Indie, outie.

There was this indie-loving engineering student that I encountered during a party a few weeks back. He held the mantra that whatever was on the radio wasn't worthy of being listened to simply because big music behemoths were responsible for putting it on air, thus depriving the underground or anyone else from being heard.

That was all fair and good, but he didn't know anything about the local underground scene, while he endlessly paraded the fact that he had great bands from everywhere else on his portable mp3 player (which was hooked up to the obligatory mini-speaker system that he had brought along). He was also playing tracks from the Verve's Urban Hymns but had never heard of On Your Own from their prior album, A Northen Soul. To his defence, he said that he had only started listening to the Verve recently. I suppose that I had a 6 year headstart, even though I can safely say that I still only know three songs from the album, with the rest of it simply being mind numbing.

To his credit, he had Oasis' Wonderwall. Which wasn't very indie. Or was it?

The fact that he started coming off as being incredibly anal and a total pedant about it made me want to strangle him; I felt that I was going to make him cry if I started changing the songs he'd put on.

I'm all for "indie", but what he played was just downright bizarre. And he'd never heard of Muse, despite them coming to KL and everything.

Plus, he left in a Lexus. That should give him a lot of indie cred.

Two things.

First: what constitutes as indie? Even indie, as a genre, is marketed to busloads of disenfranchised youths like the aforementioned stellar case study. Indie isn't really indie anymore. Are Travis as indie as the Bravery? Is Ian Tai as indie as Albert Hammond Jr.? Should we really care about all these things? The fact that indie has already (unwittingly) carved itself out as a genre should make it less than credible; if you can stick an 'indie' label on it, it might not be really indie anymore. Maybe it's time for nu-Indie to come out and cock indie on its head, no? How indie can you go?

Secondly: it's great being a steward for something that might be refreshing and a little different for people, i.e. superindie music. But being a total prick about it doesn't win you any points with the people who don't know you at parties...or in general. Having a passion for something is one thing; making yourself to be the King Ass about it is totally different. Or, in this particular case, I could just boil it down to the fact that quasi-eccentricities ruled the night.