![]() And in many parts of America, indie artists like Hoboken distortionists Yo La Tengo or grumpy Bob Mould (who’d once helmed Hüsker Dü) were selling out clubs and attracting mainstream audiences to their shows at increasingly large venues. The music industry, flush with cash as consumers replaced their vinyl with expensive CDs, went looking for the next “edgy” band or tattooed troubadour. Kurt Cobain’s 1994 suicide, tragic as it was for fans and Gen X-ers in general, didn’t cause the musical establishment to give up on indie rock the search was still on for the Next Nirvana, and money continued to flow. Elliott Smith would move from Kill Rock Stars to DreamWorks. Could one of these be the New Nirvana? A scruffy member of the anti-folk crowd who called himself Beck went from playing country-folk tunes on LA buses and busking on New York’s Lower East Side to recording for the David Geffen Company (known in its day as DGC) and Interscope, and subsequently into Wal-Marts across America around the time of Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville, boutique indie Matador - who would release work by Pavement, Guided by Voices, and Cat Power - began a distribution deal with the mighty Atlantic Records. What followed was a bidding frenzy in which big corporations began courting cult bands on tiny labels in increasingly remote music scenes. ![]() The simultaneous emergence of R.E.M., a longtime alt-rock favorite, with the single “Losing My Religion” and its Out of Time LP, didn’t hurt indie’s momentum, either. “We won,” West Coast rock critic Gina Arnold wrote when Nevermind, driven by the single “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” knocked Michael Jackson’s Dangerous off the top of Billboard’s album chart: A scrappy, neurotic punk band from Nowheresville (the indie ethos often pits isolated American college towns or British industrial cities against huge finance-driven capitals) had toppled a corporate-rock warhorse considered to be way past his prime. The US side of the story is forcefully told in Michael Azerrad’s book Our Band Could Be Your Life Britain's followed similar contours, with indie ideology locking in early and fiercely, as sales charts tracked what was selling at independent record stores.īut just as the ’60s really began with the emergence of the Beatles, the indie ’90s effectively started a few months after the September 1991 release of Nirvana’s second record. In my book Culture Crash, I date the birth of indie at 1982, when the Smiths began recording and R.E.M. But the movement - whether called alternative rock, modern rock, college radio, or whatever - was now grounded. Some of them (Camper Van Beethoven, Pixies) sounded like the indie that would come after some of them (Black Flag) didn’t. Soon after punk hit, intense, speed-driven hardcore bands formed in California and New York and DC, and their fans built an infrastructure - a coast-to-coast network of clubs, mimeographed fanzines, college radio stations, record shops, and small record labels that would make indie possible. (And the term, new to most Americans back then, is still more commonly used in the UK, where it is more explicitly tied to independent record labels.) But indie does have a real, verifiable history. Indie, of course, was not born in the 1990s. Ascending Peak Indie: the birth of a heyday Kurt Cobain performs with Nirvana at the 1992 MTV Video Music Awards. For a series of reasons that would have been hard to discern at the time, 1997 stands as both Peak Indie and the beginning of the end for the style’s heyday. To those who lived through the period, it seemed like it would last forever.īut youth, like cultural history, rarely signals when it is about to disappear. “THAT’S why 1997 was the best year for music,” girlfriend says to boyfriend while she grabs what is probably a soy latte.Īnd it really is stunning to see what a single 12-month period produced: Sleater-Kinney’s Dig Me Out, Built to Spill’s Perfect From Now On, Pavement’s Brighten the Corners, Spiritualized’s Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space, and numerous others. ![]() Two still-young music lovers stand in a kitchen, Mercury Rev poster on the wall, recalling some of the great albums that dropped that year. But to many enthusiasts of indie rock, 1997, two decades ago exactly, established a kind of high-water mark.Ī web comic called Questionable Content - set in the hipsterville of Northampton, Massachusetts - captured the feeling unambiguously. Given the way audiences and tastes have shifted since, there will probably never again be a musical year as iconic - recognizable to everyone for a handful of undeniable reference points - as the Summer of Love (1967) or the year punk broke (1977). ![]()
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