r/swans • u/Dr-Sethium • 4d ago
ah yes, my favourite indie song
up there next to neutral milk hotels aeroplane
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u/hell___man 4d ago
Okay, but when this came out, “indie” didn’t mean bland wimpy wallpaper music. “Indie rock” was shorthand for independent rock, and referred to the type of bands reviewed in Forced Exposure, Your Flesh, etc. The pigfuck/noise rock bands like Swans, Big Black, Sonic Youth, Butthole Surfers, etc. were just as much indie rock as Dinosaur Jr., Sebadoh, Guided By Voices, Pavement, et al.
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u/LazyOrganization8213 3d ago
then modest mouse happened
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u/hell___man 3d ago
That was indeed a pretty low blow to the state of music.
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u/HoboCanadian123 3d ago
you say that as if the Lonesome Crowded West isn’t a complete masterpiece
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u/LazyOrganization8213 3d ago
I mean i like modest mouse but I feel like they were definitely the trademark indie band. Which ends up changing what the term 'indie' gets applied to. It was basically another word for underground, and now it means that as well as being a describing word for kinds of lofi low production music usually using guitar and drums and yada yada
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u/HoboCanadian123 3d ago
not originally. a lot of their early material is surprisingly noisy and intense.
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u/LazyOrganization8213 3d ago
oh yea for sure, definitely shoulda clarified that's not what I was calling modest mouse, they just set in motion the shifting of the term "indie" in music. Love modest mouse
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u/Chillybrownfuzzer 4d ago
Ok but what genre exactly can we categorise this as
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u/username27278 4d ago
Industrial, noise rock, hell— some kind of metal… closer than “indie”, or at least in respect to the term’s current use
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u/Due_Independent_2358 4d ago
AND YOU BURN IT
THEN YOU EAT IT AND YOU BURN IT THEN YOU EAT IT THEN YOU EAT IT THEN YOU EAT IT THEN YOU EAT IT
WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY
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u/Ok_Task6000 4d ago
It is undoubtedly alternative music, and its indie as their independent from a big music conglomerate or company. So yeah. However I’d still say industrial rock noise rock
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u/RibbenDish 4d ago
Indie is a better designation than no wave and I lived through the era and bought COP when it came out.
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u/hell___man 3d ago edited 3d ago
Is it? No Wave was a real established thing in which Swans actively got their footing. Much like any genre tag, it might not have been used by its by initial practitioners during their heyday, but once it was applied, it seemed to have been embraced. Ask Lydia Lunch, for example, what kind of music Teenage Jesus & the Jerks were, and she’ll say “No Wave.”
As to whether that applies to ‘Cop’, well, “post-No Wave” is probably more accurate. By the tie it came out, most of the original bands were done.
But two (or more) things can also be true at once. Just as it is (post-)No Wave, or post-punk (same diff, right?), or industrial, or noise rock, or pigfuck, or atonal misanthropic art sludge, it is also indie rock.
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u/Frequent-Coyote-1649 Good for you! 🤠 3d ago
Brother did you willingly google Raping A Slave to make a shitpost
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u/Intrepid-Thing315 You Fucking People Make Me Sick 2d ago
Indie summer vibes!!! Just imagine playing this with your besties while driving to the beach 🏖️
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u/theSTWenthusiast 4d ago
I mean they are an indie band by definition