Indie rock is
a genre of alternative rock that originated in the United Kingdom and
the United States in the 1980s. Indie rock is extremely diverse, with
sub-genres that include indie pop, jangle pop, C86, and lo-fi,
among others. Originally used to describe record labels, the term became
associated with the music they produced and was initially used interchangeably
with alternative rock. As grunge and punk
revival bands in the US, and then Britpop bands in the UK, broke
into the mainstream in the 1990s, it came to be used to identify those acts
that retained an outsider and underground perspective. In the 2000s, as a
result of changes in the music industry and the growing importance of the
Internet, a number of indie rock acts began to enjoy commercial success,
leading to questions about its meaningfulness as a
term. The
term indie rock,
derived from "independent," describes the small and relatively
low-budget labels on which it is released and
the do-it-yourself attitude of the bands and artists involved.
In the mid-1980s, the term
"indie" began to be used to describe the music produced on
post-punk labels
rather than the labels themselves. The indie
rock scene in the US was prefigured by the college rock that
dominated college radio playlists, which included key bands
like R.E.M. from the US and The Smiths from the UK.
The 1990s brought major changes to
the alternative rock scene. Grunge bands such as
Nirvana, Pearl
Jam, Sound
garden, Hole,
and Alice in Chains broke into the mainstream, achieving commercial
chart success and widespread exposure. Punk revival bands
like Green Day and The Offspring also became popular and
were grouped under the "alternative" umbrella. Similarly,
in the United Kingdom Britpop saw bands
like Blur and Oasis emerge into the mainstream, abandoning
the regional, small-scale and political elements of the
1980s indie scene.
By the end of the 2000s the
proliferation of indie bands was being referred to as "indie landfill", a
description coined by Andrew Harrison of The Word magazine, and
the dominance of pop and other forms of music over guitar-based
indie was leading to predictions of the end of indie rock. However, there
continued to be commercial successes like Kasabian's West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum (2009),
which reached number one in the UK. In
2010, Canadian band Arcade Fire's album The Suburbs
reached
number
one on the Billboard charts in the United States and the official chart in the
United Kingdom, winning a Grammy for Album of The Year.
Female
