Genre Analysis

Indie rock is a genre of rock music that originated in the United Kingdom and the United States in the 1980s and earlier.

This term is used to describe the means of production and distribution of independent underground music.

A variety of musical genres and subgenres with varying degrees of overlap are associated with indie rock. Some of these include lo-fi, post-rock, sadcore, C86, mathrock, shoegaze/dream pop, jangle pop, indie pop, noise rock, noise pop, riot grrrl, post-hardcore, tweet pop, alt-country, post-punk revival, dance-punk, indie punk, baroque pop, and indietronica.

Modern indie rock is often traced back to The Velvet Underground's self-titled debut album, released in 1967, which was ranked #7 on Blender's list of the 100 greatest indie rock albums.

Allmusic notes that every "left-of-center rock movement owes an audible debt" to this album. The Beach Boys' 1966 album Pet sounds is also commonly listed as a highly influential starting point. Later, the punk movement of the 1970s had a direct impact on the DIY aesthetic that later became a cornerstone of indie rock.

In 1980 the term ‘alternative rock’ was more or less the same as indie rock.

Since early 1980s indie music charts have been complied here in the UK.

Aztec Camera , Josef K, Orange Juice where some of the indie pop artists that have emerged from a guitar-based alternative rock that dominated the indie charts.

Some of the British indie rock bands of the 1980s were The Smiths, The Stone Roses, and others who has influenced directly 1990s alternative rock movements such as Shoegazing and Britpop.

In the United States, the term indie rock was particularly associated with the abrasive, distortion-heavy sounds of Husker Dur, Sonic Youth, Meat Puppets, Dinossour Jr, The Replacements, and Pixies.

1990s brought major changes to alternative rock because bands such as Nirvana broke into the mainstream, widespreading exposure, which sort of contradicts the whole ‘underground music’. Bands such as Green Day and The Offspring have also become popular and where grouped as ‘alternative’. After that the meaning of the term alternative changed as the mainstream success attracted major-label companies.

So with this the term ‘alternative’ lost the original counter-cultural meaning and, the term ‘indie rock’ became associated with the bands and genres that remained underground.

The emo movement, which had grown out of the hardcre punk scene in the 1980s with bands like Rites of Spring, gained popularity as the 1990s progressed.Sunny Day Real Estate,The Promise Ring, The Get Up Kids and others brought a more melodic sound to the genre. Weezer's Pinkerton introduced the genre to a wider and more mainstream audience. Years later, the term "emo" would be applied to a wider variety of more mainstream bands by the music press.

In recent years, the line between indie and mainstream has become increasingly blurred, with traditionally indie bands like Modest Mouse and Death Cab for Cutie signing major label contracts. Radiohead ended their contract with EMI and self-released their seventh album, In Rainbows, in 2007.Indie rock bands without major label backing increasingly turned to the internet for promotion, as music review web sites that specialize in indie music such as Pitchfork Media saw their influence grow.

Websites such as MySpace and blogs have helped some of these bands to commercialize their works and eventually have ‘followers’ that would go to their shows in bars and pubs.

Some people have say that indie rock is the sort of thing that you cant really explain what it is, but they know it when they hear it. It's loud and despicable, or quiet and polite, careless and sloppy, or carefully composed, complex and pretentious, or simple and unassuming, and, to the fans who ear it it’s the cooler and more relevant than any other style of music, just buy the simple fact that it has its own style.

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Lo-Fi - is a term used to describe music in which the sound is of a lower quality than the usual standard. The qualities of lo-fi are usually achieved by either degrading the quality of the recorded audio, or using certain equipment.

Recent uses of the phrase has led to it becoming a genre, although it still remains as an aesthetic in music recording practice.

Lo-fi's roots can be dated as far back as a set of live cylinder recordings created in 1900–04 by Lionel Mapleson from a catwalk 40 ft (12 m) above the stage of the Metropolitan Opera.

In the same historical period, commercial field recordings of folk music had begun to be created in many nations of the world, recorded catch-as-catch-can by early record producers such as Fred Gaisberg of HMV.

It was not until Bob Dylan decided in 1975 to officially release a set of The Basement Tapes first recorded as music publisher demos in 1967, that the first lo-fi pop music milestone was reached.

Indie and Genre

The word "indie" is often used to refer specifically to various genres or sounds. During the 1980s, "indie" was synonymous in Great Britain with jangly guitar pop of the C-86 movement. During the 1990s a lot of Britpop bands were referred to as "indie", despite most of the movement being signed to major labels and dominating sales charts. More recently, the word "indie" is sometimes used as a synonym for new wave revivalist bands such as Franz Ferdinand and The Killers. The word "indie" is sometimes used as a synonym for alternative, a word which often bears the stigma of being associated with cynically manufactured mass-market teen-rebellion music from major labels. Such usages of "indie" may be considered inaccurate for various reasons: for one, stylistic qualities are often not accurately correlated to commercial independence or adherence to indie principles (this is particularly true when a sound becomes popular, its leading exponents are signed by major labels and more success-oriented bands and production teams attempt to imitate the style; this ultimately culminates in commercially driven artists sporting the same stylistic traits the "indie" artists of a year ago had). Secondly, however pervasive any style of music (even one as broadly defined as "guitar pop" or "post-punk rock") may become at a particular time, it by definition cannot embody all of indie music, as, by indie's nature, there will be indie artists, labels and entire local scenes operating outside of this style and its definitions.

Indie Culture

There are a number of cultural traits which could be more useful in pinpointing what "indie" is about than specific musical styles or commercial ownership. Indie artists are concerned more with self-expression than commercial considerations (though, again, this is a stance that is affected by many artists, including hugely commercially successful ones). A do-it-yourself sensibility, which originated with punk in the 1970s, is often associated with indie, with people in the scene being involved in bands, and labels. Indie often has an internationalist outlook, which stems from a sense of solidarity with other fans, bands and labels in other countries who share one's particular sensibilities; small indie labels will often distribute records for similar labels from abroad, and indie bands will often go on self-funded tours of other cities and countries, where those in the local indie scenes will invariably help organise gigs and often provide accommodation and other support.