Sinister: idleberry gets defensive and confused. "Indie kids"??

[idleberry]

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

>>1) They like indie music. Obviously.

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.  

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

>>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.

>>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. 


>>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.

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."

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


>>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.

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? 

>>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 
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. 

>>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,
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. 

>>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'.

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.

>>18) The worst thing about indie kids is how apalling
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.





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