What is "indie"?

[meserach.livejournal.com]

I'm sure this question has been debated endlessly here before, not to mention all over the rest of the internet, but I'm feeling poll-happy today.

[Poll #1433917]

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[koganbot]

I'd say something is "semipopular"* rather than "indie" if it reaches its sight beyond its own world. So the Ramones and Richard Hell and Pere Ubu were all semipopular rather than indie in the mid-'70s, despite their being on indie labels. (Sire wasn't originally affiliated with Warners.)

So we're "semipopular" here if we imagine our words can potentially reach beyond ourselves without limit, "indie" if we don't. This has nothing to do with how far our words actually do reach, since "indie" can be a big world but it's still indie if it can't imagine reaching beyond itself.

This is a mostly negative characterization of "indie," of course, and one that I wouldn't have used back in the '70s when the seeds of indie were being planted by Ramones et al. Back then being on an "indie" might especially mean that you're the one with reach, trying to get out from under the stultifying world of rock.

Back in the '50s, when "indie" did mean "independent record label" (assuming that the abbreviation "indie" was in use, which I don't know), it became associated with the rhythm & blues and rock 'n' roll that was coming up on the indie labels, the majors mostly sticking with legitimate, respectable, pop. This meaning of "pop" didn't hold, of course, as r&b and rock 'n' roll became a hunk of the popular music of the '50s, and held even less after the Beatles hit, when pretty much everything that hit had some rock or r'n'b element. And in the '70s the readoption of the term "indie" had - at least in my mind, and I'm in guessing in quite a few others' - the sense of "let's have another upwelling like the rock 'n' roll upwelling." For better or worse, "punk" eventually became the name for the upwelling.

But post-upwelling - when, by the way, I was releasing my own music - indie found itself stuck in a niche, not necessarily by choice. And it was only here in the '80s that "indie" really reasserted itself as term, along with "alternative." And I began to hate them, for being lies, essentially, "indie" pretending to be independent and "alternative" pretending to be alternative when really they were a quasi-bohemian niche within the larger culture. Rock in its threat and promise in the '60s meant my half fending off and half reaching out for an alternative to me, whereas "alternative" in the '80s was satisfied being an alternative to "the mainstream," to "them." This isn't to say that for some people "alternative" couldn't have initially been an alternative, a new self beyond their previous self. But I don't see that this could last, really.

*And in a few instances manages to be genuinely popular.