Why We Hate Indie Kids
Eighteen Reasons
1) They like indie music. Obviously.
2) Their regulation thick-frame black glasses. No more breakable item of nosewear has ever been invented: on slow afternoons I could happily cruise the streets for hours walking up to indie kids, lifting these ridiculous excuses for spectacles from their filthy-pored noses and breaking them at the bridge. How the indie kid would howl! Perhaps they would threaten to “kick my ass”. Needless to say all indie kids have adequate eyesight: any slight impairment of vision is due entirely to their regime of perpetual masturbation.
3) Indie kids are at it like rabbits. Or want to be. Scratch any ‘community’ or ‘scene’ of indie kids and you will find a seething cauldron of sexual frustration and backstabbing. Most indie kids are vile to look upon: I think this because I am enslaved by societal standards of beauty.
4) Societal standards of anything are bad, pretty much. Unless it gets you a shag. Or earns you – or more likely your parents – the vast amount of money needed to get through college on some no-mark computer games degree AND buy a billion useless identical records.
5) On the rare occasions when an indie kid does get it on it at least distracts them from listening to indie music. Or making it. All indie kids are in indie bands.
6) Indie is short for independent, because indie kids are not mainstream. No sir. They are individuals. A quick look at an indie kid website will reassure you of that.
7) All indie kids are unique. They are however looking for other indie kids who are unique in exactly the same way as them – cool, huh?
8) Among the unique things about indie kids are their haircuts. The square mainstream observer might mistake the uniform dyed bobs and crops of indieland as the sinister hairstyles of a clone army hell-bent on taking over teenage america and making it listen to At The Drive-In. But such an observer would be a fool. There are crucial differences in the haircuts. Some are, like, really expensive.
9) Some records are really expensive, too. You must really love the music to spend $200 on eBay on a one-sided seven-inch, right? It shows your dedication to music is for real and unique, like your taste.
10) Indie fashions are individual and unique too, and are marked by the indie kid’s strong sense of irony. For example, a lot of indie kids like wearing overalls and workshirts as worn by real live working class people. As the indie kid finishes a two-hour shift at Border’s they feel solidarity with their working-class brothers and sisters in the bakeries and pizza delivery companies all across the nation.
11) They don’t feel solidarity with the suits working in offices, though. Those people are a plastic fake herd of manufactured, soulless brainwashed lemming robot drone sheep enslaved to mass culture pap. (This is true, obviously. But sorry, indie kids are worse.)
12) Not all mass culture is pap, though. Hey! What about those cool Powerpuff Girls?
13) Infantilism is endemic to the indie kids. When was the last time you heard one of them use the word ‘man’ or ‘woman’. Nope, it’s always ‘boys’ and ‘girls’. Some girls are ‘cute’. Some boys are ‘cute’ too. The more incurable indie kids use the words ‘grrrl’ and – shudder – ‘boi’, for all the world as if they were living in a Disneyworld 1994 Experience ride or fell into a copy of Sassy once and never escaped.
14) When indie kids pair off with a cute grrrl or boi (all indie kids are in theory bisexual, of course. Just don’t ask them to do anything about it.) they tend to treat each other like shit and then write it up on their web pages (“I am SUCH the geek”). This is because they are very sensitive, not as the casual observer might have guessed because they are emotional dwarves with no concept of human interaction outside a fanzine problem page. You become sensitive by listening to Belle And Sebastian a lot.
15) All their records sound the same, due to influence inbreeding. The gene pool of influences on indie rock has been shrinking steadily since 1977, thanks to paranoid scenester tastemaking. The constant slathering praise directed at the likes of the Get Up Kids and Sleater-Kinney is the critical equivalent of a one-eyed chinless inbred mutant winning a beauty contest.
16) Indie kids like experimentation, but not too much experimentation. They like extremity, but not too much extremity. They like songs, but they like them to be a bit shy and fuzzed-up and nervous and not too songish. Best of all they like bands which sound comfortingly like the other ones they already know are cool.
17) Of course they listen to other stuff too, carefully weighing it up for its purity of motive and general indie-ness. Other genres are assessed with a practised eye, and only the records which have the most spiritual kinship to indie are acceptable – no attempt is made to take these musics on their own terms, since indie is in any case superior. Eventually a fashionably anti-PC stance allows the indie kid to reject even bothering with hip-hop or dance records – that would after all be ‘tokenism’.
18) The worst thing about indie kids is how apalling they are at even being indie kids. After idling their college years going to ‘shows’ every other day and then spending two years in retail working on a screenplay or writing a novel about following a band or recording a thousand tinny songs on a hundred cheap cassettes and giving them to people they fancy in the hope that a rare Braid EP track might get them a quick fuck on some other indie kid’s sofa and pretending to like the Spice Girls and pretending to like the Magnetic Fields and pretending to like each other – after all that they suddenly get a job and start listening to Moby and Aimee Mann. What I ask you is the fucking point?
Tom Ewing and Maura Johnston
SPECIAL 2007 EDIT FOR THE COMMENTS BOX MASSIVE:
1. This was written in 2001. So don’t complain that we’re talking about emo not indie. Back in 2001, this stuff was indie, and emo was merely a gleam in a marketer’s eye.
2. I don’t know whether the View and the Fratellis are indie or not, but I do know that you should be ashamed to listen to them.
by her own standards poor Becka appears to be indie (she sez so) AND emo (she hates herself).
Also, quick write a “Why I Hate Emo Kids” ;-)
were is the love?….ummm…..yeah ….well…i think everyone is taking this thread way to seriously then it should be takin….oh yeah stop makin fun of the US i know its a total 2nd hand shop here but saying all americans suck is the same as tom here saying all indies suck…think about it….
and i dislike emos as much as anyone but shouldnt we help them get over there self-hurting instead of saying how much we hate them…
do we need to bury more bodies or fill up more crazy houses?
instead of Jerry! Jerry! lets yell out Phil! Phil! shall we?
woah a lot of people posted today…weird with a beard…yes that makes on sense at all
It makes me want to jump off a brigde (as soon as I find out what one is) and take an in-bread monkey with me, yeast and all.
This is very odd. How exactly is indie a genre? And for every kind of music, you’ll always have a bunch of annoying people who enjoy it. A very silly article.
well Harry, from the UK, im Kyle from the US and id like to say that you made a fool out of yourself with the “bloc,party” maybe you just made a mistake or maybe you’re just a real idiot, but bloc party is probably one of the greatest indie bands out there and they deserve to not be split into two bands by some fan on a thread….and we are scientist are pretty good and lets not leave out the arctic monkeys
How on earth are people still finding this?? Poor Tom!
why that would be googling “indie kid” – WE’RE NUMBER ONE – WHY TRY HARDER
ur jus a fuck head u don no wat the fuck indie is…u jus got nothin beta to do than joudge ppl…jus go shoot ur self or ask sum one to…indie is sum ppls lives so jus leav us alone!!!!
why can’t young people spell anymore?
in my previous post i was finding humour in tom and maura being refered to as 13-15 year olds as they were both in their mid-late 20s when this piece was written (a million years ago)
our kind will die soon and the little indies shall inherit the earth
AND THEY WILL MOURN AND WORSHIP US AS WE ADORE THE LOVELY DINOSAUR
Never mind the spelling, wot happened to 1x sense of humour? and ability to think straight ;-)
Fuck you all indie haters! In indie music is the best thing that has happened to redneck america. Indie is better than emo and has nothing to do with it!
I have to agree with Tom if he switches “Indie” with “Emo”. Any Emo band’s songs are indistinguishable from their other ones, because they’re bad. Its piped crap. And plenty of Emos say they are “Punks” They aren’t, for real Punk music check out Social Explosion of Myspace.
But Indie isn’t like what Tom described in the slightest, it may have been in the time and place that Tom was. But the word Indie comes from indepedent, i.e unsigned bands.
If Indie kids are breeding like rabbits, then they probably aren’t really indie – and go for that Twee Pop/Indie Pop shit. Indie is cut aside from the mainstream, not in it. But emo is in the mainstream, and its just plain bad.
A true indie teen culture would be good, it’d certainly lower the suicide rates amongst young people…damn emos.
IT’S ALL TOO CONFUSING.
also if social explosion are RILLY 1 x punk band, why do they call themselves hardcore/oi on their mice pace, EH? EH? they are quite fun though, bless them.
also DON’T TELL US WHAT INDIE MEANS, young whippersnapper…
fuck you indie kids!!
if you are so “individual” why are there so many of you and why are you all the same
WTF is this all about. as other people have said, you’ve got indie totally wrong! you pretty much described emo when indie is nothing fucking like it!! how can you sit there and insult the best music around at the moment? indie owns your ass. retard.
Kooks fans got the best speling! A signed photo of Tom is on its way to our lucky winner.
MARVELLOUS, most of today’s hits are arriving because we are now also number one google for INDIE HAIRCUTS!!! (although ilx is third as well!)
I think it is time for a new feature on Indie Haircuts.
I like the idea that people google Indie Haircuts when they want to decide what kind of haircut they want to show how Indie they are. they can take the picture down to their barbers: a paragon of independent trading by the way: and get their moptop chopped.
Dear God, it’s still going on! The idea that you can write something five years ago and have every indie kid in the world showing up and shouting that ‘u r a h8r RETARD’ terrifies me beyond reason.
The approximately 100,000 ppl who’ve googled it over the last five years and been unable to comment, that’s who I feel sorry for.
in all honesty, indie kids suck ass, indie music can be ok… when it’s not trying to be wierd just to be original (which in turn makes it sound like every other indie song), and indie girls can be cute, but as a whole, indie kids blow
they enjoy obscure music based on the fact that it’s obscure, and attempt to be different by cutting their own hair
indie is short for independent… how can you describe a large group of people as independent, the whole indie scene just doesnt make any sense
god damn non comformists!! stop TRYING to be different and be yourselves
this is the second and final message i post on this site
Yeah I fucking hate Vintage indie shit, It is as futuristic and forward thinking as a downsyndrome baby – backward and dead
I am about to go and work at the reading festival, I don’t really feel very happy thinking about the amount of Vintage shit that is going to be played there. Especially the Carling chiefs and razorCarling – Overprivilaged and under talented wannabe Mods that are used to sell Carling beer. Fair enough if people like that shit but what gets me is the over advertising of it. I want to hear new music – not renditions of yesteryear.