Earlier this week I was skimming around Paste looking for some decent new artists who weren't so cool that I didn't understand them, and I stumbled upon this story. Is Indie Dead? Now, I would be thrilled if you all would read this article, but realistically, seeing as it is quiet lengthy, I'll sum things up for you. "Indie" is 1. Not what it ever was in the first place, and 2. The opposite of what it used to falsely be. Indie Started out as a technical term for any record released on an independent label, one of the Davids of the music industry, instead of the suit-wearing money-stalking executive Goliaths. If The Black Eyed Peas were released on some little label based out of Portland, they too would be "indie". HOWEVA, "indie" was morphed over years. Only a short time after "indie" had hit the playing field it meant something of a very different nature. Indie was now the uncool music. It started out as the punk rock movement, who made sure they were not at the status quo. The leather clad sons on anarchy would listen to anything that no one else would, leaving a very small following. But, over time, uncool has become cool. The nineties brought a lot of angst and revolt against everything right, and through this past decade, that angst has turned into quirk, at an extraordinary pace. We appear to be in this awkward puberty stage in music where discovery of the strangest sound is the next big thing. While the "indie" music has been great for music in general, it is no longer "indie". Indie is about as individual as a pseudo-suicidal emo in Hot Topic. It is dead, or at least, somewhat ironically, different.
Vampire Weekend is one of the primary "indie" bands on the scene. They are polo-clad Jewish New Yorkers who could rock out in a country club, and no-one would care. The band consists of the four Columbia grads Ezra Koenig, Chris Baio, Rostam Batmanglij, and Chris Tomsom. The band gained buzz around their college, playing for literary clubs, and recording EP's in their own dorms. The real peak of VW's train to fame was in 2007 when, like so many artists nowadays, their Myspace took them to places unprecedented in Columbia University band history. Ever since the release of their first self-titled album, The band has been busy recording this new album, Contra, and touring. If the planets align right, I'll get to see them myself in March.
Contra is a fresh twist on the same Afro-pop the band the band is so famous for. While most of the songs have the same sound, every track has a few things that have really been experimentally tweaked. For instance, "Holiday" contains distortion the you will not hear at all on the first album. The harpsichord in "M79" and "The Kids Don't Stand A Chance" has been replaced with acoustic guitar; a first for the band. One of the quirkiest changes is the auto-tune used in "California English". Were not talking "Shawty lemme smack that booty" auto-tune, it's just a slight little enhancer to the fluid drums and occasional chord spurt in the background. Vampire Weekend loves to reference pop culture from a distance, mentioning Lil' John and how boring English drama's are now, all in one song. The auto-tune, though very interesting and pleasant, could be the band's calling to the DOA(See Jay-Z's hit Death Of Auto-tune). Many critics think that the band is just trying to get that "indie" sound, but the great thing about bands are that, for the most part, their making music, not a stereo-type. Vampire Weekend doesn't care what they are. They won't take out their ska guitars and african beats to please people, and that in itself makes the band "cool" in my book.
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