Indie pop

Indie pop
Indie pop
Stylistic origins	New Wave, Punk rock, Post-punk, pop
Cultural origins	early 1980s, United Kingdom
Typical instruments	Guitar - Bass - Drums
Subgenres
	Twee pop; (complete list)
Regional scenes
	England - Scotland - Wales - Sweden - Ireland, USA, Australia
Other topics
	Timeline of alternative rock

Indie pop refers to indie music which is considered to be based on the conventions of pop music. The term is nebulous. Because indie rock is sometimes used to mean indie music as a whole, indie pop can be discussed as a sub-set of indie rock, but other times the terms are used to illustrate a pop-rock dichotomy within the indie music scene. The term is further blurred by disagreement over what qualifies as pop music. Pop is seen as being radio-friendly and disposable, two things that indie music generally eschews. Indie pop is thus the pop music that operates outside of the boundaries of conventional pop music. It is often lo-fi, or otherwise unusual.

History

Roots

Indie pop's sonic roots lie in pioneers like Jonathan Richman and the quieter songs of The Velvet Underground. The sweeter sounds of 1960s garage pop/rock, as well as mainstream 1960s artists like The Beatles, The Beach Boys and the early Syd Barrett-led Pink Floyd. 1960's girl groups also heavily influenced indiepop, both musically and stylistically, with The Shangri-Las or The Ronettes being the most obvious. The Ramones mixture of 60's melodies with a crudely played wall of sound guitar was also a key influence. The British punk-pop group Buzzcocks, adapted The Ramones' sound into a speedy jangle with high whining boy voice, elements that were to become keystones of the later indie pop sound.

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British indie pop

Indie pop can be traced back to the post-punk explosion in small photocopied fanzines, and small shop-based record labels, for example Glasgow's Postcard Records and London's Rough Trade Records. By the beginning of 1980s, there were dozens of labels in the United Kingdom. The publication in "Record Business" of the first weekly indie singles and album charts during the week ending January 19 1980 coincided with the growth of indie music in UK. The following year was the fifth anniversary of the UK independent record label movement and Rough Trade Records. To commemorate this, the British musical weekly New Musical Express released an era-defining compilation cassette called C81. This cassette featured a wide range of groups, reflecting the different approaches of the immediate post-punk era. Three Scottish groups on C81: Orange Juice, Aztec Camera and Josef K featured a sound that used jangly guitars mixed with scratchy white funk. It was this thread of post-punk that evenutally developed into indiepop, although along the way the funk element was dropped, replaced by the 60's pop and rock influences noted in the Roots section. These 60's groups had been targeted as the enemy by punk, but were now reclaimed as an influence.

Although never part of the indiepop scene, The Smiths (Rough Trade Records); songwriters Morrissey and Johnny Marr used guitar driven sound and lyrics with social statements on life in Thatcher Britain, covering topics from sexual ambiguity, loneliness and death to vegetarianism and vicars in tutus, and were a great influence on many groups. The debut album by The Jesus and Mary Chain, Psychocandy was also an influence, as can clearly be heard in groups such as the Shop Assistants.

In 1986, the British musical weekly New Musical Express released another compilation cassette, entitled C86, that attempted to promote the lighter pop sound of the UK independent music scene. This introduced a wider public to acts including The Pastels, The Wedding Present, The Soup Dragons, Primal Scream, and The Bodines. Significantly, the C86 compilation received critical attention in United States where an embryonic scene which merged the poppier sound of the Ramones, against the more rock sound of The Sex Pistols.

BBC Radio 1 DJs John Peel , Janice Long and David Jensen promoted the scene through their evening show playlists. The NME both championed and derided the scene, reflecting the highly polarised views of different writers. Their attack on Talulah Gosh was extreme enough to still be remembered today. Musical preferences changed rapidly with the rise of hip hop, acid house and rave, and several of the indiepop groups that continued changed style by the end of the 1980's. The prime example would be Primal Scream who were early exponents of indie dance. Latecomers to the indiepop scene, such as The Soup Dragons, quickly changed their style to indie dance after Primal Scream's success.

The Pink Label, 53rd & 3rd, and The Subway Organisation were just some of the labels putting out singles by important indiepop groups like The Shop Assistants, Razorcuts, The June Brides, The Flatmates and Talulah Gosh; the last-named can probably be considered the first of the C86 influenced groups, founding group of indiepop's second wave, "Twee pop".

Many of these groups prominently featured female members, still considered a notable thing at the time. Indie pop has always had a very strong streak of gender equity; perhaps its most prominent philosophical note has been the championing of anti-macho points of view, whether from women or from men refusing to buy into traditional rock'n'roll male aggression.

American indie pop

In the United States, a similar revolution in underground pop had been taking place in Olympia, Washington. Beat Happening, an indie band fronted by Calvin Johnson and Heather Lewis, who additionally started a record label called K Records. Their aesthetic was quite similar to their British cohorts, with hand-drawn photocopied sleeves and stripped-down instrumentation playing pure pop gems that were well out of step with the then-current hardcore punk scene. The first Beat Happening record, on K, was released in 1985. Other labels sprang up across the country, including Bus Stop (Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, from 1987); Picturebook (Barrington, Illinois, from 1987), Harriet (Cambridge, Massachusetts, from 1989) and Slumberland (Silver Spring, Maryland, from 1989, later California), bringing together the American sound of Beat Happening, which was a little rawer and more pared-down, with the British indie pop of Sarah and others, which was sometimes softer, more harmonious, and more twee. Important groups included The Springfields and Honeybunch -- both part of the vast and complicated Velvet Crush group that's been making "indie pop" singles since long before indie pop.

International reach

One striking feature of indie pop is its unusual international reach. In addition to the United Kingdom and the United States, there has been a significant school of bands since 1985 in New Zealand, recording for Flying Nun Records, most notably the trio of The Bats, The Chills, and The Clean. Instantly recognizable for their insistent jangle-guitar strums and sweet, high male choirboy voices, these bands were the model for much of what followed in other countries. Not just English-speaking countries, either; Germany, Sweden, Japan, Philippines, Greece, Spain, and Canada all have longstanding significant indie pop scenes. Australia has always been an important indie pop country, going back as far as The Go-Betweens, who, while considered pop and indie, were not really indie pop; up through the Sugargliders, who were; to The Lucksmiths today.

Fanzines

Two of the most significant fanzines of the day were Are You Scared To Get Happy?, written by Matt Haynes and Kvatch, written by Clare Wadd, both then living in Bristol, England. AYSTGH?, as was common then, featured an attached flexidisc, on the bedroom label Sha-La-La. Flexidiscs embodied the in-the-moment throwaway vision of perfect two-minute pop gems, even more so than did regular vinyl singles. When Are You Scared To Get Happy? stopped publishing in 1987, Matt and Clare joined forces, and Sha-La-La evolved into a real record label called Sarah Records. Many people now consider Sarah, which ended in 1995, to be the archetypical indie pop label. It is certainly hard to overstate Sarah's influence on the bands that followed, not just with the sound of the records but the graphical style of the record sleeves and the bitingly funny sleevenotes.

Growth

Since the early 1990s, indie pop has been growing in popularity. Elements of indie pop sound have broken through into the mainstream through bands like Belle & Sebastian and Camera Obscura. In 1985 or 1995, it was impossible to hear an indie pop record on any kind of commercial radio station, and even most college and alternative radio stations abhorred the soft sounds of "Twee pop," preferring aggressive testosterone-charged grunge and punk sounds. By 2005, however, it was quite common. Some veteran bands formerly noted for a sound typical of indie rock, such as Yo La Tengo (and the Flaming Lips, although they record for a major label) have moved increasingly to an indie pop approach in recent years.

Some indie pop artists

Main article: List of indie pop artists

Indie pop labels (currently active)

External links