Best summation about why one of my jobs is so impossible, made in the comments of Gawker:
"The best thing about the current state of "indie" is that starting about the time The Strokes and The White Stripes and all those bands hit the scene, the universe starting folding in on itself. It was no longer a scene of consisting of a handful of bands at any given moment. Suddenly they were popping up left and right on a weekly timetable. As pointed out above, "indie" means nothing anymore. Just about any genre of music you can imagine can be classified as such. And, best of all, the waves of backlash now come so quickly that you can't even tell if something is hip or if it's already passé before it even began. While this seems like a horrifying thing to happen, it's really the most liberating of all possible occurrences. It's harder and harder for people to define their "coolness" by the music they listen to because no matter who you like, somebody even cooler (or less cool?) than you will mock you for liking it. So now we're stuck with just listening to what we genuinely enjoy. Which is how it's supposed to be. And the timing couldn't be better. There are more interesting bands out there today than at any given moment in pop music history. If this were the 80's or the 90's I would probably be forced to love Vampire Weekend because there would really only be a few bands even remotely possible to like. But now there are hundreds. I can just admit I don't care about them much and move on, and know that there are so many fantastic options to try and always something new to explore. And Vampire Weekend will work for a lot of people, and I'm happy for those people."
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I think it must have been back in 2000 or 2001, when something just snapped and I couldn't keep up any more.
It used to be there was mainstream pop music and then there were genres - indie, hip hop and dance music etc, and most people's tastes used to comprise a majority of one genre and a minority interest in one or more of the others. But suddenly everyone seemed to develop individual tastes comprising a little bit of every genre.
And at the same time all the music changed. The boundaries between musical genre have blurred so much that it's impossible to hold up a record and cite it as typical of a particular genre. There's no such thing as an 'indie' band any more, it's becoming a completely redundant term.
These are strange times, so we're relying on you for some guidance...
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