Indie Guilt: C/D

I don't think people are saying they feel guilty about once having been into 'indie' music. More acknowledging that they once were and aren't anymore...which, is like fair enough. Obviously, there are jokes about indie here and there on ILM, but if you like 'indie' then why be so defensive? It's not like ILM is stopping people from buying indie.

(oh God, I sound stupid when I try to make a sensible point )

haha jess maybe you should post that irony definition again

OOOH! I'm not being defensive at all! it's hard to maintain the original question and precepts through this entire thread.

case in point: In the 1996 thread, someone mentioned defending any year (with rare exception) with "indie" records was *gasp* "precarious" (interesting how these words are used usually by people who quote dictionary definitions O_o), yet this person is clearly an indie product (as tackily (but necessarily as to make this particular point) referenced above). there is a definite anti-indie backlash in this forum, usually by those who possibly embraced it harder than others. i singled one person out unfairly, but this person is far from being the lone voice of indie guilt on ILM.

i'm looking to answer the question, not attack any online persona... Esp, not any wigga! Some of my best friends are wiggaz. w3rd y0! I think Josh's answer is most OTM so far.

young mc taught jess to love music you fool

jess is the lone voice of giant lettuceheads on ilm

"Obviously, there are jokes about indie here and there on ILM, but if you like 'indie' then why be so defensive?"

"Do not feed the troll."

if you like anything, then why be so defensive?

josh i think youre forgetting someone

I had the same reaction as ethan when I saw that list... like... a buncha indie albums makes a good year for music? C'mon, what was happening in the charts, with the stuff that most people were listening to?

Indiephilia!

I do think ILM sometimes protests too much about indie e.g. all the connections and references to Pitchfork. I think FT/NYLPM/ILM are perhaps more reactionary then they'd like to admit. (But that's a small strike against, and easily worth swallowing for what the whole offers.)

ppl only convince themselves they "like" indie because they're so embarrassed abt the daft chartpop they genuinely loved as kids

"ppl only convince themselves they "like" indie because they're so embarrassed abt the daft chartpop they genuinely loved as kids"

Do you really believe that, mark s? It's difficult for me to follow all the switches between sincerity and irony in this conversation.

sincerity & irony = equal affectations.

And only indiekidz care about EITHER!

namdam was so persuasive with his much-repeated wife-beating question that i decided to take "guilt" seriously as a motivating factor in all musical taste evah

unless his = her

I had the same reaction as ethan when I saw that list... like... a buncha indie albums makes a good year for music?

HAHA, it's not ALL indie records, I won't defend indie, somebody else's music. I'm more concerned about Indie Guilt phenomena that runs rampant on ILM. It's confused me.

HAHA, if someone would have put all jazz records (or all country/electronic/dub/house), i guarantee all y'all indie apologists would've stroked their chins in unison.

C'mon, what was happening in the charts, with the stuff that most people were listening to?

there's some groundbreaking shit that has influenced all the way into the POP stratosphere there right here and now today. obviously someone was listening to those records...

Sterling, do you think that rejecting indie self-consciously after finding someone else who shared the same (i'll use this word cautiously) "precious" LoComDenom/indie interests as you has made you into someone who wants to have GCD shared musical interests (eg, the hip-hop/pop listening pile?)

its a big big world out there, and indie comprises a small percentage of it. and theres nothing wrong with that. but rather than indie guilt, i looked through that thread and it was jam packed with indie records, over-represented i thought (and i picked suede stereolab third eye foundation and ghostface killah, so i am guilty of indie over representation also - because i was listening mainly to dance music from from 15-present)

and wqhere was the guilt on the tful282 thread. i must admit, i just can't see it

See the 96 thread now. "No Diggity" was a big single that year, and THAT'S im-fucking-portant.

& I didn't self consciously reject indie after that, but now lo-this-many-years-later I can look back and perhaps see that as something pivotal, something which shattered my perception of the nature of the music and a person's necessary relationship to it, which broke through some idealist strand of essentialism and forced me out of that particular rut.

Well, "My Heart Will Go On" was a big single in 1998, for instance. Is it a question of what 'most people' were listening to or a question of what were the most striking/original/worthy sounds 'most people' were listening to? Which is a good way of looking at it, but then undoes this initial division between small and large audience by throwing artistic qualifiers into the mix...

Also, none of the albums you listed in that thread were even the particularly better albums by those artists. I mean, they were a bunch of FAIR-TO-MIDDLING indie albums, not great ones. Defending the late 80s with the 'mats and sonic youth would have been much more reasonable, or even 94 with the cast and crew of Simple Machines & co.

its a big big world out there, and indie comprises a small percentage of it.

That's going to be the nature of lists by one person any time, not just with indie. It could be a list consistenting of indie, pop, and smooth jazz and still it wouldn't encompess music as a whole. I just don't think it's possible for one person to listen to everything and make an informed decision being totally fair to all genre's, all while comparing apples to oranges. I'd rather see personal lists, i want to know what YOU liked in 1996 regardless if it was indie or not.

i know, but the personal lists were pretty indie heavy too, including mine (i feel kinda guilty about that, heh heh heh!)(i dont do emoticons, sorry, too indie)

i'm still loving the idea of stroking chins over jazz! jazz is just indie with trumpets yo!

See the 96 thread now. "No Diggity" was a big single that year, and THAT'S im-fucking-portant.

More important than TIGERMILK? [totally joking here]

& I didn't self consciously reject indie after that, but now lo- this-many-years-later I can look back and perhaps see that as something pivotal, something which shattered my perception of the nature of the music and a person's necessary relationship to it, which broke through some idealist strand of essentialism and forced me out of that particular rut. i understand, agree (!?!?), and more importantly, that was nice and concisely put. i think there is a lot of personal reasons not worth getting into with this subject and i admit I didn't have the right angle at first, but amid the varying pleas for sympathetic chortles, there were quite a few nice replies. i have to leave ILM now for the lab (please, hold back the groans and tears), but I have definitely learned something today about ILM and the extremely essential love/hate indie relationship within. thank you all.

thank YOU gygax

does being slighty flippant about indicate that really i'm indie as hell, and real guilty about it????! thats like those arguments where whatever you say someone says "ah, you see, that just proves it, cuz i knew you would say that".

if yr all so indie, answer my damn Smashing Orange thread already...

extremely essential love/hate indie relationship within

but this was always obvious! you make it sound like something all hidden! genres=love/hate.

and every poster has the same affliction. deraymi's salsa/arabic interests? ha! just fronting, hiding from his Matador CDs!

i knew you were going to post that

i am SO COASTING!! time for television i believe

You don't need guilt, Mark! You can count songs instead. Huzzah!

unless his = her

Then what, huh? If I'm "her," I can't beat my wife? Are you gonna beat my wife? "Gonna beat my wife!" Oh wait, is that an indie song?

Seriously, what the fuck is the wife-beating thing about? Must be another ILM thing that I wouldn't understand. Inside jokes, *yawn*.

Thanks for answering the question, Mark. Underwhelming as evah.

Cheers.

yeah, "have you stopped beating your wife?", as invented on ilm

the problem w.yr posts, namdam, is that they always contain even numbers of letters

mark refers to the classic paradox of the unanswerable question 'have you stopped beating your wife?' which cannot be answered without implicating ones self YOU SEE

This is where someone points and laughs at Mark for actually either (a) counting the letters in those posts, which is sad or (b) correcting him over the number of letters in those posts (in case it's actually an odd number) which is even more sad.

I won't, though. I'm gonna go to the corner store for some Coke.

cure for indie guilt:

throw out the elitism or ditch the egalitarianism so you feel ok.

result: snotty hipster elitists or, uh, sterl ha ha

nate do you drink coke because youre guilty about liking pepsi?

No, I drink it 'cause it's on sale for $1.99 for a 12-pack. I HAVE ZERO BRAND LOYALTY

ethan is hip-hop, but I AM THE PEOPLE.

P433R M3.

Seriously, what the fuck is the wife-beating thing about? Must be another ILM thing that I wouldn't understand. Inside jokes, *yawn*.

I'll see your *yawn* and raise you a *sigh*: "the wife-beating thing" is the classic rhetorical example of a loaded question.

The question "Have you stopped beating your wife?" presupposes that you have beaten your wife prior to its asking, as well as that you have a wife. If you are unmarried, or have never beaten your wife, then the question is loaded. Since the example is a yes/no question, there are only the following two direct answers: (a) "Yes, I have stopped beating my wife", which entails "I was beating my wife." (b) "No, I haven't stopped beating my wife", which entails "I am still beating my wife." Thus, either direct answer entails that you have beaten your wife, which is, therefore, a presupposition of the question. So, a loaded question is one which cannot be directly answered without implying a falsehood. For this reason, the proper response to such a question is not to answer it directly, but to either refuse to answer or to reject the question.

ha, this thread has boosted my site ratings cuz everyone wants to see if jess is guilty of liking indie, hey, those that come, why not stay and look at the photos and then answer the song for a picture thread on ile?

God, curse the fucking posting pile-up on this thread!

nitsuh you need an editor ethan did that way quicker!

haha sterl is too l33+ to use haXoR korrektly

jess, graham looks miserable there!!

b-but I'm not 133+, I thought was the point... or... (sob).

it's back to mille plateaux with you!

The friendly dead kid.

"i wonder if casper is the ghost of richie rich."
"hey, yeah...i wonder how he died!"
"maybe he realized the fruitlessness of the search for money, and took his own life."
"kids, you're kind of creeping me out."

Oh, and here's a thought experiment to answer the actual question. If we adopt Tom's personal preference (i.e., "listening to different genres" = "good") and look at all of the musical genres that have semi-definable "communities" attached to them (indie, hip-hop, metal, various dance, etc.), we find that the "indie community" is the one that feels the most compulsion to look outside of its own box. (Followed closely by "various dance," but there half of the impulse to look outside of the box is for the purpose of cannibalizing whatever's found there.)

I'm less making that argument than I am suggesting it. Other thing to consider: the other half of indie-bashing on ILM revolves around criticizing indie kids for being head-up-ass insular. Note the twin pincers, both of which get adopted by the indie-friendly and the indie-bashing and used as appropriate: (a) you suck for only listening to indie, and (b) you suck for making conspicuous efforts to listen to things other than indie. Isn't "indie guilt" in the question as posed here just a way of saying either (a) you suck for both of those or (b) you suck for caring about the question at all?

The issue's been gone over enough times on ILM that I don't fault anyone for not wanting to put a ton of energy into it again. A lot of it is "political" anyway, a tool for those who want to chip away at the stranglehold indie-centric discourse has had over music discourse for the last decade (especially online). And a lot of it is a way of slapping back at whatever perceived "indie community" wasn't giving enough credit to, say, pop fans during that period. And a lot of it is just sides-switching, now that indie's having something of a bad patch and danceable radio-friendly pop is having such a good one. All of which combines to make it basically irrelevant. YES indie is a bit of a whipping-boy around here. It still gets talked about constantly and seriously, and the barbs thrown its way aren't any worse than the barbs a lot of indie kids still reflexively throw at anything in the top 40. Fine. Good. Listen to things, talk about things, and quit being so hypercritical of everyone's motives for listening to or talking about the things they do.