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.
Well. I have to say. best website on hating indie kids. although, i must say, i hate emo kids more. some indie music is not bad, but the “scene” ain’t my place. ill stay at the raves where everyone is chill, and actually unique.
I’m indie. I think it’s funny. People are strange.
This is amazing. You are God.
I like indie music like Bloc party dretty pretty things ARtic monkeys Etc but people on here r trying 2 say that people like indie music dress like emos wowowoowwo i anit no emo n i anit dnt fdress like no tramp either with the mongey emo fringe n the skin tight jeans nobs newayz y people sayin that O yeh wot wud people put WOLFMOTHER under bcoz my gosh there amzingggggggg went 2 c em in concert wooww
I really don’t agree with your post, there are a lot of valid points. In some places, indie kids are exactly how you describe them, but then they’re not really “indie kids”, are they? There’s a lot of people that just want in on the “indie scene” which really pisses me off since that’s not what it’s about at all. Indie kids (and everyone) shouldn’t be worried about being “unique” or spending time and money to make their own “style”. That’s being a non-conformist simply to be a non-conformist, and in a way, that’s conforming since it makes you shy away from things that are “mainstream”. I guess I’d be classified as an indie kid to a casual observer, but I sure as hell don’t call myself one. I hang out with all kinds of people that listen to all kinds of music and I go to lots of shows, not caring whether or not everyone’s heard of the band or not… I guess what I’m trying to say is that the people you describe aren’t indie kids, they’re posers. Please, hate the posers and don’t confuse indie kids and emos… they’re usually polar opposites in terms of personality.
Oh, and please make your posts bearable for those of us that actually speak English… and I left a “but” out of the first sentence on my first post. Thank you.
oookay well first of all, I know I am beyond bored when I read shit like this and then actually take the time and effort to comment on it. I am ashamed of myself….
Anywho if you ask me you have got the description of indie wrong, you are describing emo. Annnd most indie music is good. The Kooks, The fratellis, Hadouken, Klaxons are all really good. And if you are going to insult a label, please insult the chavs who pollute my town.
oooh and I swear ‘boi’is like a ‘rude boi’/chav term? not indie or emo.
“That girls an Indie Cindy,
Lego haircut and polka-dot dress,
I don’t care if she thinks she’s indie,
how she’s different is anyones guess.”
That boy That girl-Hadouken lyrics. Seemed uber appropirate for this article.
Great song too……………
Frankly, I don’t know how you can say you’re into Indie if you don’t like Judomaster, Carpet Fatalist or The Ostracising Three.
Oh come on, Judomaster only ever did the one good EP and there’s nothing about Carpet Fatalist’s music that the Oscillating Ocelots and Juana La Enana didn’t do 10 years ago. The Ostracising Three’s underrated first album is good though, but they’ve been rubbish since Pitchfork and the NME started hyping them. Soon they’ll be in the same place as Magenta Placenta, Terris, and The Aids, and all the other bands that the NME have hyped and knocked down in the past.
C’mon! This indie fad is BULLSHIT!! I’d grab all you littel fuckers and burn you all in 1 pile if i could!
it’s pretty obvious who wrote this is what you could call literally racist. except your not basing it on skin colour instead your basing it on what music the listen to.
just because someone likes indie music doesn’t mean they’re an indie kid nor would it matter if they were an indie kid.
the person who wrote this obviously doesn’t like unique music nor unique people.
right indie kids aren’t mainstream wtf? is wrong with not being manistream? mainstream is what is wrong with the damn world. People don’t make hits from songs because they like the song they like it because they’re friends like it.
i can obviously see your one of those stuck up blonde popular girls at school or something.
well if i have offended you you can spray me with the superficial gimic induced power-indulging lipgloss.
just proves you only like the fads you fucking asswipe.
The Fads? Their split EP with Stabvole was OK.
You’re only saying that because you’re LITERALLY RACIST.
98% of commenters on this essay are TOOLS (possibly myself included). I keep checking back once every three or so weeks for new innovative comments or whiny “indie” kids who can’t spell “you,” and maybe death threats to all present-day indie kids (not 2001 indie kids) but it’s all the same shit.
hey lol ur a funny guy lol im into indie a lil but this made me laff so fuckin much hahaha u should make one bout chav’s and gangsta’s cause them bunch of wankers worse then indie hahahaha indie have a life lol chav’s only do fights n holiganism or gettin lippy like u at indie kids or each other n gettin there asses kicked cause they cant back up the cockyness wid hardness n gangsta’s well they just kill each other or act hard hahaha wats wid them they r more dickheaded then indie trust me i know alot of em hahaha n well if ud rather b one of them then just bein normal anyhow then ur worse then indie ur a discrace to life itself hahaha (P.S. get a life better then the one u got now)
All I can say it this: old or not, there is so much truth to this list it’s not even funny, and yes, I am a “recovering” indie kid – the circle jerk that comprises much of indie is full of some of the most miserable, unhappy, self-centered, passive-aggressive crybabies that I have ever met. The sad thing is, stereotypes are often based on a solid grain of truth, even when exaggerated. What’s even more sad is that 99% of these “kids” pain is entirely self-inflicted, but the rampant immaturity keeps so many from ever getting their act together. There’s nothing wrong with liking smaller, unknown bands or a particular aesthetic, but when it becomes a “lifestyle” (re: series of excuses), the “stupid meter” pegs.
:O OMG I’m SUCH an indie kid.
and now?
(that was sarcastic of me wasnt it?)
SORRY, BUT I GUESS THE WORST ARE THE WANNABES AND THE OH-SO-STYLISH KIDS IN TH RIOT
Article trackbacked to Diary of the Mad Pigeon
(http://www.themadpigeon.com/diary_of_the_mad_pigeon/2007/03/is_it_fair_to_p.html)
youve got it all wrong mate, just because i like indie music doesnt mean i waste my life and money buying expensive vintage tat and stupid cds, i just like the music, ive never met an indie kid who isn’t nice and just likes some good music. Emos on the other hand… dont get me started
We got a bright pink website talking about how emo sucks, and how such legendary bands like Justin Timberlake rule.
This is like the parable of the pot calling the kettle black, assuming that instead of being black, both the pot and the kettle where pieces of poo floating in the toliet.
Indie is full of shit, but I don’t wanna hear anything from the dance hip hop community, because lets face it, if it wasn’t for the drug extacy and the date rape drug, you wouldn’t get laid either.
Lets also face it, your no diffrent than the indie crowd. I think most points you made about indie kids could be said about your own community. I mean, come on, Top 40 isn’t reptative at ALL, AMIRITEGUYS!!!
Sometimes I long for the good old days, where being indie at a punk show was solid grounds for an ass-kicking.
Pink is the new black.
“We got a bright pink website talking about how emo sucks, and how such legendary bands like Justin Timberlake rule.”
Dude, ever since that whole “My Dick in a Box” skit, Timberlake is okay in my book. That stuff was funnier than hell.
Ha, It kinda seems no really knows what there talking about. Trends change so quickly one minute you slitting your wrists and your cool, the next your hospitilised by some chavs for being a goth. My point it this, don’t get so worked up on what something is or isn’t just be grateful you have something. You can laugh at someone for being mainstream, but isn’t that what we’re all doing?
Fuck it, emo, indie, WHATEVER. Why hate something when you can spend that time hating loving something awesome, like Pop Punk!
YES!