Indie Guilt: C/D

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.

And also obviously don't ask question that make silly assumptions about what people wear or what they listen to in their closets or why they like Missy. Even in jest, it's just irritating.

oh nitsuh I'm sorry about making fun of your stereolab album

hug?

Josh: there I need not fear shame when those delicate glitch-structions do not move my stony ass with their beats.

nitsuh the indie community only 'looks outside its own box' for other token genre artists who sound like indie!!

So what's indie, then?

indie = wu tang and evelyn king and THAT'S IT!!

Funniest thread evah! The only non-reflexive (and thus no guilt trip) and insular genre is Heavy Metal because it doesn't rate knowledge very highly. And the latter is of course mainly a male trait.

coaassssting

bah my hair metal joke was the funniest of the entiy-ah thread and no one even noticed it => like binaries you are all beneath me

just coast on out mark

Hair Metal doesn't count= indie Pop

INDIE GUILT

http://www.ludd.luth.se/ ~kavli/Thunderbirds/TracyFamily.jpg

blimey lady p owns some ugly-ass art

anthony to thread!!

is tin-tin doing dad tracy?

seeing as giveaway body language is the secret subject of this whole thread

thats you in the middle

keep up ethan

nitsuh the indie community only 'looks outside its own box' for other token genre artists who sound like indie

That doesn't matter. In fact it doesn't even matter whether they actually look or not. The point is that a certain percentage of indie fans at least mentally recognize that their other-genre listening doesn't live up to their ideals of being critically open- minded and musically omnivorous. The thought experiment was that by Tom's standards, that should be a step better than just ignoring everything else.

And once again what the hell is wrong with that? I mean, why wouldn't people who like indie like music from other genres that has affinities with indie? You can use the same thought- experiment to turn that back into a compliment, if you want to: you could argue that indie kids really are as open-minded about genre as their rhetoric likes to think, insofar as they'll listen to anything, regardless of musical genre, so long as it offers them what they enjoy in the "emotional" or "philosophical" or really "cultural" senses.

When the fuck was Bobby Moore a Thunderbird?

Parker's saying to Lady Penelope "I'm better than you, because you like Helen Love"

1. I missed this whole damn thread because I was having like the shittiest day EVAH at work
2. Mark S is often right and often funny on this thread and elsewhere but ppl only convince themselves they "like" indie because they're so embarrassed abt the daft chartpop they genuinely loved as kids is transparently total and complete horseshit
3. if I misattributed that one I am sorry Mark S
4. the original question hath to it some pith: people say "indie" around here as though the word gave off a bad smell
4b. which reminds me Steve Malkmus is a way better songwriter than you-all gave him credit for on the Pavement thread a while back
4c. the observation that a lot of people in this hizzouse seem to think that not liking Destiny's Child is pretentious is spot-on
4d. when in fact Destiny's Child aren't even good pop
4e. honestly
5. the conclusion here is that only true kult black metal is any good although as we know great death metal is better still but there is a paucity of great death metal right now 6. Oh yes and the attempt to laughingly discredit the "homophobes=closeted homosexuals" is itself laughable as accepted canons of psychiatry (not kooky Freudian shit neither: well-reasoned valid things) bear out that most homophobia is rooted in suppressed homoerotic urges 7. BLACK METAL IST KRIEG 8. Please do pity me, the workday was truly abysmal

Actually the more I think about it it is mind-boggling. People pick on indie fans for liking stuff from other genres that's similar to indie: what the hell is surprising about that? As if hip-hop fans listen to indie and go "I dunno, that was a sort of hip-hoppy beat he put in there, I hate this shit."

I like to solve my indie guilt by drinking copious amounts of Budweiser. This is a statement far more relevant than burning a copy of the last Modest Mouse Eminem CD which was released on a major label.

Look, can't all the indie kids and the b-boys and the popists and the rave bunnies all get together in the spirit of communal harmony, and just throw shit at fat girls with ironic backpacks?

oh nitsuh, i think constructing thought experiments to explore the transgression of "indie boundaries" might be a cry for help.

nitsuh mainly i have a problem because indie kids listen to some pussy-ass fuckin hiphop

i just don't like them because i live @ indie USA ground zero!!

also hiphop fans like all kinds of crazy shit!!

This thread is like the twilight of an era, Nero fiddling as Rome burns, the sun at the center of the ILM universe flaring into a red giant. It sums up a year and a half of ILM, kind of.