Ooh! This looks like fun. Hating indie kids? Blimey.

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1) They like indie music. Obviously.

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2) Their regulation thick-frame black glasses. No more breakable item of nosewear has ever been invented: on slow afternoons I could happily cruise

Define indie music. Can you? I can't. I mean, all I know, is what I like is plopped into the genre of indie. But technically speaking, Britney Spears (bless 'er little PVC catsuit) is also indie. Well, shes signed to an independant label. So are Backstreet Boys. And I think Jive Bunny was as well. And Sir Cliff Richard. I don't particularly like these bands/artists. Although I appreciate that some people do. the streets for hours walking up to indie kids,lifting these ridiculous excuses for spectacles from their filthy-pored noses and breaking them at the bridge. How the indie kid would howl! Perhaps they would threaten to "kick my ass". Needless to say all indie kids have adequate eyesight: any slight impairment of vision is due entirely to their regime of perpetual masturbation. I have glasses. They aren't particularly thick, but you know, thick enough I guess. They are dark blue as well, rather than black. I don't have adequate eyesight- I am long sighted. So I can see you coming a mile off, but it gets fuzzy when I read. My choice for them was simply cos they made me look gooood. Without make-up. And with the alternative choice of those thin wiry frames, or those frames free ones where the lens sort of sit there in the middle of your face.. hmm. My nose is not covered in blocked pores. I have clear gorgeous skin. If you broke them, I wouldn't howl. I'd probably reclaim on insurance. Besides which, you over estimate indie kids. They wouldn't threaten to kick your ass. They would grab you and give you a chinese burn. And whats wrong with masturbating? 'course we do it. When we do it, we do it good. (I might be speaking for myself here though.)

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3) Indie kids are at it like rabbits. Or want to be. Scratch any 'community' or 'scene' of indie kids and you will find a seething cauldron of sexual frustration and backstabbing. Most indie kids are vile to look upon: I think this because I am enslaved by societal standards of beauty.

At it like rabbits? Yes. Ugly? No, both me and my boyfriend are the most gorgeous creatures to behold. We're well fit. ;) We wouldn't be shagging each other if we weren't such a pair of totally sexy beasts.

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4) Societal standards of anything are bad, pretty much. Unless it gets you a shag. Or earns you - or more likely your parents - the vast amount of money needed to get through college on some no-mark computer games degree AND buy a billion useless identical records.

I'm lost here. Wish I had a billion records. And what is societal?? Plus, I'm not doing a computer games degree. As my brother will happily tell you, its a Mickey Mouse course.

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5) On the rare occasions when an indie kid does get it on it at least distracts them from listening to indie music. Or making it. All indie kids are in indie bands.

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7) All indie kids are unique. They are however looking for other indie kids who are unique in exactly

no, I'm not in an indie band. How about listening to indie music while you're at it like rabbits? you forgot that. Singles are good if its a quickie, a nice long album for well, a long one. If you catch my drift. 6) Indie is short for independent, because indie kids are not mainstream. No sir. They are individuals. A quick look at an indie kid website will reassure you of that. Define mainstream. Nice little quote here from somewhere or other in Norway "We are all born originals, but die as copies." the same way as them - cool, huh? Yup, I am unique. I agree. 8) Among the unique things about indie kids are their haircuts. The square mainstream observer might mistake the uniform dyed bobs and crops of indieland as the sinister hairstyles of a clone army hell-bent on taking over teenage america and making it listen to At The Drive-In. But such an observer would be a fool. There are crucial differences in the haircuts. Some are, like, really expensive. I dye my hair cos it looks shinier. Its a bob cos its growing out of its previous cut- psychopathic day-release girl. The hairdresser said it was funky.

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9) Some records are really expensive, too. You must really love the music to spend $200 on eBay on a one-sided seven-inch, right? It shows your dedication to music is for real and unique, like your taste.

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10) Indie fashions are individual and unique too, and are marked by the indie kid's strong sense of irony. For example, a lot of indie kids like wearing overalls and workshirts as worn by real live working class

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15) All their records sound the same, due to influence inbreeding. The gene pool of influences on indie rock has been shrinking steadily since 1977,

If I can get anything cheap, I do. If I can't, I don't bother. Or I copy it from somewhere. What is eBay? people. As the indie kid finishes a two-hour shift at Border's they feel solidarity with their working-class brothers and sisters in the bakeries and pizza delivery companies all across the nation. You reckon? I like H+M to be honest. I have never worked in Borders. 11) They don't feel solidarity with the suits working in offices, though. Those people are a plastic fake herd of manufactured, soulless brainwashed lemming robot drone sheep enslaved to mass culture pap. (This is true, obviously. But sorry, indie kids are worse.) Sometimes you can meet "indie kids" in offices too. Scary, but true. 12) Not all mass culture is pap, though. Hey! What about those cool Powerpuff Girls? Oh come on! They are cool! Don't even go there! Now you've really really crossed the line. (you also forgot Cow and Chicken though.) 13) Infantilism is endemic to the indie kids. When was the last time you heard one of them use the word 'man' or 'woman'. Nope, it's always 'boys' and 'girls'. Some girls are 'cute'. Some boys are 'cute' too. The more incurable indie kids use the words 'grrrl' and - shudder - 'boi', for all the world as if they were living in a Disneyworld 1994 Experience ride or fell into a copy of Sassy once and never escaped. What is Sassy? 14) When indie kids pair off with a cute grrrl or boi (all indie kids are in theory bisexual, of course. Just don't ask them to do anything about it.) they tend to treat each other like shit and then write it up on their web pages ("I am SUCH the geek"). This is because they are very sensitive, not as the casual observer might have guessed because they are emotional dwarves with no concept of human interaction outside a fanzine problem page. You become sensitive by listening to Belle And Sebastian a lot. How does one "become" an emotion? I never became anything. I stayed me the whole way through. thanks to paranoid scenester tastemaking. The constant slathering praise directed at the likes of the Get Up Kids and Sleater-Kinney is the critical equivalent of a one-eyed chinless inbred mutant winning a beauty contest. I don't think all my records sound the same. 16) Indie kids like experimentation, but not too much experimentation. They like extremity, but not too much extremity. They like songs, but they like them to be a bit shy and fuzzed-up and nervous and not too songish. Best of all they like bands which sound comfortingly like the other ones they already know are cool. I disagree. Sometimes that is the very reason that an indie kid will hate a band. Cos they sound too much like a band they like.

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17) Of course they listen to other stuff too, carefully weighing it up for its purity of motive and general indie-ness. Other genres are assessed with a practised eye, and only the records which have the most spiritual kinship to indie are acceptable - no attempt is made to take these musics on their own terms, since indie is in any case superior. Eventually a fashionably anti-PC stance allows the indie kid to reject even bothering with hip-hop or dance records - that would after all be 'tokenism'.

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18) The worst thing about indie kids is how apalling

What about drum'n'bass? I mean, I know it sort of surged up a few years ago, then got sent back under for being too "mainstream" whatever you say, dance kids are just as capable of looking to the underground. Well, at least those I know, and they sneer at the mainstream stuff. Cos thats what indie kids-trying to be dance kids-listen to. they are at even being indie kids. After idling their college years going to 'shows' every other day and then spending two years in retail working on a screenplay or writing a novel about following a band or recording a thousand tinny songs on a hundred cheap cassettes and giving them to people they fancy in the hope that a rare Braid EP track might get them a quick fuck on some other indie kid's sofa and pretending to like the Spice Girls and pretending to like the Magnetic Fields and pretending to like each other - after all that they suddenly get a job and start listening to Moby and Aimee Mann. What I ask you is the fucking point? Hmm. The fucking point? You're sentences are too long. Shorten them. A bit of punctuation would make the point indeed, easier to understand. You're rant would be more understandable, if I wasn't getting so lost in all your NME-style rants. By the time I got to the end of the sentences, I didn't know what it had started out like. Reminds me of the days when I started reading Vox, Select and Melody Maker. Back then, when that whole shoe-gazer indie was coming out. In order to sound, well, you know, cool, or whatever, the writers seemed to give up on the full-stop. It was a sort of pretend intelligence they had. If you understood what-on-earth they were going on about, you were a liar. If you didn't, then, ha ha, you weren't fit to read whatever it was. Now I'm even more uncertain to whether I am or am not an indie kid. Any suggestions? Answers on a postcard please to the usual e-mail. Cheers, Idles. ===== http://clubs.yahoo.com/clubs/corduroysmoke we're all smoking our corduroys in our secret little b+s club- what are you doing?? __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get personalized email addresses from Yahoo! Mail - only $35 a year! http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister +-+ "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper +-+ +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "peculiarly deranged fanbase" +-+ +-+ "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000 +-+ +-+ "frighteningly named Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000 +-+ +-+ Nee, nee mun pish, chan pai dee kwa +-+ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+