BERKOWITZ: 'Indie' to the max

I was going to write this column about Valentine's Day, but I realized that topic was played out, and everyone hates Valentine's Day. So I'm going to write about a topic that should be universally hated, but isn't. Indie music.

"Indie," short for "Independent," is the stupidest name for a genre of music. It's a descriptor that doesn't say anything about the music and exists only so bands can give themselves "cred," a moot point when so-called "indie" artists such as Broken Social Scene and Sufjan Stevens are selling out shows, scoring movies and appearing on magazine covers.

Traditionally, the "indie" moniker meant a band was signed to a record company that was not a major label, i.e., Elephant Six or Kill Rock Stars. These labels usually saw some limited success, despite usually producing only one or two bands of merit (Neutral Milk Hotel) and many, many bands of more questionable talent (Xiu Xiu).

Then, Pitchfork Media came along and ruined music forever.

Well, not exactly. KISS ruined music forever, but that's a topic for another column. Pitchfork merely wanted to create a website dedicated to reviewing these independent, lesser-known bands. In doing so, however, they unleashed the indie snob, an obnoxious, evil creature at one time relegated to the backs of record stores a la High Fidelity. In the same way mid-'90s "alternative" music actually became not an alternative, but mainstream, so too the indie music of the 2000s has blurred the distinction between so-called obscure bands and a meaningless label.

Pitchfork has fostered a community of music fans more focused on image than actual music. This is evidenced by Pitchfork's longwinded, rambling, turgid (as they would say) music reviews, notorious for being more of an account of what the writer had for breakfast than an actual review of a band's music. Of course, this style was supposed to be ultra-hip and ironic, but usually it just made me want to gouge my eyes out with a grapefruit spoon. To be fair, I hear they've lightened up on the meta-reviews lately, but they still remain responsible for bringing this indie scourge to the mainstream.

Thanks to Pitchfork, marginally talented bands like The Arcade Fire and The Hold Steady are bestowed with inordinate amounts of praise and hype, selling them to readers who don't realize that The Arcade Fire sounds like a poor man's Talking Heads, and The Hold Steady sounds like bad Bruce Springsteen. Yeah, Funeral was a pretty good album, but it wasn't freaking Revolver, people. And even though they're signed to an indie label, The Arcade Fire is selling out shows in five minutes and is on the cover of about 20 magazines. That's not indie, that's called making it.

For a lot of these bands, important elements such as singing ability and musicianship often are eschewed for image and "ironic" sensibility. I guess that's why Pitchfork decided it would be hilarious to review Jet's new album with nothing but a YouTube.com video of a monkey urinating into its own mouth, while praising Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's album with a thousand words and giving its new album a respectable 7.2. Yeah, Jet sucks, but CYHSY is a hideous joke of a band, and the lead singer sounds like some sort of dying mammalian creature, maybe a shrew or a gopher. I'm honestly shocked that they're allowed to make music.

Indie aficionados may accuse me of harboring an undue prejudice against unique or "challenging" vocalists. Here's what I think. The guy from CYHSY and Joanna Newsom should team up with Yoko Ono and put out an album called Guantanamo, which the United States can then use to interrogate prisoners and force confessions.

Here's what I think also: Sufjan Stevens is boring and puts me to sleep, and his track titles like "To the Workers of the Rock River Valley Region, I Have an Idea Concerning Your Predicament and It Involves an Inner Tube, Bath Mats, and 21 Able-bodied Men" aren't endearing, they're stupid.

The Decemberists: Awful.

Any band described as "twee" or has one of those big old-fashioned double basses is going to be terrible. Likewise, so is any new band described as "shoegaze" or "baroque." Pavement wasn't as good as people remember them. They were actually kind of boring.

The Shins's first album was all right.

Let's be real: I was listening to Broken Social Scene when I was 16, thus dramatically increasing my cred and making me wonder why, especially in Boston, it's hip to like stuff that was big four years ago. I mean, I always knew Boston was a couple of years behind New York, but when I hear people asking me if I've heard of Regina Spektor, I knew we had some catching up to do.

In summation, there's no such thing as indie music. It was made up by record companies to sell more records. Pitchfork Media is pretentious and annoying, and so are people who define themselves by their musical tastes.

For the record, this columnist's favorite band is The Monkees.

Adan Berkowitz, a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences, is a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press. He can be reached at adanspy1@bu.edu.