One & The Same: "Punk," "Indie," & "Pop"

Nowadays, everything trendy seems to be labeled as "indie," regardless of whether it be the enormously huge Modest Mouse and Death Cab For Cutie, the recent rise of "hipster hop" artists like Kid Cudi, Wiz Khalifa, and The Cool Kids, or experimental electronic from Flying Lotus, M.I.A., and Sufjan Stevens. Many of these artists have nothing to do with each other in terms of style, and many of them have top 10 hits, millions of fans, and major record deals. So in what way are they indie? Many of them are part of the same machine that created pop as performed by Britney Spears and Akon and contribute to the same mainstream ideology that punk rock originally sought to identify against.

Punk music originated from the D.I.Y. ethic in the early 1970s with artists you and I have never heard of, if only for the fact that these artists played music simply for the sake of playing music and not to get famous. Like everything else, generational outcasts and Bohemians identified with this counter-culture and it became popular. Bands like Sex Pistols and The Ramones took off, with records distributed by major labels and sold out concerts. Over the next few years, punk started to evolve in New Wave, post-punk, and hardcore. New Wave became known for big shot one-hit wonders, post-punk fused with heavy metal and hardcore punk to create grunge, and hardcore evolved into post-hardcore, emo (post-punk + hardcore), and metalcore (metal + hardcore). Grunge went on to spawn Britpop and post-grunge (see Nickelback), and New Wave and post-punk were both revived in the early 21st century - all to great success. Summarily, all these subgenres became popular, and punk derivatives can be seen absolutely everywhere regardless of where you look, whether you listen to Avenged Sevenfold, System Of A Down, Arcade Fire, Oasis, The Strokes, or Lady Gaga. And consequentially, if one were to go to last.fm and look at the tags on any of these mega-huge acts, "indie" can be quickly spotted.

The Sex Pistols would probably disagree, but they were "pop" music, too. It's all pop. Maybe it's punk, too, or post-punk, or maybe it's on an "indie" label. But anything that seems original is probably just a new derivative of things that have already been done. And anyone who likes something solely because it's indie should realize that someone else likes it, too.

Listen to music because it's artistic and well-made, and fuck genres.