Groschi

I’ll dig up this old thread to add my two cents to the whole indie/underground thing from an indie standpoint, since it’s a topic that’s kinda bugging me lately. Being an indie music buff for many years, i’ve become witness of how the meaning of those terms changed over time, often leading to confusion when an old fart like me (and i’m only about 30…) tries to talk to younger folk about the music i play.

The three terms i’d like to discuss in a rock context are Indie, Alternative and Undergound, and i’ll try to categorize things roughly into three decades.

In the 1980s, fueled by Punk and its associated D.I.Y. culture, independent record labels were on the rise for the first time since the demise of the local record labels in the late 60s. As far as i can tell, the term indie was also used widely for the first time then and simply meant all artists who got their records produced and distributed outside of the established structures of the major record labels.
When the short commercial hype around punkrock died, the music went back underground into its local scenes and evolved into all imaginable directions from there. For this new breed of extremely diverse punk-influenced rock groups the umbrella-term Alternative went into use sometime in the mid-80s. Another interchangeable term, at least in the US, was College Rock, since this type of music got almost exclusively played at college radio stations.

In the nineties, things became more complicated. There was this famous band with the blond singer who killed himself, whose incredible success seems almost surreal by todays standards, and whose music sounded a lot like a cleaned-up culmination of everything that was going on in the 80’s rock underground. And with them came a whole generation of alternative bands that compromised their sound to make it more marketable to mass audiences. Instead of the free-minded musical anarchism of 80’s alternative and punk’s raw energy, they incorporated pop and classic rock elements into their sound and developed a rockstar image (if you follow this development for another ten years you’ll end up with something like… Nickelback!!!).
The underground scenes needed something to distinguish themselves from commercial alternative rock, and so the old indie-term was used to denote the more unpolished, weird and „underground“ styles of the alternative universe. It wasn’t underground by definition, since some bands like Pavement or Guided by Voices did have some considerable success in that time.

Then, sometime during the 2000’s, indie went the same route that Alternative Rock already took during the 90’s. It’s hard to pin down the beginnings of this, but i think it started when bands like the Strokes and Interpol became a short-lived hype. Since then, numerous acts like Franz Ferdinand, Modest Mouse, Arcade Fire and Bloc Party enjoyed mainstream success and became associated with Indie Rock by the mainstream press and so by everyone else. Of course the focus was almost entirely on the more digestible, tame side of the indie spectrum and today even obvious sellouts like Fun. are talked about as indie bands. When i try to explain my style of music to someone without a similar background and use the word indie to describe what kind of music i play, everybody thinks i’m spinning fluffy stadium rock, pop and folk music. They coudn’t be more wrong.
And up until now, nobody came up with a new word for that more unpolished range of styles. Today is simply tell them i spin punkrock. It’s a step back about 30 years and doesn’t even come close, but at least people understand what i’m saying… kind of.

Underground is another weird term that changed over time. In the pre-internet past, you could call artists underground that operated in small and mostly local scenes. You woudn’t even know they existed if nobody pointed you to them. But then it was still hard to get information about it. It was all about little known venues, fanzines, labels and mailorders you had to know about and you really had to dig your way into it to get a picture about what was going on.
Now that you can find info on the most obscure stuff by a simple google search and artists can reach a potentially infinite number of people, it’s debatable if an „underground“ by this definition still exists at all.