It's not just music, either. I don't know quite when it happened, but at some point a certain vague strain of "indie" dropped its last vestiges of seeming weird and became a commonplace-- sort of like in Britain, where "indie" has long been synonymous with the normal guitar bands people find fashionable. When those I'm-a-Mac, I'm-a-PC commercials came out, I even saw some ad critic describe Justin Long's Mac guy as an "indie type." Why? He's just a young middle-class-looking white guy with a haircut. (I'd be more aghast, except it's actually not hard to imagine him telling you about the New Pornographers.) And soon enough any film, book, or cultural product that came anywhere near a certain sensibility-- anything anyone would describe as "quirky" or cleverish or tender-- fell in the indie bucket, too: Garden State with its hilarious Shins scene, Wes Anderson movies, Dave Eggers (??), Juno, Zooey Deschanel's general existence, private colleges, button shirts, the Internet, IKEA, Miracle Whip, literacy, you tell me. The sensibility used to seem rarer, and then, I suppose, half the people attracted to it grew up and got creative jobs and now it floats everywhere. So huge swathes of twentysomethings, like anyone with a college education or a Mac or a strummy guitar record: indie, apparently? Which is allegedly quite the thing these days.
from Nitsuh Abebe's "The Decade in Indie"
Did ya hear, bro' the Internet is TOTALLY INDIE! So's Zooey Deschanel who can be currently be seen shilling for the cotton industry in some horrible "song-emercial". Everytime I think the metal & punk scene(s) are overwrought with b.s., I can just go on Pitchfork and be realize that it's not so bad. Now where's that Embrace of Thorns CD?
1 comment:
Yeah - totally happened. But why? - like why indie at this time for so many people?
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