When I started out as a music journalist, at the end of the 1980s, it was generally assumed that we were living through the lamest music era the world would ever see. But those were also the years when hip-hop exploded, beatbox disco soared, indie rock took off, and new wave invented a language of teen angst.
— Rob Sheffield
Attractive Indie Music quotations
It's important to keep indie record stores alive because their unique environments introduce music lovers to things in a very personal way.
Generally I try to read anything but indie rock journalism or anything about music at all, especially in the summer.
Indie rock is just as susceptible - if not more susceptible - to all the gross things about people becoming total ass clowns in music, and only worrying about money and image. I'm not interested in being a part of that.
In high school I was in a band called Goodfight, but it was more me running around on stage. It was very punk inspired. Then I started to get into indie-rock and older music and decided I wanted to write my own stuff. I quit the band. Around 16 or 17, I started recording myself at home on keyboard and piano.
I'm into indie music. I think indie is going to bring back the spirit in music. There was a time when it was all about accommodating the music business, the music was getting tasteless, but the spirit is back.
I really do listen to all types of music, not only rock, but everything from good pop music - which is usually older pop music - to RB and indie rock. I love indie rock more than a lot of the commercial stuff that you'd expect.
I listen to all those kinds of music, from classic soul to hip-hop to Brazilian music to, you know, jazz to indie to alternative. So whatever. I listen to all if it. Classic rock and classic pop, all of that.
You really think all of those indie music dorks go to SXSW every year to check out music? They go there to wear their laminates and act important and try to get laid.
Now that the generation that grew up on '80s indie-rock has attained influential positions in the culture, that music is the new yardstick. And that will shift yet again some day.
I have friends with deals, both major and indie, and the ones on majors never seem as happy, and quite frankly aren't making music as strong as those on independents.
I had received some minor indie label interest when I was 14 after I was in a schools music competition thing in NZ called 'Rockquest', but I knew it wasn't the right time and that I wasn't good enough and needed to concentrate on school.
I'm not going to say I'm not a fan, but I'm a fan of house music, essentially, and kind of indie, and I was always into the kind of sub-pop Seattle Mud Honey and Pearl Jam kind of sound. But my kind of big love was house music ever since I was 15/16, going to raves when I was 15 or 16 years old and not going to school, like a naughty boy.
I've always seen myself as the person listening to alternative music and all that - generic indie person. I always tried to be the least pretty I could be.
I was always drawn to performing. I took improv and acting classes during the summers and was involved in middle and high school plays. But when I discovered indie and punk music in high school, those things sort of took over.
I will never sign to a major record label again.
If, by some mega fluke, a record of mine looked like it might break big, I'd try and do it via an indie or somehow license it. I'm not having my music owned by those corporate bastards again.
They said I was a married mother of two but the record sounded like an indie album and they didn't know how to market it! This country is incredibly sexist, as is the music and media industry.
We're on an indie label. We don't have mass marketing behind us, and we don't have big budgets. We do our own thing. We do exactly what we want to do. We produce our own music. We write ourselves. We record ourselves. We mix ourselves. The artwork is done by my brother. That's not selling out. We're doing exactly what we want to do.
You have to be open-minded, because it's so diverse nowadays.
I used to be a deep trance DJ, and now I've transformed into something eclectic. So you can expect any kind of music, from house to electro to indie-rock to techno and trance. I have very wide musical tastes nowadays.
I'm not interested in the being the next indie hipster scene or in how skinny my jeans can be. That's not my thing. I'm interested in arenas. That was the magic of the music I grew up listening to. Being a rocknroll front man is all I've ever wanted since I was 10 years old. I give it everything I have.
A lot of the songs are pretty unmasked.
If you listen to "As Cool As I Am," it's not all that different from what you were hearing from Ani DiFranco and some of the other indie women artists of the time. It was still in that context, still seen as folk music.
It's just weird that indie rock heads and so on are connecting to my music.
The American indie underground made music for like-minded people who thought for themselves. Thinking for yourself is intrinsically subversive.
I always remain optimistic. There are three levels of music production: the majors, indies, and what I call "inties," music distributed via the Internet. The Internet is one area that I have used pretty effectively to break free of corporate control.
Hip-hop is mostly what I listen to, other than jazz. I've given up on pop music and indie rock.
I am an indie kid. I made no bones about the fact that I fell into DJing electronic music by accident, by a lucky break, but it doesn't make me any less of a fan of that music, I just never envisaged... not through a lack of confidence or belief, I just didn't think that I'd be sharing the bill with people that I was going out to see myself.
When I first put out music, people didn't know what I looked like.
They called it a new type of something, they couldn't put a genre on it - it was where indie and urban kind of meet in the middle. I thought that was quite exciting.
The only music I was listening to for ages was old soul.
So I wasn't listening to a lot of new music - especially indie music.
I think a lot of music that's really innovative is not even considered because it was made by people who had a sexual image. And people assume that it's a commodified thing, so it can't be "indie."
Im really into the indie-music scene and listen to a lot of De La Soul.
I have a day job Monday to Friday. I work at a record label in Brooklyn called Ba Da Bing. It's a great indie label and I listen to music all day. I meet people online and find out about the cool new music blogs.
I listen to all those kinds of music, from classic soul to hip-hop to Brazilian music to, you know, jazz to indie to alternative... And for me, when I'm making music, it's all in my head, and all those influences in my head. So if something comes to me that's a reference from a different genre then people are used to hearing from me, I'm not afraid to go there with it.
I always have looked at "indie" as a term of "independence.
" Never associated a sonic gesture with that in the same way that pop music has always meant "popular" to me it didn't define a sound. And I think now that has been the context for things. If something is indie, it almost has this sonic association with it, or pop has become this term of shame almost, like, bubblegum sweet pop.
A lot of the music I listen to is indie rock. It's not on the radio.
I love indie record stores, man. I love anything that's about independence and preserving the brand of good music.