2010s: Indie Rock

Thanks! Yeah, I like the idea of 2019 as a whole being retrospective of the decade as well. I'm hoping that these series of threads (which will be created over the next 12 months) will cover most (or all) of the major fads/trends of the 2010s. If there's something which you would like to create a retrospective thread about, please feel free to create it.

I was referring to the 2010s. I've since edited that out of my post, because it made the sentence sound cluncky and I realised that it didn't make much sense anyway, lol. 

I've got to be honest, I have never really had much of an interest in "Pompeii". It's not a bad song as such, but I tend to think that it's somewhat overrated and the constant radio airplay that it received back in 2014 has ruined the song for me.

I Completely forgot about this! I'm not sure if too many people here would be familiar with it (Telso , you might remember it? ), because it didn't chart on the Billboard Hot 100 and it was a complete flop in the UK.

Anyway, with that being said, "Mountain Sound" would also have to be one of my favourite indie-pop songs of the 2010s. I really like the ambient feel to this song and the chorus is great as well. "Little Talks" was the bigger hit, but "Mountain Sound" also received a decent amount of airplay and this is personally my favourite out of the two Of Monsters And Men tracks that charted here.

I've kind of always been really resistant to indie rock because coming from a progressive intellectual background, such an overwhelming chunk of my peers listened to this type of music and embraced its aesthetic above all else. Stuff from the 2000s and 2010s is a more lot grating to me, though, than earlier stuff like The Smiths, Pulp, Blur, or Pixies, who had real tunes and sounded genuinely visceral on their works.

Modern indie, on the other hand, is usually a combination of a meh mindset, that abhorrent fake accent (Brett Dennen and Passenger are the quintessential examples that come to mind, but several other singers, male and female, also sing like that), snobbery towards acoustic guitars (though most acts have gotten increasingly electronic in the past few years), and emphasis on dreary, melodramatic moods as opposed to engaging melodies, compositions, and hooks. The stuff people like in modern indie is stuff that either has only residual value to me or which runs totally counter to my own taste.

It would be one thing, however, if indie rock simply existed as a type of music that simply wasn't my own cup of tea, but the entire scene became overbearing to me due to how unbelievably pretentious, close-minded, and "anti-corporate" indie rock fans were, and they were completely ubiquitous all through my college years. They're the same type of people who consider the type of bubble gummy pop I love to be shallow, soulless, commercial dreck for the unenlightened, and for a really long time, I felt so vulnerable to that notion that it became so much harder for me to embrace my own aesthetic. It felt like the indie scene and the music associated with it was the absolute, prevailing definition of "individuality" everywhere I turned, while I was completely left aside, feeling like a clueless idiot who resonated with nobody. It contributed so heavily to my own misery for such a long time and I am so glad I am done caring and instead feel confident in my ability to articulate why I genuinely love the type of music others think is just kitsch.

In hindsight, I firmly believe the more snobbish wing of the indie rock scene were the true bullies in my life, not your generic macho jocks or mean girls. The latter simply focus on and value different things, and don't try to be anything they're not. The indie people, though, honestly threatened my self-worth and entire taste in things. They're the ones who made me feel like an outsider who was too clueless to understand anything about the world.

In retrospect, I think the snobbish and entitled attitude that manifested through the 2010s indie rock scene was inevitable really and while I don't support it by any means, I can understand how that mindset began to form in the first place. There were really several factors, both direct and indirect, that essentially created the perfect storm for indie-rock to serve as a platform for the disillusioned.

I'd say that one huge contributing factor was the rise in social media and smartphone technology. The flashy, image-obsessed nature of social media, where getting hundreds of likes on a selfie is often considered to be more important than staying true to yourself, is obviously going to go against the core values that a lot of people stand for. The breakthrough of smartphones around 2010 only proliferated that mentality, which arguably, is partially the reason why indie-rock responded in the manner that it did and became a huge cultural force in the US around that same time. It also didn't help matters that the music industry itself became even more heavily flamboyant and commercialised once electropop started to rule supreme. With the decline and then eventual absence of rock, the music landscape became squarely focused on corporate, palatable music that conveyed listeners to "raise your glass" and "party in the U.S.A" rather than to fight social/political causes. Pop and hip-hop had both become too image-driven by that point to salvage what was left.

When you take those factors into account, it's really no surprise that something as minimalist as indie-rock became a home for people who felt extremely alienated from the world around them. You had a large proportion of people in society who didn't want to heavily engage in something as "flash-in-the-pan" as social media, nor listen to "corporate" genres such as EDM and Trap music. I'll be honest, I can understand why many people who followed the indie-rock movement have the viewpoints that they do. I'm not saying that I agree with their stance on rejecting other people's tastes in music, however as someone who feels alienated from current pop culture myself, I can empathize with how many of them generally feel about the mainstream.

I'm sorry to hear about the experiences you went through in college. I think it's interesting to read about how you went through that ordeal, because honestly, I can't say that I ever witnessed or experienced anything like that during my time in high school. There weren't any clicques based on music preferences. Then again, I guess there is more freedom of expression in college/university than what there is in high school. 

The indie crowd thinks they’re the “real” people just because there’s lots of artficiality associated with the flashier, party-oriented dance-pop, but in a huge sense they’re actually worse because they’re so much more hypocritical about their so-called progressiveness when they shut out people like me just because of their snobbish taste in aesthetics and condescending view of enlightenmnent.

I mean, pretty much everything these days is affected by collectivism, so genuine diversity is tougher to really notice, but at least the jocks and pretties aren’t culturally paraded as models of realism, as the hipsters incessantly were. I’ve always cared much more about being myself than being super popular, so the individuality stereotype that favours indie rock aesthetics over late ‘90s/early 2000s melodious dance pop aesthetics was way more predatory to my adolescent mind than not having a large quantity of friends ever was.

I remember you telling me about this on a stream we did a few months about how the hipster community at your college made you feel alienated. As someone who comes from the hood I know once you start doing something that's outside the norm you sorta lose your black card. I didn't have as bad as you did but plenty of people in my life told me I was a weirdo or a square for not doing drugs or not being promiscuous. I have empathy for you because there were times where I felt like I didn't fit in with the people around me. Thankfully people like @x2m, mqg, Spyrokev and Millenum are into the stuff I'm into and are also Black.