Indie Rock, R.I.P. 2005

They said, “I hope that you will never change”
I went and cut my hair
They say, “Don’t take your business to the big time”
I bought us tickets there

A slight figure of speech
I cut my chest wide open
They come and watch us bleed
Is it all like I was hoping now?
-The Avett Brothers, “Slight Figure of Speech”

Oh, those Avetts. They know exactly what they’re doing. As unchained and raucous as their ballyhooed live shows are, their every move these days, be it in recorded song or in rock press interview, is calculated, cunning, aiming to milk the cash cows that are big-label contracts and deep-and-wide critical and fan base acclaim.

This is not a bad thing.

An indefatigable, romantic notion lies embedded inside earnest souls in the indie set, tells them that the immortal Zeuses and Heras of the would-be rock underground will always be theirs. Will not jump that clichéd shark, will not leave a note on the pillow.

Oh, the dear little bleeders, they set themselves up to be crushed. For somewhere along the route it goes wrong. At some point that band – “Mine!” – explodes. They may not have even meant it, not at the time of its occurrence or not based on the material that does it – but it happens. Fame hurts, and fame kills, but before that fame comes. (Something wicked this way comes?) When it does, the clock may read 14:59 and counting, but fame is fame, and once a band’s achieved it there’s nary a forgiving soul who’d accept that act back into the cherished “indie” fold.

Not fair. Among those of us who aren’t sadists, who would want to see his favorite band languish in some vague blackness on the soundscape, see those players merely treading in rock’s trenches, when the prospect of Making It™ lurks, always?

Sure, that band is “yours.” Was, is, and always shall be. But the time seems to come for each in the ever-fickle indie fandom when his impression goes from “I listen to bands that don’t exist yet – and this one!” to “Hear you me, I’ll never listen to that shit act again! Charlatans!”

Friends, we’ve witnessed the death of what is indie. What was it, anyway, some may ask? Once it meant a band was independent of label control, implied that no Sony or Def Jam nor even a Barsuk type label had its talons sunk into the sonic flesh of Our Band™. Then indie came to mean simply a certain sound, and you knew it when you heard it. It was Broken Social Scene, it was Arcade Fire, it was even those Avett Bros and so many more of the heretofore unusual suspects. And it was good.

And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made
-Simon and Garfunkel, “The Sound of Silence”

There’s the rub: Indie folks saw what they had created and said that it was good. It’s ironic, really: They knelt to these indie rock gods – the David Bazans and the Win Butlers, the Ben Gibbards and the Jenny Lewises of this age – and all the while they themselves, these supposed indie serfs, were the true wizards behind the curtain, fashioning these icons in their own image and wielding power they did or did realize. They dictated what constituted distinctly “indie” taste, brazenly telling bands where to go metaphysically, musically.

Surely it got to the point where what was deemed “indie” seemed to be for the sake of the onlookers, for those boys bobbing their heads to that Clap Your Hands Say Yeah beat while their girlfriends sway left-right-left-right in a line like indie fembots. For all the indie children of the world with their merch-grabby paws. Indie existed not for the bands, but for the fans. And they were legion. Still are.

But. Broken Social Scene birthed the singular Feist. Girl went rogue. Arcade Fire last year lent one of its best songs to a film trailer (even if it was the so-indie-it-hurts Where the Wild Things Are). And those dastardly Avett Brothers? They went and wrote a freaking song about shamelessly angling for that big tent. To note, it didn’t hurt them a bit, either, to link up with one Rick Rubin, that King Midas of crossover production.

Look, any band that wants to eat these days will have its best songs – that virgin album or
at least some half-baked EP – on iTunes. That’s not very punk now, is it? Not very indie, if you will. And I will. Indie was done for with the advent of legitimate music sharing. When corporate met online, it was truly curtains for this niche. You can hardly call yourself “independent” when you’re in bed with Apple, even if you’re just one of a trillion concubines ready to service that behemoth at 99 cents a pop.

Besides that, indie rock got diluted, arguably in the best way, by what artists like Feist and Spoon made of it, when they refused to bend to its ironically rigid conventions. Both brought a catchiness – holy hell, melodies! – and good, clean fun back to what was indie rock. They did this shamelessly. For the former, it was The Reminder on the whole, not to mention a certain little iPod commercial replete with wholesome dancing and primary colors. So winsome, that, as innocuous as appearing on “Sesame Street,” where Feist would later take “1 2 3 4” for real. With all this Feist became the Little Lady Engine That Could – And Did.

As for Spoon, 2005’s infectious “I Turned My Camera On” (birthed in the same year as Feist’s smash album, no less) was but a harbinger of things to come. The band’s egregiously titled but scrumptious Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga record two years later, replete with faux-indie nuggets like “The Underdog” and “You Got Yr Cherry Bomb,” served up never-ending slices of pure pop pleasure, unabashed hooks abounding. Indie went passé when more and more songwriters in that vein realized their tunes didn’t have to be completely devoid of melody and soul to be perfectly accepted. They watched fans of Feist and Spoon follow their faves into the light, and they yearned to do the same.

The tale of the Pied Piper always freaked me out as a kid, but these were the right kind of Pied Pipers of music, ones I’d gladly get in line behind. On another note, they seemed relentlessly unpretentious, and still do. Rejoice, I say.

These two acts have bridged the divide between what is pop candy and melody-deprived indie brooding. We should thank them. They’re not alone, either – Feist broke out ahead of other indie-pop darlings as Santigold and Lykke Li, not to mention those precocious Yeah Yeah Yeahs. I mean, Karen O’s indie cred was spent for good when she went from yelping and screeching like a wet cat all the time to actually (gasp!) singing. Turns out she has a pretty voice. Turns out she knew just what she was doing when she made the switch.

At the turning point that may have been 2005, this catchiness that crept into what was indie rock meant the melting of that sound into what is considered pop. The likes of Pitchfork and Paste fell into the cavernous hole that is Rolling Stone and all but died there, their niches, the thrones of their indie kingdoms, usurped by a little dirty pop. Indie and pop, pop and indie – the two have just plain merged.

Even so, Kelly Clarkson’s latest title track samples Spoon’s sickly yummy bass groove from “I Turn My Camera On” And America’s first Idol has covered Patty Griffin, says that’s her favorite songwriter. Meanwhile guitar-and-diary troubadours Pete Yorn and M. Ward, both arguably in need of career rejuvenation (or at least a muse), cut records with starlets Zooey D and ScarJo, respectively. Like it or not, what’s indie has gone pop – that is, popular. There’s hardly any distinction between the two now, at least not in what gets the bulk of the attention, be that via iPod ads, magazine covers, primetime TV placement, what have you.

An aside about those sordid TV montages set to music: You know you’ve seen a sign of the apocalypse, or at least the murder of “indie,” when the likes of Grey’s Anatomy and Gossip Girl appear to have their visceral fingers on the pulse of what is indie, of what is “good.”

If video killed the radio star back in that delicious decade called the ‘80s, well, TV has slain indie. The tube didn’t act alone, though, mind you – surely it had an accomplice in the nation’s club scene. I mean, there are remixes for the floor – egad, good ones! – out there the likes of The Fray’s ubiquitous “You Found Me” and Kings of Leon’s fiendishly listenable “Use Somebody.” (Speaking of the latter, how many in the mainstream who dig that track today have a clue that the band was once tiny and has other albums with zero songs about sex and fire?)

Blazing club-pop producer Tiësto just released an epic track with Jónsi, the lead singer of Sigur Rós, as his guest vocalist. That blasted Ting Tings track (“That’s not my name!”) went to pop radio and seems unwilling to perish; it’s received the high-end remix treatment to boot.

These mixes are circulating, they’re playing, and, good lord, people are gyrating to them.

Be glad. Thankfully the indie masses have gone with them. Bless those happenin’ kids for coming along, even with their black skinny jeans and their appropriately torn band tees and their perpetual sad-sack scowls. (Guh, don’t they know they got even those from Avril Lavigne in the first place? Pshaw.)

So what’s next? More and more collaborations, likely, hopefully. Think that Dark Was the Night compilation this year was a fluke? Hardly. Then we got Santogold and Lykke Li cutting a track with Kanye and N.A.S.A. (“Gifted”). This year’s breakout cerebral rapper Kid Cudi, himself a Kanye protégé, feasted on one of his debut tracks alongside both Ratatat and MGMT. The latter there themselves performed on The Late Show with David Letterman. Dave even pronounced the band’s name correctly: “Em-gee-em-tee.” I’m no Paul Revere when I say this: Indie has arrived.

Yea, there remain those acts toiling under the radar yet, and they will always be. Not those same bands per se, but some upstarts, those shooting for trajectories similar to those of heroes who went before, ones whose posters and B-sides they adored. Recall that U2 started out as a trashy little Irish punk band. Now those crusty blokes get to play three songs on SNL, haven’t met an ad they didn’t like to pimp for, and sell out gargantuan stadiums, frolicking around a stage that looks ready to beam them up and away forever. Likewise, a Michigan native née Madonna Louise Ciccone moved to NYC in 1977 to pursue a dance career. She started making art-pop, performing at CBGB, and cavorting with the likes of Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, the day’s visual-art taste makers.

Face it, folks: Love it, hate it, or hate to love it, pop is eternal. The brats and urchins, they become titans. And just like Jesus Christ, indie was always destined to die. This can be all right. The instruments and technologies available today (not talking about Auto-Tune here) will only catalyze further genre-hurdling and collab-tastic releases. We should all be waiting with bated breath and suitably sweaty indie palms for the returns to come in on our investments.

But do invest. Nothing passes as quickly or quietly as the future, and this trend is silently stampeding over you if you don’t soon hop the greatest bandwagon to take off in a good while. You can’t stop what’s coming. Why would you want to? We need them.

Look alive, see these bones
What you are now, we were once
And just like we are, you’ll be dust
Just like we are, permanent
-Nada Surf, “See These Bones”

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