Last year, the NME placed Vampire Weekend on its cover and declared that we were living in a time of renewed greatness in American music. Not long after, a blogger at The Guardian made essentially the same claim. Weirdly, the conventional wisdom for those of us on this side of the Atlantic was just the opposite, the line being that 2008 was a relatively ho-hum time for American indie rock. My suggestion for UK indie: It's not us, it's you. In the past few years, it's too few art school bands, too few mavericks, and too few iconoclasts; it's far too many groups that amount to a haircut, a worn copy of Is This It?, and a provincial accent. Above all, it's far too many bands that confuse ambition with chart placements instead of creativity.No really, Pitchfork it is you. And here's the proof in your final paragraph:
Here in America, we spent a lot of 2008, and now early 2009, celebrating a noise-pop underground that, in places, takes weak pop songs and slathers them with fuzz and reverb under the pretense of art. In this environment, it's great to see a band like Glasvegas go for it, take their own noise-pop impulses and shoot for the rafters. And yet, not only do they do it on almost every song, in almost the exact same way, but they seem to do just the opposite of the American brethren-- start with the fuzz and reverb, with quality noise-pop, then tack on layer after layer of gloss until their songs are transformed into modern rock. In their rush to be the UK's most important band, they seem to have ignored restraint, charisma, and charm-- the qualities that made them Next Big Thing candidates in the first place.You can't have it both ways. You're either into the "noise-pop underground" or you're admiring of bands that exhibit "restraint, charisma, and charm." Show me where you have that combination in the 2008 best-of and I'll gladly give it a listen. If 2008 was such a ho-hum year (and believe me it was), why should I be bothered with your celebration of fuzz and reverb just because it has an American accent? Instead what you have is your own set of provincialisms, and anyone who is not from Portland or Brooklyn is not likely to get a fair shake. Talk about the pot and the kettle, what is American indie music but a pair of engineer specks and a worn out copy of Daydream Nation?
The truth is that indie music (as portrayed by Pitchfork and its followers) has lost the plot. It's become a music that doesn't rock, you can't dance to it, it's too stupid to be meaningful, too quiet and self absorbed to be fun. It's essentially devoid of any of those pleasures that might have gotten you into music in the first place. The records themselves are just signifiers for your blog, badges for your Facebook page. You're the right sort of white person. Congratulations and big deal. Whether anyone would actually want to listen to the stuff is beside the point.
