REWIND: Skinny Jeans And Sideways Hair

Every Friday, we hit rewind to visit one of our older playlists. The following is one of our favorites from the Loudcrowd vaults — our first indie rock playlist.

The term “indie rock” has become so super ubiquitous in the last dozen years or so that — what does it mean? What did it ever mean? The phrase was first used in the early ’80s to refer to a very particular kind of underground, guitar-based music that was released on small, independent record labels.

Personally I always thought it was a dumb term, indie rock. It attempted to define a music based on the way that it’s distributed? That’s both boring and random, wow. Why wasn’t there a genre known as Fender bass rock, then? Or bands who solely got around by VWs — bug rock? As tends to happen, over the years I have found more important things to care about.

Indie rock no longer refers solely to bands on small labels; it’s more about the attitude. Our friends at Wikipedia (which is to say, YOU) have divvied recent subgenres of indie into the following: Britpop, Lo fi (a term I still despise for pretty much same reasons as for indie), Noise rock, Riot Grrrl, Post rock, Post-hardcore, Twee pop, and Indie pop, among others. The songs in this playlist fall more into garage-rock and indie-pop than any others, but they’re really diverse. Indie rock really is pretty diverse for a music made predominantly by young, white, well-educated dudes (and yes I’m aware of the many exceptions to this, from Cibo Matto to the Grifters to TV on the Radio — but those all just prove the rule).

One of the sweeter developments of the last dozen years is that indie-rockers have come to accept dance music as another place to steal cool ideas from. The Tortoise remix 12”s helped get this going, but it all really came to a head when everyone and their brother began to ape the post-punk funk of Gang of Four and James Chance a few years ago. Genres seem much more fluid; the recombinant postmodern mix and match aesthetic is dominant. Animal Collective can morph from a freak-folk act to a freak-electro act, and their fans don’t bat an eyelash.

—DJ Yeti