with high-profile acts such as The Strokes, it has recently failed to make any money for Sanctuary.
That has compounded problems for the music group, which early last year pushed out its co-founder Andy Taylor. The other founder, Rod Smallwood, left in November, taking the management contract for its prime act, Iron Maiden. However, Sanctuary retained the more profitable merchandising agreement for the band that gave the company its name.
Sanctuary said in April that it would not achieve profitability until at least 2008 and that its struggling recorded product division would miss expectations for this financial year.
''scream for me long beach! SCREAM FOR ME LONG BEACH!''
I've got friends on Rough Trade and Domino and they all say it's the worse thing they ever did signing with them.
That's not to say that anyone else is better. Ummm, that's all.
Surely this is a good thing right??
Yes William. When are we starting that band?
I've got the album title - Crosby, Stills, Nash, Young, Gifted & Black.
We can call ourselves the Elton John Butler Trio
Whoops - wanted t'other side...
New indie or new hype??
Today is Inde-pendents Day
This is indie gone too big........