Why did so many 2000s indie acts stagnate?
The strange thing about indie music is that we all loved it so much, almost to the point that it became toxic.
It was a trend that stemmed all the way as far back as the 1990s when the Britpop tour-de-force dominated the scene, with its brazen attitudes, lip service rivalries, and specifically male-oriented view of life provided a tonic to the working classes that somehow, just maybe, they could dare to dream of stardom style.
Yet ten years down the line, when you found yourself in the midst of the 2000s, the initial zing on that beer had decidedly run flat. The landscape had moved on to its post-Britpop era, which it was inevitably going to do, but while this was buoyed at first by the darker, brooding edge of bands like Radiohead, there wasn’t much else to follow it.
You could have been fooled into thinking the contrary, with standouts emerging during this time like the Arctic Monkeys and The Libertines, who straddled a unique blend of timeliness and universality in lifting their music somewhere just above their contemporaries in the canon. The rest are names you would recognise – Kaiser Chiefs, The Wombats, The Vaccines, among a myriad of others, since long-forgotten – but none climbed quite to the same heights. Why?
The obvious place to start would be in a brief exploration of the ‘landfill indie’ tag, which transpired to have increasing accuracy despite its seemingly harsh labelling. A term coined by music journalists, likely exasperated by the wash of jangly guitars and strained English accents they were being forced to differentiate every week, it may have seemed offensive – but it was actually accurate.
The whole connotation that came with the idea of landfill indie was that it was largely uninspiring. Not poor quality or lacking intention, but it simply followed the same tropes of every other band on the circuit and never possessed the ambition to stretch any further. In essence, it was a truth serum that this was a sub-genre destined to fail and be forgotten.
That doesn’t seem to be an opinion that wins you many favours, but when you fast-forward to now and see that the main swathe of the biggest bands in the country at the time are now reduced to playing circuits of academies and corn exchanges, the excitement of days gone by has definitely turned quite stale.
Of course, this is not a naive assertion that every outfit was always bound to shoot to the same heights as the Arctic Monkeys. But in the very essence of following the same formula and fitting into the same mould, indie from the 2000s and early 2010s now instantly sounds dated from the first second you press play on it.
In the same vein of its lack of diversity, you also have to point to the dominance of the male voice as a reason why the sound doesn’t stand up so much anymore. Look at the landscape we have now, with massive female-fronted indie outfits like Wolf Alice and Wet Leg. Doesn’t that changing of the tide symbolise why the genre of old is now pretty much dead in the water?
There’s no denying that the indie scene of the early 21st century, whether you call it sleaze, landfill, or any other tag, harbours a special, transportative nostalgia that reminds many of simpler times. But in that simplistic viewpoint, when we now know the world is full of so much more complexity, there comes the reconciliatory moment when you realise that some things are better left in the garbage.
