Curiosa definición que da Ian Watson sobre lo que significa la palabra indie. Al parecer Word Magazine en su número de Septiembre realizó un artículo sobre el indie y sacaron "The Kids at the club" y al propio Watson, que contestó lo siguiente:
Eso si, parece claro que en el mainstream el "indie" es sinónimo de peinados a lo Pete Doherty y chicas Vogue...
Andrew Collins de Word Magazine asked:
I'm currently writing a piece for Word about the death of Indie. (The word indie, as opposed to the concept.) Your record arrived just as I was launching into writing it, and it fits in. Clearly, the concept as it once was is not dead, as your club nights prove, but there is, I'm sure you'll admit, a degree of nostalgia about it all, for a better time, when indie meant independent and not a haircut in Toni & Guy, or VH2, or Razorlight and Keane. So I ask you this question, and I may quote you, if you don't mind: WAS DOES INDIE MEAN TO YOU?
And I replied:
It seems to me that the word indie is just going through what happened to the word metal. In the seventies, back when metal was invented, you just needed one word to cover your love for hairy, loud music - you liked Sabbath, Deep Purple, etc, etc, you liked metal. Simple. But as metal got more sophisticated, it started to break off into factions and so a whole load of sub genres were needed - speed metal, thrash meal, doom metal, black metal, and hair metal, for the more commercial wing.
If we accept that indie was created in the eighties, then the word's gone through a similar journey. When you talked about the Mary Chain, House Of Love, Primitives, etc, etc, you just needed one word - it was indie. But as indie's developed, it's also fractured - indie pop (which became indiepop), shoegazing, Britpop, indie rock (college rock like Pavement etc etc), post rock, and now, in a direct parallel to metal in the eighties, there's haircut indie - which is the modern brand, as championed by NME and often sponsored with no little irony by Shockwaves.
Indie as a word was always tied to the means of production and a set of DIY, punk values, so it's always suggested a sense of authenticity - this was music that didn't care about marketing or focus groups or street teams. It was just creativity. But haircut indie is all marketing, all the time, it seems. In the samw way that grunge went from being a genuine attempt to find an intelligent middle ground between punk and metal to being a catwalk term for looking a bit scruffy, then indie's gone from being an often middle class attempt to find an intelligent middle ground between pure pop and post punk to being a catwalk term for looking a bit scruffy. In both cases, as soon as the term went mainstream, it became meaningless.
I still use the word indie, but just as a primer. It essentially now means "non-aggressive guitar music". But really indie on its own is a useless word - it needs a prefix or a sense of context. For me, indiepop is now synonymous with what indie used to mean - that sense of DIY values, of wanting to exist outside of the mainstream, of having ideals and often a manifesto, a world of fanzines and seven inch singles and fan-based club nights, defiantly and gloriously insular, and thriving "without your permission", as Huggy Bear once put it. But indie itself is just a pointer. It's the pizza base of musical genres - it needs a topping, be it the sweetness of indie pop, the studied cool of indie rock, the classical ambition of post rock or whatever. If you think of a band that's just indie in this day and age - Snow Patrol for example - you've just got the pizza base. Pleasant enough but a bit doughy.
If you want the real definition of what the word indie means in 2006, though, don't go to the NME or Pitchfork or even the HDIF messageboard - take a look at a recent issue of Vogue. In it Mario Testino did a photo story on the bright young things of London, who were invariably skinny teenagers pretending to be Pete Doherty (which leads me to think that there's another sub genre happening right now - trustfund indie - but that's another story). They were all of a post-Libertines type - they hung out at Nambucca and White Heat, they were into The Holloways and The Paddingtons, they were slumming it for all they were worth (a small fortune, obviously). And right in the middle of one of the groups was a girl with the classic indie look - flick hair, I think she had a stripy t on (very much back in fashion), all of 14, had the look down perfectly. Her name? Indie. Which sums it all up really. When there's a girl calling herself indie in the latest issue of Vogue, you know that the word is all but over.
