Glamorous Indie Rock and Roll

“Hey! Look at me! I’m in an indie rock band!

“Maybe you’ve heard of us. Our band name is a quote from a cult movie. We sound like everything that came out in the 1980s, but without the charm. Just lots and lots of annoying synthesizers. We play ironic cover songs. Our singer likes to use a bad falsetto at strange moments. The titles of our songs are so very, very clever because we’re all so very, very smart. We spend a lot of money to look like we don’t care what we look like. No, we’re not actually independent of anything.”

…

I made a decision to break out of my norm and try new things and, by Crom, I’m going to stick to it. I’ve been reading different books, trying different TV shows, and yes, listening to different music. My friend Glenn provided me with the last two years’ worth of those monthly indie rock playlists that float around semi-legal torrent websites. I’ve been working my way through them over the past few weeks.

To my surprise, I’ve been using that “next track” button less than I thought I would. I may have a preconceived notion about the pretentious laziness of indie rock bands, but not all of them are like that. Okay, about half of them are like that. And okay, I don’t always hate it.

Sometimes synthesizers sound cool. And sometimes I enjoy the clever little song titles. Sometimes I recognize a band’s name as originally belonging to a race of people in the movie Willow, or the villainous family from The Goonies. Enjoying any song that features a drum machine fills me with that special kind of shame that only someone raised Catholic can really understand.

I was hoping trying new things would make me realize something about the inherent goodness of the world around me, something that would show me the error in prejudging things and people. But instead, I learned something special about myself: I am a giant hipster douche-bag who loves crappy music.