What Defines the Indie Genre?

It's the first Friday of  a four day long weekend. The sweet tunes of Metric are playing in my ears, with Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Stars, Broken Social Scene, Holy Fuck, The Weakerthans to follow. It's been a relatively nice day compared to the relatively freezing last few days, but it's starting to get chilly, and I long for the coat that's buried under a series of backpacks in the trunk of the four-by-four I'm writing this in.

Myself, my cousin, and my two younger siblings are about an hour into a 15 hour drive to the heart of French Canada, Quebec City. After getting from Brantford to the Hamilton airport, we had to turn around for arbitrary reasons, only to find out right when we got back into town that those arbitrary reasons had quickly become irrelevant.

As the lovely voice of Emily Haines on "Twilight Galaxy" soothe the slight frustrations I've been feeling (while everybody else chills out to Pussycat Dolls), I have a lot of time to reflect on the genre that I've made myself infatuated with over the past couple of years: indie. 

For a long time, when people thought indie, they thought soley this: a musician or band not tied to a record label. In other words, all it meant was: independent.

With the rock revolution of the early 2000's brought about by The Strokes, the meaning of the word has changed significantly. Sure, they are now many artists who don't toil under the commands of record execs, and technically they're still independent, but the style of indie rock and indie pop has evolved enough to become not only its own genre, but its own culture. As with every culture, it has its extremists. Indie kids their extremists as: hipsters. 

I love to hate the goddamn hipsters. Jeph Jacques, writer of the infamous online comic Questionable Content came up with a delightful tidbit about hipsters he calls, "The Theory of Hipster Relativity". The theory states (and this is quite true), that because hipsters believe that the quality of a musician is dependent on how obscure they are to the public, theoretically, the best band in the world would be the one that absolutely no one has heard of. Therefore, if no one has heard of them, they don't exist.

Hipsters suck, plain and simple. Indie cred, by association, is ludicrous. They think it makes them sound smarter, just because they can name a band that make chart-lurkers scratch their heads in confusion? Hedley? Hell no, I listen to Dead Child Star. Nickelback? Please, Sufan Stevens is where its at!

Hipsters are what define the indie subculture. As such, all indie kids are associated with hipsters. This is not a fair comparison. Why should anyone's musical tastes be based upon the credibility of the band's obscurity? They are ruining our subculture, one chart-bottoming "sell-out" at a time.

Just so you know, the new album from Metric, Fantasies, came out this past Tuesday. GO BUY IT!!! I don't care how shameless I'm being in my promotion of this band, they're awesome. Natch.