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.
i didn’t want to read this crap but my friend sent it to me and asked me to read it….
see, what a crapload of gross generalization
especially this one: “All their records sound the same, due to influence inbreeding”
omg, I guess nickleback and theory of a deadman sound very different
it’s just sad that u two would blindly label people and find the time to write crap like this, my response to u is: get a fooking life
sebadoh put out a song entitled gimme indie rock. they where addressing a mindset . that at the time was based largely upon recording/promoting/supporting like minded musicians without relying on fat cats to dish out a sweaty wad of cash
Dude — that song is totally a piss-take on how formulaic indie rock is!! “Rock and Roll genius, ride the middle of the road / Milk that sound, blow your load / Shoot it further than you ever said it go / Four stars in the Rolling Stone”
get them little wank indie shits told, there musics wank, its produced wank, and can a say been a dj can you tell me 1 big name dj who plays that shit-anser-nooooooooooo cos its shit, get a fucking life and stop dressing the same
im from the uk, and i would say that im indie cos i like indie music and the uk has a huge indie scene, and i think that indie now is considered by some people as being quite mainstream.
bands like the arctic monkeys, the view and the klaxons often appear in the charts and most UK people dont have a problem with it.
but real indie are bands that you have to dig your way to find, the kind of bands that you’ve heared of for the past 6 months and your mainstream friends start to hum one of their new tunes.
bands like
dirty pretty things, kasabian, the cribs, little man tate, boy kill boy, and idlewild.
i believe that indie is the coolest scene to be a part of = its them fucking emos you have to look out for
I really hope someone reads this…
You know what, I get your point. I too hate these scenester fakes.
But you know what? Most of my music could be classified as indie (Pretty much all music can be now)
But are you going to crucify me because I like bands like that? Not all of us are like these fakes you’re talking about.
Your article should be titled Why we hate FAKE indie kids.
Because the genre of music, while frequently abused, is actually very amazing and unique.
glad tom likes racist skanks like paris hilton, not this indie crap
Look here lady’s theres nothing wrong with indie, grunge, emo i think people are entitled to what they think and do we dont need some lot of dumb ass crackers telling what we should and shouldnt be why dont you all grow up for once!!!!!
(just so you dont forget PUNK is british not american so is indie and mod an rockers)
stick this in ya pipe and smoke it
FACT WATCH DEPT: Punk was actually invented by the USA, arguably dating back to the Velvet Underground and the Stooges, but coming into full force with the New York Dolls, Ramones, Wayne County and so on (the New York Dolls being the band that inspired McLaren to form the Sex Pistols).
What we in the UK did, as we’ve done with so much of the USA’s output, is steal it, use it to jump-start our own turgid music scene, vastly improve it and then sell it back to them. In the process, we (a bit shamelessly) invented the myth that we created it from whole cloth.
THIS IS SO AWESOME
don’t bother people this is some old crap.
I hate indie so much.
The View – Same Jeans terrible it irratates me and others very existents.
The kooks and many other bands mindless crap for SHEEPS.
The View? De leuningen van Pissheaded voor niet uit te spreken over Dermot O’Leary zich terwijl het shanging van de hoornen van ongebreidelde rammen.
um, i think you have confused indie kids with emos. if you’re gna bitch about something that doesnt need bitching about at least get right. besides, theres nothing wrong with goth/punk/emo/grunge/indie etc etc etc. much better than all the chavscum there is these days. i know quite a few people of the goth/punk/emo/grunge/indie persuasion [many in fact] and they are all nice, [mostly] well-spoken teens [who dont go around swearing at the top of their lungs and robbing superdrug etc etc like chavs] so i think old people should shut up about it as we are obviously the preferable type of teenager. ha. long live metal =] x
oh god, we *are* old people aren’t we?
Well we were even when we wrote this.
i am the oldest :D
um, kogan?
getting old = wanting ppl to read the comment thread through first
i am an in-bread monkey :D
YES! this guy (tom) writes for Pitchforkmedia.com now. Guess he doesn’t hate indie kids all that much afterall.
None of the pitchforkmedia.com staff are indie kids. They’re all shark-eyed businessmen who listen to Daniel Powter: my kind of people.
This is all a sham. Underneath our air of indie beneficence we are secretly CAMERONITE CRUNCHIE FROGS!!!!
“oooh WHHHHEEEEEEEE OOOOOOOOHHHHH I look just like Buddy Holly” means emo/indie/whateveryouwannacallit started a long time ago, died tragically and then has been resurrected, more or less. (If you think the resurrection was a bad idea, then they are ZOMBIES, I suppose.)
That’s a terrible insult to Colin Blunstone and the plucky lads from St Albans! ;-)
Whoops! Should’ve written “the UNDEAD” ;-)