I don’t normally use this site as a forum for personal essays and internal diatribes, but when the subject involves a category of music that I’ve spent fifteen years cementing a relationship with, I can’t help but get it off my proverbial chest publicly and hear what opinions the reader might have to offer. The subject in question, of course, lies within the fashionable and ill-defined parameters of what we call ‘indie rock.’

Brandon recently pointed me in the direction of a provoking New Yorker article by Sasha Frere-Jones entitled “A Paler Shade of White,” wherein the author discusses the apparent lack of ’soul’ in modern indie rock and a negative shift in the incorporation of predominantly ‘black’ musical traits within the music, thus contributing to its ever-increasing “whiteness.” These traits are defined as “a bit of swing, some empty space, and palpable bass frequencies” (presumably among others), and while I have some issues with Frere-Jones’ vague digressions and musical conjunctions – specifically The Chronic (1992) and Led Zeppelin tie-ins – it’s tough to argue with the gist of the piece: for the past decade or so, indie rock, and the umbrella of styles that it encompasses, has grown square and stiff.

Frere-Jones’ piece triggered a response within me that pretty much sums up something I’ve been musing over recently. After much deliberation, I can safely say that I’m officially ‘done’ with all things indie rock – maybe not all things, but a 95% majority of it. The article pinpointed precisely what it is about indie rock that I’ve struggled to identify for the past few years, or perhaps have admittedly been in denial about, that which has been the sole cause of my bored indifference toward it: yes, the “whiteness” thing. This feeling has resonated so strongly within me that I can state with confidence – and at the risk of sounding like a reductive, condescending, and racist asshole – that if you’re a young white male with a guitar, a band, and a handful of songs, it’s a safe bet that I’m probably not going to like what your musical contributions to the world are. This is merely a byproduct of experience, like a child touching a hot stove for the first time; after hundreds of hours listening to hundreds of self-proclaimed ‘indie’ bands and being left only with an empty feeling of exhaustion, I’m going to personally ban all things ‘indie’ from my aging ears.

Most visitors to Floodwatchmusic are aware of the fact that I cover a fairly wide spectrum of music here, and I assume that just as many find it frustrating as (hopefully) refreshing. My intentions have mutated slightly over the past year, but the concept is basically still the same: to promote artists’ music by offering my own perspective on what makes it so important, whether it’s via my tech-geek babbling or microscopic dissections of the trivial. I occasionally make time to slag off an artist or band whose popularity I find inexplicable, but my chief purpose with the site and my encouragement of a healthy variety of music appreciation should be somewhat obvious. Understandably, with this sort of ethos, I receive a moderate amount of “You should cover more indie music!” emails and pleas from “We play indie rock!” bands for me to review their latest opus. I suppose this post should serve as my official announcement that indie rock is hereby dead to me and I’m not going to bother with it anymore, at least for the time being.

Why would I turn my back on a genre that has inspired and excited me for fifteen years now? And what does any of this have to do with the suspicious “whiteness” thing?

Let’s jump back to the spring of 1994, when the notion of ‘indie rock’ first registered with me. For weeks I had been glued to my copy of Yo La Tengo’s Painful (1993) and had recently read somewhere that YLT was “the quintessential indie band.” To my porous, impressionistic mind this made perfect sense: they were basically a rock band that didn’t conform to major-label expectations, possessors of a “do anything you want” kind of mentality that I found liberating. Of course, I was obviously aware of the existence of independent labels, judging by the sheer number of SST and Sub Pop discs that occupied space on my CD shelf. But like many, I was wholly attracted by this new aesthetic concept, and I slowly began to explore the catalogues of Matador, Merge, and Thrill Jockey, among others. By the time the word ‘indie’ began to imply a standard of musical ideals rather than label status, my appetite and consumption of good music had little regard for who happened to issue an artist’s record. What I couldn’t wrap my head around was the detectable sense of stagnation that I was getting from my indie rock, an irrepressible feeling that what I was hearing was simply a variation of bands whose discographies I was already intimately familiar with: Sonic Youth. Cocteau Twins. Fugazi. Pavement. And so on.

But what really began to bother me is what Frere-Jones identified in his article, a sort of passively metronomic, blockly, mid-tempo – and because there really is no better word for it – whiteness that has become the most prominent characteristic of indie rock now. Essentially, it’s a rhythmic thing, or “groove,” if you will, which Frere-Jones attributed to the incestual musical appropriation between like-minded white indie artists, as opposed to the synthesis of African-American musical components that comprised the basis of rock ‘n roll back in the 1950s, resulting in ’soulful’ bands like The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, and The Clash: groups who weren’t afraid to hide the influences of the blues, reggae, and gospel in their music. I listen to a lot of new indie rock on a daily basis at work. Some of it I enjoy (that new Shins record was decent, Midlake, Spoon) and some of it I find absolutely revolting (Arcade Fire, anything featuring Ben Gibbard’s voice, which reminds me: whoever Jolie Holland is, she must be destroyed). None of it would strike my ears as particularly ’soulful,’ which could be attributed to everything from the rhythmic syncopation to the overall mood of the music.

Unsurprisingly, I’ve been retreating back to my time-honored standbys. Dusty ’70s Soul. Golden-Age hip hop. Early shoegaze, ’70s kraut, and noise-rock. ’60s Blue Notes and avant-garde jazz. And metal, which is where the dissident exclaims in defense, “What could possibly be ‘whiter’ than metal?” For starters – and some may find this incomprehensible – metal actually grooves, laid on as thick as some of the finest Motown platters; it’s just a different kind of groove. Metal is raw, edgy, unbridled; it has balls. New and exciting sub-variations and genre off-spins surface on a daily basis in the great ocean of metal, which is tough to claim among the confines of indie rock. Personally, I’ve discovered that indie rock just doesn’t ever mirror my temperament anymore. Why mope around to The National (who, admittedly, are a stellar band) when I could lift my spirits and quicken my heartbeat by air-shredding and wailing along to, say, the ass-kickingly ridiculous and awesomely-named 3 Inches of Blood?

“Goat Riders Horde” – 3 Inches of Blood 4:02 (Fire Up the Blades, Roadrunner 2007)

I’m not exactly sure where this is going, so I’ll sum up. There are a lot of great audioblogs out there that specialize in the sort of placid, antiseptic, and repetitive gulf that indie rock has sunken into. This isn’t one of them, and likely won’t be, so please don’t ask me to cover more “angular guitar pop” or review your “heavily indebted to My Bloody Valentine” band. Consider this site indie-free, and any tired jibes about ’selling out’ to the majors should be directed to the comments section below.