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"How Selling Out Saved Indie Rock"
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Hunter T Wolfe
Hunter T Wolfe
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Re: "How Selling Out Saved Indie Rock"
Nov 18, 2013, 16:12
Moon Cat wrote:
Kid Calamity wrote:


We need a new punk.


Well, the old ones were flogging butter and car insurance last time I looked.

I don't think you'd realistically get a new 'punk' or any similar such sense of revolution in popular music any more, certainly not with such a distinctive impact. I guess acid-house and the subsequent take-off of dance culture and its various sub=genres was the last time such a thing happened in the UK, being a confluence of the music, an aesthetic, a community and so on. And, of course, the accompanying drugs!



Agreed, unfortunately. Britpop is generally regarded as the moment that indie music went wrong, but there was an idealism to that moment as well as naked careerism; a sense that to make a difference you had to compete with pop music and get in the charts, rather than just being 30 people moshing to Silverfish down at the Bull and Gate.

So at the time it was tremendously exciting to see Pulp doing Common People on Top of the Pops, or the Manic Street Preachers getting to number one with If You Tolerate This, Then Your Children Will Be Next. But they're about the last examples I can think of where it felt like 'our' bands were breaking through into 'their' turf and saying something critical and important about class and society and stuff. All that is what has always excited me about pop music almost as much as the actual music.

A few years earlier the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays on top of the pops felt important too- those bands were implicitly political and subversive, through their attitude, their clothes, their drugs as much as their tunes.

Also, the Roses, the Mondays, Jarvis, the Manics etc were all fired up by punk; they were still in some way continuing the punk ethos. Even Blur and Oasis, too, to an extent. It was the bands that grew up listening to them that really seemed to break the chain. When Franz Ferdinand, the Libertines, the Kaiser Chiefs etc came along they arguably had some good songs, but their success meant nothing. They were devoid of sub-cultural content or context.

And no Top of the Pops or anything like that anymore now either. You don't watch Later with Jools with your dad complaining that you can't tell the boys from the girls anymore, do you?
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