Stuck indie middle ... Franz Ferdinand
When is indie genuine indie, when is faux-indie indie, and when is genuine indie not indie? It's a paradox that has been vexing me since The Cribs indicated that "corporate indie" is a bigger threat to the planet than climate change.
Maybe I shouldn't get so hung up about compartmentalisation, but I'm sorting out my CDs. Should Primal Scream and Teenage Fanclub be filed under indie, or will I need to put their later Sony output in the corporate indie section? What should I do with Fugazi, as they're now considered godfathers of emo, rather than the US indie titans they once were regarded as? And as for the early Sinitta and Kylie albums, officially they are indie, but...
However, it's the more recent entrants to the collection that are causing the most havoc - being signed to Domino makes Franz Ferdinand and Arctic Monkeys indie, but they seem too major league. And now Rough Trade's cash-from-chaos-cow Babyshambles are tied to EMI, the situation has become nonsensical.
The confusion now is that almost every emerging band since the Strokes has been filed under indie, whether or not they're on a major label, independently minded, or creatively self-controlling. They might have lifted their musical approach and image from the Fall, Joy Division and Smiths indie textbooks, but the unpopular music of yore is the mainstream pop of today. And The Killers must shoulder some of the blame. Once they were a minority, but now the stereotypical indie kid with skinny-everything attire must have far overtaken self-harming emo-kids in numbers, especially if you include the neon-indie, nu-rave followers as part of the indie congregation.
Louis Barfe's whistlestop history of the recording industry, Where Have All The Good Times Gone?, says the first independent labels sprang up between 1914 and 1916 and were either bought up by the big three - Victor, Columbia and Edison-Bell - or destroyed by the Depression in the late-1920s. The labels, such as OKeh, Paramount and Gennett, typically put out jazz, blues and "race records", all the stuff we value today - except perhaps for one Gennett signing, the Ku Klux Klan - but was spilling out from the margins. It was British indie labels such as Folkways, Oriole and Melodisc that introduced Leadbelly, blues, Jamaican pre-ska, and world music to Britain in the 1940s and 50s. And then punk pointed the way for independents from 1977 onwards.
Indie was really only a clearly identifiable cultural enclave from about 1984 to 1988. It either included everything in the indie charts, everything on the NME's C86 tape compilation, or everything John Peel played. Then acid house came along and muddied the waters, fusing the indie ghetto with the ravers. The combination of the Stock, Aitken & Waterman PWL pop polluting the indie charts (by virtue of it being an independent label); grunge, which began on Seattle's Sub Pop but switched to Geffen; the everyman notion of Britpop and Creation selling out to Sony in 1992 helped dismantle the indie dream.
With major labels setting up subsidiaries that looked like indies, such as Virgin's V2, and indies selling out to the majors but keeping their cherished identities, the boundaries were further blurred.
The claim of full independence, even during the golden era, was always tainted with a reliance on big-corporation printers, pressing plants, duplicators, manufacturers and, increasingly, on major distributors. And while the MP3, MySpace and internet route starts off as an indie kind of idea, any measure of success results in a major-label acquisition, while the artist struggles to hang on that 'indie' credibility. And, above all, now John Peel's gone, we don't really have a compass.
So, I ask as my CDs lie spewed in disorganised piles on the floor, how else can we categorise the massive array of new and new-ish bands that are known as indie? And the answer cannot, must not, be alt-rock.
