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.
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HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA. indie people suck. bitches go listen to some bromheads jacket or something you bunch of POSERS.
[…] https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2001/01/indiekids/ […]
You don’t understand what indie is if you think that because we like indie clothing and we are trying to be unique that it contredicts itself because 90% of the time indie clothing is one off peices and 99% of other people don’t wear indie clothing so we are still unique against them, and then other indie people wear different indie clothing, indie is also a different style from indie to indie so it’s unique to be indie even if it’s the same another indie or different.
so true im into “indie” fashion and thats what made me and my friends friends becuase we liked eachothers clothes and now i relaize thye try soooooo hard to be different. theyre not different and their music!!!! God forbid their fav band Arcade Fire wins a grammy! Now everyone knows about arcade fire so now they have to find a new band no one has heard of to obsess over. Now they like Animal Collective. UGHHHHH! So self obsessed and full of themselves. I like some indie bands but I really like all music. All music and I don’t get mad if someone knows my bands. Yea and they read books that they find at old garage sales and have like circa 1970 covers. Perks of being a wallflower???? ASK ANY INDIE KID IF THEYVE READ IT (THEY HAVE) AND SAY YEA ITS SOOO GOOD ALL MY FRIENDS LIKED IT. THEYLL NEVER ADMIT THEY READ IT AGAIN. Id you look through an indie kids ipod you will not know any of the bands and youll wonder how they know these bands. You will ask and they will say “I dont know i just come across them” BS!!!! YOU GOT ITUNES SUGGESTIONS CUZ THERE IS NO OTHER WAY YOU COULD FIND OUT ABOUT ARCHITECTURE IN HELSINKI UNLESS YOU GOT ON ITUNES AND BOUGHT PETER BJORN AND JOHN WHICH YOU PROLLY DID. ALSO THEY LOOK ON PANDORA AND URBAN OUTFITTERS. YEA YOU GUYS ARE SOOO ORIGINAL!!!!!! UGH!!!! ALL INDIE KIDS ARE POSERS AND THATS THE TRUTH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Wow you have absolutely no idea what real indie actually is. First , its independent which means “indie” people have the guts to be unique unlike all of you other sods that say they are following a supposed trend or whatever. Second , if it became in fashion to wear a gstring over your jeans you would wear it because you are so blinded by society that you would only want to fit in with the rest of the squares in the world. Being indie isn’t a certain style , its being brave enough to show the world you can be yourself without being scared of your lower class judgment. So should we call you guys weirdass names because you listen to house music just like you chune “indie” people for listening to their own music ? I’m sure you will enjoy living your life far away from risks and maybe one day when your smart enough to realize you can’t get a good enough job because your just like the guy that came in for the interview before you then you should read back on these comments and realise what a fool you have made of yourself.
Yeah! I can’t wait to see what you indie-haters are doing in ten years OH WAIT HANG ON
I believe this article now defines the stereotypical ‘Hipster’. I have friends who are considered indie by most other people in my class, however that is just because they don’t follow the latest trends and don’t listen to Ke$ha, Justin Beiber etc. I think that mostly people who are different are nowadays automatically put into the ‘Indie’ category, and now it’s getting a little out of hand. If someone want’s to be different, they don’t have to buy records, wear too big glasses or live in coffee shops, they just need to have their own views and be unique.
Labels are for soup cans, people.
~Jess
Dear article,
Fuck you.
<3 an indie kid.
I cant believe some of these comments im reading. Fuck indie with their chinos and converse (stop ruining them), i bought converse because I liked them not because some kid from down the street told me to. Indie bands are sometimes tolerable, but cmon people, you cant honestly tell me that your non-conformity has got you anywhere. Just live life as yourself! And dont try to aspire to a stereotype, that just fucking sucks.
“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.”
^^^you are a complete idiot. They don’t do what everyone else in the world is doing?! By that you mean being a working class citizen like everyone else then yes, and maybe that’s why they dress like COMPLETE fools. No money. Oh but wait they have plenty of money from their mommies and daddies to go to “shows” so that can’t be the case. Oh wait maybe you’re talking about how artsy they are…..hahaha PLEASE. all you indie kids are the butt of the worlds jokes.
Lmfao, jeez you indie kids sure get defensive for none of this being true (which, it is completely on point, you all are just a separate set of drones following the sounds of terrible “music”, each other of course because indie kids need other indie kids around so they can make fun of everyone else together because they aren’t indie, and your horrible, tasteless, “i wanna dress like I lived in the thirties and fourties mixed with the eighties and nineties at the same time. Fucking dipshits.) I hope one day you all look back at photos of yourselves are feel really fucking stupid for how ridiculous you were and how stupidly you dressed just to not
fit in with society but to fit in with the multitudes of other indie kids in the world so you can all be individual together, and be exact replicas of each other. Fuck all you cry babies, go listen to some grateful dead and free your goddamn robotic mind. You all are fools.
I hope people snap out of this shit someday, useless stupid shit is what it is. What’s up with the indie kids acting like little hippies these days? Cool, you finally tried pot in college, now you’re wearing tie dye and headbands and hemp necklaces and pretending to like phish when you know nothing about them at all. Those are the indie kids I REALLY hate. Please stay away from real shows, concerts, festivals. We don’t need all of you tainting our shit!
I think Indie people and Hippie people had sex and created the Hipster…That’s the new fad. I dislike these hipster folk.
Well if people feel the need to hate, let them hate. I couldn’t care less.love everything about indie; the music, the people,the art and cloths. I always wear my cheap mondays rolled up, my hear is a curly mess and I listen to indie music. you can hate me all you want, like I said I couldn’t care less. So to all the hating MR.Joneses out there haha relax, take a smoke or something.
k SICK now all of you get a real life
&stop trolling all around and saying “OMG STOP HATIN ON ME IM A REAL INDIE KID~” cause its just someone’s opinion. i’m sure yall open your mouth at times too. and some of you not only to talk
You’re simply jealous so you have to hide behind a computer and bash on people.
I totally agree. Being a teenager who is just TRYING to express herself is so fucking difficult when everyone is listening the the modern crap they call ‘folk.’
Indigo girls are the Fucking best!! <– Thats an opinion. But it's not an opinion if you're only claiming it to be true because its in fashion. Get a life of your own people. Learn how to be free in yourself. and stop ruining music. (Please)
-Banya x
You’re talking about Hipsters not Indies (you probably know that by now anyway).
A lot of people getting Indies mixed up with Hipsters, they’re not the same thing. Here’s a few small details about the labels:
Hipsters are generally quite up themselves and love to talk about how “unmainstream” they are and rub it in people’s faces. Plus they’re the ones who generally like to wear the black glasses and stuff. They limit themselves by desperately trying to listen to types of music that nobody has heard of. Although they deny it they all fall into a very typical stereotype and all look the same. Hipsters hang with hipsters.
Indies on the other hand are not mainstream OR typical, they’re all generally quite nice people (depends of course), and they DO NOT rub things in people’s faces. They generally listen to all (or at least a large varying amount) of music genres, because of this a lot of the music they listen to just happens to be unheard of by “mainstream” folk. They DO NOT judge others for liking other things. Indies hang with everyone.
If society can’t even get our own labels right, we should just scrap them all together.
But besides all that – Good Article :)
You are one ignorant piece of shit.
Indie kids >>>>>>>>>> you
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I absolutely loved this and all the indie kids are now self conscious
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Hey, there’s a ton of meaningful indie music. However, most mainstream music is about getting drunk, getting high, or getting laid. There ARE indie songs about that stuff too, but the majority of indie music is meaningful, unlike mainstream music by freaks like Lady Gaga who can only sing about sex and drugs.
:p
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No need to mock the Fratellis they’re a brilliant band.
This article is about hipsters. If you think indie kids are anything like this, you don’t have a clue what an indie kid is. Stop being so ignorant, seriously.
Indie is independent… not just some fucking society group.. you don’t want to be like everybody else.. from day one you should’ve already knew you were different. I hate being labeled..
Posers are so ignorant.
Sounds like some people just need some love. Find the joys of going on hikes, of planting a garden or simply just reading any book. Be happy, and don’t be upset