Sekrit Origins

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

One of the persistent themes in the Now polls is "wow this is my first NOW album" (frantically ticks everything). Another persistent theme is "OK at this point I'd got into indie" (ashamedly ticks nothing). So in the endless search for shared experience let me ask you this question:

How did you get into indie?

and as a bonus question - let's try not to make this too loaded -

If indie is less central to your music listening now than it once was, why do you think this is?

Define the i-word however you like.

I think I have asked similar qns on ILM, but this is a new kettle and these are new fish.

Comments

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

I was into indie before indie existed, me. Actually that is sort of true in a way, in that I was into the music that indie grew out of - punk and post-punk and Stiff and power pop and all that. It didn't feel like anything separate until it was sort of crystallised into a scene in the mid-'80s, so I guess that was when I started thinking of something called indie, and I was into it then, a lot of the acts that ended up on C86 and so on.

As the '90s got going I found that white guitar music was shrinking rapidly as a proportion of the new music I played. Hip hop and dance (broad sense) were grabbing more and more of my attention and affection. No new guitar/rock/indie bands at all seemed to be emerging that I thought very much of. My suspicion is that the young white British talent that in previous years would have picked up guitars and formed bands were making techno (etc.) in their bedrooms instead, and that Underworld, Orbital, Chemical Brothers, Massive Attack and a huge long list of others might mostly have tried rock/indie the decade before - and some of them would have been very good at it.

Whatever, I don't really need to make a case for the decline of indie here - fact is, I stopped liking it with extremely rare exceptions (Pulp, Spiritualized), and these days I listed as little as possible, and I dare say that'll continue until I fall for some new acts in the genre, if that happens.