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ADA President Andy Allen:
Indie music has entered the mainstream. Hollywood and Madison Avenue are increasingly using tracks from indie artists in their projects, and you hear indie artists regularly in TV shows. This is NEXT features the best music from the indie community.
Let's qualify “best” here. This is the indie mixtape du jour, the heavy-hitters all bundled up into one hook-addled time bomb with an expiration date of 2008 or so, when any number of these current blog darlings will be crapped upon by the very same sites that crowned them. Or will they? It's arguably true that some music blogs are losing their edge as their gradually widening allegiance to bands they've trumpeted and obsessed over in the past get older and keep pumping out material, so maybe this comp does herald the indie gold of our particular era: these bands might be said to form the bedrock of blogospheric indie rock. But enough meta; let's try another angle.
Indie has entered the mainstream, they say, so it's time for its first crack into the territory usually reserved for halter-topped teens sighing about sexy backs and their pimply boyfriends who'd throw d's had they any. Spoon and Interpol both smashed into the top 40 with their new albums, so there's no question that there's a place for quirky skinny-pants wearing music geeks at the cool kid's lunch table these days. It's an exciting breakthrough for 15-year olds who suck at basketball.
On the other hand, is this all that new? Um, Nirvana? “Indie” rock supposedly toppled glitzy Billboard fodder 15 years ago with grunge, right? So what happened in between? The Goo Goo Dolls and Creed, I guess. Media-proclaimed movements come and go, and “indie” is no exception. It's our nostalgic idea of the early 90s and 80s–Sonic Youth and J. Mascis and Pavement–that lets us turn “indie” into a movement and a philosophy currently as ingrained in rock history as punk.
So what's the big deal about This Is NEXT? What's it stating about our current “indie” climate? That these “indie” bands are a relatively disparate bunch of sounds and genres? That I can put “indie” in quotes? Yeah, that's cool- it means the term isn't really about the aesthetics of the music it describes. So what? So “indie” means outside the music-industrial complex? Not really, if indies are doing just as well and often better than majors at their own game.
Generally, the thing that's different about these bands than “mainstream” stars is who's touting them. Spoon blew up after a movie, true, but it's largely the years of e-support that carried them to Stranger Than Fiction and will sustain them through one-hit wonderdom.
Don't get me wrong, this is great for music. With so many blogs out there, it's easier for weirder stuff to slip into the mix (Deerhoof?!), and as such, both the quantity and quality of music has increased and hopefully will continue to do so. The only question is whether the commercialization of music will keep creeping deeper into the crevices of independent music-making, inevitably keeping pace with the spreading blogosphere.
VICE has made many admirable inclusions in this compilation (alongside indie pop tracks that will presumably be the comp's selling points), including Deerhoof and Sonic Youth (whose “Do You Believe In Rapture?” is notably one of their most accessible singles to date). You be the judge.
TRACK LIST
01 Bloc Party – The Prayer
02 Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Cheated Hearts
03 Sonic Youth – Do You Believe In Rapture?
04 The Shins – Phantom Limb
05 Spoon – The Underdog
06 Bright Eyes – Four Winds
07 Cat Power – Lived In Bars
08 Neko Case – Hold On, Hold On
09 Of Montreal – Heimdalsgate Like A Promethean Curse
10 Deerhoof – The Perfect Me
11 The Hold Steady – Chips Ahoy!
12 Cold War Kids – Hang Me Up To Dry
13 Ted Leo & The Pharmacists – Colleen
14 M. Ward – Chinese Translation
15 Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! – Satan Said Dance
