I disagree with ulytau's message. I dont think there is such a think as an indie sound.

If there isn't such a thing as an indie sounds, why do bands like Modest Mouse and the Falming Lips still get the "indie" tag despite their label?

Flaming Lips*

You are posting too frequently, please slow down.

geeve

Appropriated by a dying music corporate music industry seeking to stay relevant, "indie" was a meaningless descriptor in the same vein as "alternative". The longer any genre name like that is around, however, the less meaningless it becomes as the labels seek out other bands with similar sounds so they can keep milking the cash cow while "indie" is still popular with the public. They find bands with similar sounds to current "indie" bands and group them in under the same genre name, so even if it was once meaningless it begins to actually describe a specific style.

Err... one too many "music"s in the first sentence, but you get the idea.

@thatwasawkward -- pretty much correct as to "indie", ...

Yeah, indie was supoosed to be *independent* of the big music groups. When the RIAA members suddenly coopted it to be a style of their own. Just like alternative was supposed to be an alternative to labels, only to be coopted by the same RIAA members.

Is "indie" played on commercial radio in the States? Up here you can only find it on college radio or cbc radio 2 or 3.

but that goes for most things "popular" genres that aren't top 40, radio rock, country or classic rock.

we have a smaller but still commercial station in Columbus, CD101 (though it's now at 102.5) that pretty much plays "indie" as described above ... you will hear Arcade Fire, the Decemberists, Okkervil River, Flaming Lips, Death Cab for Cutie etc.. etc...

Odd Future isn't indie, it's part of some kind of as-yet unnamed new movement in hip hop imo.

At best it could be called underground hip hop but that would not be quite accurate I think; it's less underground every day.

And yeah indie is kind still a genre though. It's a very big tent but there are still some things that will never count, like hip hop or EDM for example.

Relies on cutesy vocals, acousticness (though ironically also a lot of electronic assistance) and a general vibe of otherness and hipsterness.

That's my personal definition. Imo it actually has nothing to do with an association with a label. I'm not denying that that is and has been a definition of the term, but in the case of music it has become an umbrella term for music favored by "indie kids" who are in turn sometimes termed hipsters though many would dispute this terminology.

And of course you have different types of indie shit, indie pop (she and him) indie rock indie folk... etc and they all have aspects of each other.

but lets be honest here genre delineations have never been pretty, or in many cases very clear at all.

but living in austin with shit like ACL and SXSW happening every year, you get to a point where you kind of have a general sense of what counts as "indie" lol

There are enough colleges and universities with UD, UC, Xavier, NKU, and Miami Oxford that one never knows if it is a college station or a commercial one around here. :-)

I watched Titus when it was a VHS new release, it was at least 6 years ago. I don't remember much about it other than feeling that it often went for style over substance, a big strike for me. I'm the odd sort of person that would rather watch a stripped down set where the acting is the real focus than a lavish production.

Thucy - did you attend SXSW shows this year? We have a couple things like that in Toronto, including a direct repsonse NXNE, but SXSW obviously dwarfs them?

Going to that thing is probably one of the top things I want to do before dying.

haha it's awesome. but as you may know i'm more into hip hop so i was pumped that hip hop got a lot more representation this year: sxsw is much more non-indie friendly than ACL, say.

so i saw de la soul, odd future (barely.. lol), and wanted to see kanye but it was 21+ :(

and obv a bunch of sideshows that were aight but forgettable.

I also really like hip-hop but find it is a difficult genre to pull off live. You saw odd future - what was that like? Did you see Lil' B?

The best rap guy I have seen live is Shad, do you know him?

they actually were kind of rude... true to form i guess. they walked out way earlier into their set. idk if it was planned or what.

i agree about hip hop being better recorded. at shows they seem to feel they should scream. the wordplay comes off much better recorded. then again if i ever had the chance to see a chill hip hop show like in a closed club or something i'd jump on it, because i'm sure it would be dope.

not that the party atmosphere at your average hip hop show isn't fucking fun as hell lol. i saw big boi last weekend and though i'm not a huge fan of his it was a lot of fun. nothing like jamming to classic hip hop imo.

never heard of shad, just looked him up though he looks pretty cool.

this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExOCc_bHj6U&feature=related) is particularly brilliant. lmao.

i feel like some of the people on this thread got sidetracked...

Makes sense you wouldn't have heard of him he is only starting to get popular outside of Canada. That video is really good I have not seen it before. His new album, TSOL, is particularly excellent. Highlights include Rose Garden and Yaa I Get It.

Have you ever seen Bun B in concert Thucy? As far as I know he doesn't tour much outside of Texas but seeing him live is another thing I want to do before I die. Or before he dies. RIP Pimp C.

How are you not a big fan of Big Boi, by the way?

lol. i think i will get to see bun b in houston this summer. or i hope so.

also... it's not that i don't like big boi lol. i think he's great. i just mean he doesn't make like my top favorite MCs list or anything. there are a lot of great MCs that i personally don't rabidly follow, him being one.

so who is your favorite rapper/rap group then?

mine: tribe called quest, honorable mentions to the pharcyde and rakim

Well, Sacreddigits, the play itself largely requires a lot of style and spectacle, it's a huge slasher play, 15 dead and dead in over-the-top horrific ways--this was Shakespeare's first tragedy, and this sort of slasher-revenge-tragedy was in at the time, so Titus followed that example--so the stylized nature of the movie complements the stylized nature of the play, so I don't hold that against it (now, DiCaprio's R+J, THAT goes for style over substance and, worse, visual over literal and the spoken word in what is arguably Shakespeare's most lyrical tragedy, the ONLY reason Romeo and Juliet is to be considered a masterpiece at all is because of the language and rhyme, the characters and plot itself, with a few exceptions--see: Mercutio--are and were generic even when Shakespeare created them...so to de-emphasize the WORDS, the one saving grace of the work, in favor of stylized camera work, sinks that production; with Taymor's "Titus," the play is made to be a spectacle and over the top, and so her style matches that notion rather than upstaging it like R+J with DiCaprio did.)

I always really loved the Clipse but they have kind of gone downhill of late. Saw them in Toronto once it was pretty good. They are probably my favourite. As for honourable mentions obviously I am a huge UGK fan as well and their respective solo work. And Weezy on point is pretty hard to beat.

Hard to argue with Tribe though.

As for new stuff, I'm really into Yelawolf at the moment.

Does anybody else on this site like rap music?

lol not really.. or not that i remember.

They are all too busy listening to metal and screamo I guess.

I'd disagree with the style matching the substance...I, personally, find Titus to be...trite. It's not worth that much effort by half, in my estimation. If you shellack and emboss a piece of crap, you still have a piece of crap. Now, don't get me wrong, I like a lot of Shakespeare's work and respect quite a few of them that I don't like, but to me, Taymor's Titus is like the woman who thinks that she's the hot mom and so puts on the make-up and the tight clothes but just kind of comes out of it looking like a cheap hooker that can't score a trick.

@Lando: I came to hip-hop late. I started out on post-punk, synthpop, and college rock, which eventually morphed into "alternative." Then a co-worker from Newark burned me some CDs: Fugees, Blackstar, Enimem. So I had some catching up to do. I'm a pretty white hip-hop listener...when I hit "like" on a track from Pandora, there's a good chance that it's by a Canadian or something like that.

Fugees are an especially good choice. They are probably up there as one of my favourites.

i'm not sure what Pandorra is or how it works, but I hope you are into Canadian hip-hop. There is some pretty good stuff that goes on up here that doesn't really get the exposure that it deserves.

I also believe that appreciating a variety of musical genres is important, so your little journey makes sense to me. It would seem you are a generation ahead of me, though, since I am not so familiar with those movements.