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

[cis.livejournal.com]

Girls and Boys was on Now 1994! I'd only just started listening to Capital and buying Now albums when Britpop hit, and um stuck I guess? I grew up on sixties pop; anything that claimed a direct line of descendence from The Beatles was automatically good (the real cementing of my childhood love of Take That was this medley they did of beatles songs at the brits or something, the fab five, did you see what they did there), which is funny to say because I never really liked Oasis for all they were the ones going on about the Beatles connection. And then I started secondary school and everyone was into britpop, damon albarn pouting in posters ripped from Just Seventeen etcetera - which was when it really was pop music, but somehow I managed to start buying vox and then the nme and then select and not grow out of the guitar music fad like everyone else. Probably because of Radiohead's 'OK Computer' and the run of sad music with guitars and high voices that followed, although the songs with clever-clever lyrics about how girls are mean genre was also fairly important.

I could imagine myself part of an indie community by reading the NME - couldn't stand the melody maker - but in my daily life there wasn't really one: my friends tended to listen to rock and metal, which I got into by osmosis. There'd be these points where everyone's tastes intersected, sudden consensuses (ash, idlewild, the manics-), and then nothing again; even when it were all nu-metal, I still considered myself to be 'indie'. (i remember an argument with a friend, in year9, over whether weezer were indie or rock, her argument being that weezer had to be rock because she didn't like indie, also the guitars in x song... the idea of an 'indie rock' never occurred!)

Indie is less central to my listening now, partly because I went though a period where I didn't seem to be all that interested in music, which turned out to just be that I wasn't so interested in guitar music (amusingly this coincided with my doing work experience at the nme), and then by the time I was able to listen to that indie stuff again it was being crowded out by pop as well, and rnb and hiphop as well, and dance of various kinds as well... Plus I don't think i'm capable of being socially indie again, the thought of going to gigs on spec as I used to just tires me out, actually the thought of gigs at all. Since I don't listen to it as much, I've less patience for the stuff: I don't listen as closely and so I find less to like, and I can't be bothered putting in the hours and the money to find new indie bands to care about, not when I could be listening to, say, shonky eighties jpop or minimal bobbins or the indie records I already own. But I look like someone who listens to indie, dress like one, act like one, to all Is and Ps am one: I suppose it's pretty hard to change that, if you even want to.