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Modern Indie Music Movement

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Imagine the discovery of an art form so abstract and different, one of which possessed with strange ideals and seemingly free artists to create and dispose at their will. These are the basic attributes of what we call independent, or indie, music. Independent music is a movement meant to represent the opposition of being trite - an anti-establishment “fuck you” to the mass marketing of originality. Independent music started as bands that were on small and relatively low-budget labels that had a do-it-yourself attitude and retained an outsider and underground perspective. From then on, the conversation changed from how the music was made to how the music sounds, such as containing abstract or non-mainstream themes, instruments, lyrics, etc.. …show more content…

Some of these artists were R.E.M., Pixies, and The Smiths from the UK, a band that helped inspire the guitar-based genre jangle pop. Around this time in the United States, the term indie was particularly associated with the intense, distortion-heavy sounds of the Pixies, Hüsker Dü, Minutemen, Meat Puppets, Dinosaur Jr., and The Replacements. The 1990’s proceeded to bring massive changes to the indie rock scene. Grunge (a subgenre of rock that fuses elements of punk rock, heavy metal, and distorted electric guitar) bands such as Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Hole, and Alice in Chains broke into the mainstream, achieving commercial chart success and widespread exposure. As a result of indie rock bands moving into the mainstream, the term "indie" lost its original counter-cultural context and began to refer to the new, commercially more accessible form of music that was now achieving mainstream success. It has been argued that the term "sellout" lost its meaning as grunge made it possible for a small movement, no matter how radical, to be commercialized by the mainstream, solidifying the formation of an individualist, fragmented

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