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.
hey, you suck indie is the best. go jmp of a brigde, just try not to land it the water, that way you can make sure you die.LOSER! Go shove that so called sense of humour up that dick-joint you call an arse. Besides, Go die in your sads little 1 room apartement you internet-loving-music-hating son of an inbread monkey.
I hope this person never finds Tanya…
(This is FTs most googled article BTW)
in-bread monkey!
I think you were way to nice on the little morons. Indie and Emo kids must have a deaf ear for music, little cock suckers of whatever the current fad is.
… And I REALLY HATE Indie and Emo Kids who claim to be Punk Rock. I really wanna behead those little brats.
dude get a real hobby
hello.
is this site american?
cause your idea of an indie kid is pretty different to the english version.
your version of indie kids are like the english version of emo.
i hate emos.
indies are cool, they wear teh vintage stuff.
its snazzy.
but we’re all entitled to our own opinion so fair enough.
The article was written 5 years ago. One of the authors is American, one is English, both are indie, but they were talking mostly about American indie kids. British indie kids at the time were such a woeful and dejected crew that they didn’t seem worth addressing.
fucking right
everyone needs a little dr.phil in there life…hahha just kidding…
well…i like a type of indie …twee pop…and i wear glasses but wat am i suppose to do about it??? scartch out my eyes i have incredibly bad eyesight?
and i have a weird hair cut…but when you live in l.a when its 113 degrees outside and the power goes out you would want short hair too…im just saying…and who actually wrote this and how old are they? 13-15…so immature to be sterotyping a whole group of people like that…sad, so very sad….go to http://www.homestarrunner.com and get some funny in your life and ..REAL PUNK ROCK IS DEAD!!!! theres no more anarchy out there thats wats real punk is about
indie=amazingg genre of music.
indie kid=kid who listens to indie.
thank-you.
who actually wrote this and how old are they? 13-15…so immature to be sterotyping a whole group of people like that…sad, so very sad
marvellous, there.
marvel comics….stop being so sarcastic steve …thats what i’ll call you sarcastic steve
faster than a speedy modem
stronger than three microsoft workers put together its…..
SARCASTIC STEVE!!!!!
unless you arent being sarcastic and i just take evrything in the wrong way i say i didnt say anything mean cause i just called you a super hero…please dont hurt be im just a really smart kid
hey bitch,
i’m from the uk and you have it all wrong mate, i dont know what indie is over there but heres its Pulp,Blur,Maximo Park,Kooks,Bloc,Party,We Are Scientists..if your referring to these bands you obviously do not know anything about the topic you are desperately trying to put across…as us indie kids mind our own business and do not get in your litle american grunge face you think you can rip the piss out of us……its really sad that you think you can sit there and criticize us and the music we listen to just because you havent got the balls and want to just join the club of indie haters.
your a wanker…but nice opinion
“British indie kids at the time were such a woeful and dejected crew that they didn’t seem worth addressing.”
OHHHH DICKHEEEAD!
AMERICA STARTED EMO! your the ones to blame!!!! and indie in the 90’s or britpop if youd looked a little bit more into your claim was the center of the universe…just because we enjoyed life down here and you guys sat and masturbated to nirvana on repeat for most of the 90’s we own AMERICA at music always have always FUCKIN will mate 60’s we owned you 70’s we owned you 80’s we owned you 90’s we owned you and now america decided it would bring a little thing called fuckin emo to england! well thanks a fuckin lot you fuckin idiots.
ruin music why dont you
Bloc and Party!
u realli need to get a life m8, instead of takin the piss out of indie kids (that happen to b VERY gd) get ya self a job that suites you maybe a sewer cleaner or sumit along those lines that way u wont affend any 1 u fukin low life!!
OI YOUR GETTING INDIE KIDS MIXED UP WITH EMOS IN SOME OF YOUR POINTS… 1) indie kids do NOT wear black rimmed glasses… emo DO!
2) indie kids are not all bis, emos are!
And P.s… Why I HATE YOU!
1) YOU COMMENT OF PEOPLE WHO HAVENT EVEN MET YOU FUCKING RETARD!
2) YOU HAVE A WEBSITE ON WHY YOU HATE INDIE KIDS… HELLO, I LIKE INDIE MUSIC .. SO THAT MAKES U AN INDIE KID..! YOU LOWLIFE PIECE OF SCUM…OFF MY CONVERSE!
have you met Tom or Maura? Does “you fucking retard” count as a “comment of people”. do you hate yourself? of course you do. you’re indie.
i think yu should get ur fuckin facts straight before u make urself look even worse. u dont have it right.
emo= (ex.) Where’s my mascara? and i’m a man. (or) i wear size one jeans and i have a penis. (or) hey do you want to come over so we can cut eachother’s wrists!?!? sounds like great fun!
like someone said before (and they’re one of the smart ones – a REAL indie) indie kids aren’t mainstream and dress different and in my opinion better than otyher people. they don’t do what everyone else in the world is doing and dont give a shit what other people think.
(plus they listen to the best music – all alt. and indie)
SUCK ON THAT !!!! (btw ALAN _above comment_ emo ppl hate themselves, not indie)
I had no idea there was such hostility between emos and indies.
i think it = v.v.recent (ie since around the time kogan declared emo a world-historical issue)
Maybe a little before that – of course we don’t know where these comments are coming from – UK? US? The impression I get is that emo has kind of overwhelmed ‘indie’ as a teen subculture in the US (though college-age kids would be indie-identified still), but in the UK both are fairly viable and emo more recent. On the other hand it’s interesting that there are no ’emos’ on this comment thread saying “oh yeah indie kids are horrible” (though there is one punk!).
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.