Keeping It Real

Some ones been giving indie a bad name and while I generally relish any kind of bile leveled at those fine protagonists of pap, casting their gangly, jangly shadow across an overpopulated musical landscape; lets not get bogged down in terminology, as indie is, for the most part defunct by the fact it’s ‘major’.
Howls of ‘mortgage indie’ berate those bands on a quest to sell out and cash-in , puking pops pick’n’mix cocktail all over the shop, two parts brit-pop, one part 80 ‘s drive time, a dash of 90’s Seattle and a lovin spoonful of sugar for the bitterest pill of cynicism. Nevermind.
Authenticity and the music industry have never been mutually exclusive, quite the opposite, but all that is a well trodden path in this column, everything is not as it seems and y’alls should know better. To have a passion for something does require a level of criticism, panning for musical gold, sifting crap from cream is all part of the fun and while some records are built like a PowerPoint presentation for the benefit of a bank balance, this fretting over it’s origin, form, credibility to find its actual worth, only distracts from whether the song is good or not.
As much as Baddona and Cowell dress it all up in lights, cameras and re-invention, engaging us in an all out assault on the senses to sell the songs, is all part of the same argument. We know more about an act than we do their music, spilling onto tabloid pages before a chord is struck, distorting the ‘voice’ and romancing us with a cinematic version of events - building a story to fit the market. In the same way, ‘keeping it real’ is an overrated angle, keeping it right is mostly forgotten.
Guitars have bloated the scene for several years, to the point it’s like the only way to make music, that rock’n’roll standard ad infinitum and in another throw of the postmodern dice mutate into nu-rave and artrock, becoming so angular it might slit its own throat. Maybe these voices of descent (‘landfill indie’ was also a good one) wanting something ‘real’ might be missing the point but blow a wind of change. I’ll hold out on a revolution for now but whatever the future holds, guitars or not, can we just have some more fucking cracking records please? Like mine, available in all good stores now (hmmm, might not get away with that).