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The Guardian - AU
The Guardian - AU
Entertainment
Elle Hunt

Fans and Franz Ferdinand line up to confess all in an #indieamnesty

Alex Kapranos of Franz Ferdinand with ice-cream (not duffle coat).
Alex Kapranos of Franz Ferdinand with ice-cream (duffle coat not pictured). Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian

It’s hard to believe there was once a time when an Oasis CD, a Decemberists T-shirt, or a Weezer lunchbox singled someone out as being at the cutting edge of music.

But in this post-poptimism epoch, guitar bands have been relegated to the sidelines. The question “Oasis or Blur?” raises no more than a one-shoulder shrug; Q magazine’s one-time “biggest band in the world” has to call in women and ethnic minorities to seem relevant at the Super Bowl.

Q has even given up on trying to sell people on Razorlight (though it is still being published – Kurt Cobain’s on the most recent cover).

It leaves indie and alternative fans – reformed or otherwise – in an awkward position, their favourites not contemporary, not yet ironic.

This was highlighted on Twitter when #indieamnesty started trending, a safe space in which to own up to (hypothetically) counting down until that Foo Fighters double-disc came out.

The Franz Ferdinand frontman Alex Kapranos had his own confession to make:

... which was fact-checked by a fan.

The hashtag was kicked off by this tweet on Wednesday night.

It trended well into Thursday as people reminisced – or remembered with regret – about a time when every band’s name started with “The”, and songs made without “real instruments” were widely understood to not be “real music”.

Slate granted participants absolution in its assessment of the hashtag (“most of these confessions are things we should not need amnesty for”). But, it added, “Read them all together and they add up to a kind of loss of faith in the whole indie project.”

The BBC Radio 1 DJ Phil Taggart took the opportunity to get a couple of things off his chest:

Nick Grimshaw’s contribution was less of a confession than a humblebrag:

If there’s one person you’d expect to walk the walk, it would be the deputy news editor at Pitchfork:

But no word on whether Pitchfork’s director of editorial operations is still employed after the following confession:

You can dig into the rest of the tweets – and share your own; go on, it’s cathartic – at #indieamnesty.

  • This story was amended on 8 April 2016 to correct the statement that Alex Kapranos is the “former” frontman of Franz Ferdinand. He still is.
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