Indie pop is not just "indie" that is "pop." Not too many people realize this, or really care either way. But you can be sure indie pop's fans know it. They have their own names for themselves (popkids, popgeeks) and for the music they listen to (p!o!p, twee, anorak, C-86). They have their own canon of legendary bands (Tiger Trap, Talulah Gosh, Rocketship) and legendary labels (Sarah, Bus Stop, Summershine). They have their own pop stars, with who they're mostly on a first-name basis: Stephen and Aggi, Cathy and Amelia, Jen and Rose, Bret and Heather and Calvin. They've had their own zines (Chickfactor), websites (twee.net), mailing lists (the Indie pop List), aesthetics (like being TWEE AS FUCK), festivals (the International Pop Underground), iconography (hand drawings of kittens), fashion accessories (barrettes, cardigans, t-shirts with kittens on them, and t-shirts reading TWEE AS FUCK), and in-jokes (Tullycraft songs and the aforementioned TWEE AS FUCK)-- in short, their own culture. They're some of the only people in the world who remember that Kurt Cobain used to kind of be one of them, and they've been wildly generous about the moments where one of their private enthusiasms-- like, say, Belle and Sebastian-- bubbles up into the wider world of indie music.
As of the mid-1990s, there were a hell of a lot of kids like this in America: Happy pop geeks in love with all things pretty, listening to seven-inch singles released on tiny labels, writing songs about crushes, and taking a good deal of pride in the fact that everyone else found their music disgustingly cute and amateurish and girly. This is the story of how they got there-- a partial history of the indie pop project, and a beginner's guide to what it meant.
Part One: Great Britain, Anoraks, and the Trouble With "Pure, Perfect Pop"
Let's say it's 1977. You live in London. And with punk going full-steam-- in this new scene that's abandoned sophistication and chops, this scene that insists anyone can start a band-- you start thinking: Why not me?
Only there's a problem. Punks act certain ways: They're loud and angry, or else they're arty and clever. They yell and make unpleasant noises and put safety pins through their bodies and belongings. And you...well, sorry, but you're actually pretty normal. You have a schoolboy voice and you'd feel stupid spiking your hair or pulling on bondage trousers. The punks sneer at most everything that came before them, but you don't sneer much at all, and you certainly don't see any reason to stop loving the Kinks and Syd Barrett. Truth is, you make a terrible punk-- so what are you going to do?
If you're Dan Treacy, you and your friends rename yourselves after talk-show hosts and start self-releasing your songs as the Television Personalities. Eventually, you release an album called And Don't the Kids Just Love It, which sounds like a trio of 10-year-olds got together in a basement, dropped some microphones on the floor, and played do-it-yourself. They're 10, so even when they sing something hard and serious and real-- "Hear my father shouting at my mother in the room next door"-- it comes out in vulnerable voices and rudimentary guitar figures, and when they play pop it comes out as an unselfconscious la-la-la. If you're Dan Treacy, you do something along those lines, something that in the face of so much sneer seemed completely punk. In the process, you lay some of the groundwork for one of the most misunderstood, written-off, and generally just forgotten threads in the history of the music this website covers.
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In the beginning, "indie" and "indie pop" basically was the same thing. As early as 1978, the sound of punk wasn't nearly so important as the spirit of it; for a lot of British kids, the whole notion of being in a band had changed. You didn't need to know how to play your instrument well, or have a great singing voice. You didn't have to wait for a big record company to discover you and pay for fancy recordings of your songs; you and your friends could record and release them yourselves. Music didn't have to come from pop stars on television-- it could come from the kids across town. These ideas are now eye-rolling clichés, but at the time, they were still fresh-- and as punk and new wave faded off in their own directions, a whole legion of do-it-yourself guitar bands started popping up.
These days, we remember only a handful: Pop crossovers like the Smiths, "post-punk" gems like Josef K and Orange Juice, and anything else that fits the big-picture story of how we got from punk to the present. For those bands, indie was a means to an end-- a way of making and selling records on their own. For a lot of their peers, though, indie was something more: It was their scene, and a revelation, and a liberation-- a trick to play, and a way of rejecting some of the things the world had taken for granted for the past couple decades.
One of those things was the idea that rock music was supposed to be cool-- "cool" meaning sexy, tough, arty, fiery, or fantastical. In indie, a lot of undramatic kids saw an opportunity to make music as themselves, for themselves: regular middle-class white kids in plain clothes, not especially sexy, not exactly musically brilliant, and more often sad than angry. As the 1980s wore on, the music they made began to seem more and more like an outright celebration of those details-- and a little bit of a raspberry blown at the larger musical world, which (sensibly) went right on preferring something more interesting than average white kids playing simple pop songs. The charts had "cool" covered-- these kids, in their basements and bedrooms, were trying to hand-craft a mirror-image of it, a pop world where they were the stars.
The bands at the root of indie pop were the ones that latched onto those concepts most rabidly. For their musical cues, they looked to the quaintest, least-cool roots of youth-culture music: girl-groups, 1960s guitar jangle, bubblegum chirp, rainy-day balladry. Their lyrics toed the lines between schoolboy earnestness and arch, bratty simplicity. Their guitar playing revolved around elementary chord strumming, and their production ranged from no-frills to downright primitive. Their performances were so amateurish that the word "shambling"-- as in "shambling along"-- became one name for the scene. Their fashion sense was deliberately plain, like children dressed by their mothers: stripy shirts, librarian skirts, and enough anoraks (parkas) to make that word a genre name. Their gender politics weren't just egalitarian: If anything, they celebrated the girly and the sweet, so much so that the word "twee"-- pronounced the way a baby might say "sweet," and meaning cloying, or overly precious-- became the biggest insult leveled at them.
The idea, weirdly enough, was adorable and ideologically radical at the same time. Pop was glamorous. Underground rock, through the punk and post-punk years, had been gritty and serious. This stuff was looking for something else-- something more like the charm of watching children put on plays in their backyard, where anyone can be a star, where construction-paper props turn big gestures into something small and pure, and where the whole endeavor feels like a beautiful, private gift. Such was the case with the Pastels, a Scottish band that defined the hip end of "anorak": Their lazy melodies, lackadaisical strum, and naive attitude transformed the idea of the rock band into something casual, intimate, and free from the pretense of cool. Scotland, far from the London-centric pop universe, embraced that just-some-kids-in-a-basement aesthetic like nowhere else.
And then there were the bands the Pastels inspired, like Talulah Gosh-- two Oxford girls who named themselves after a (made-up) celebrity, recruited brothers and boyfriends as their backing band, and went about pairing girl-group tra-la-la harmonies with shambling punk backgrounds. A few years later came Kurt Cobain's beloved Vaselines, who turned anorak attitude in a snotty, aggressively amateurish direction. There were the Marine Girls, who produced two albums of primitive pop sketches, inspired by the drumless minimalism of Young Marble Giants. And, of course, the Television Personalities, who went on making their scrappy neo-psychedelic pop, sounding sweeter with every record. Even the wider world got its doses of twee sound, from the fluffy pop of Aztec Camera to the stylish bounce of the Railway Children.
The bulk of indie, though, was still all about that 60s-styled guitar jangle. And in 1986, that style got its moment in the sun, with the NME's C-86 cassette compilation. Tracing the musicians who appear on this tape is a pretty good way to see just how important this strain of indie was, for a moment. In and around anorak stalwarts the Pastels and the Assistants, you'll find McCarthy (the terrific Marxist pop group that would morph into Stereolab), the Wedding Present (soon to become the face of straight-up indie popularity), and even Primal Scream (a cute little Scottish band that would soon become, well, Primal Scream). It was Stephen Pastel's label that would help launch the Jesus & Mary Chain, and over the next few years even My Bloody Valentine would dip a few toes in this scene.
And then something happened: indie became cool. Between C-86 chic and a backlash against it, between the massive popularity of the Smiths and the lovable hyperspeed rock of the Wedding Present, British indie became what American indie is today-- the fashionable music-of-choice for a certain sort of mostly-white, mostly-educated, mostly-middle-class young people, the sorts of kids the British call "student types." And if indie was becoming stylish, forward-looking, and ambitious, what would become of its twee side, the side that prized exactly the opposite?
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Enter Sarah Records, the Bristol label and fanzine founded by indie devotees Matt Haynes and Clare Wadd. Sarah clung to the details of indie, releasing 7" vinyl singles-- an inexpensive, personal format-- in hand-assembled packages. More importantly, the music it released devoted itself even more fully to everything the new, stylish indie was coming to abandon. Their first stars, the Field Mice, were willfully starry-eyed and defiantly wimpy; the bands around them embraced all forms of sweetness, earnestness, simplicity, and comfort. The Sarah aesthetic was another "radical" rejection of the whole notion of trying to be cool, trying to be tough, trying to be sexy, and-- maybe most importantly-- trying to be masculine.
"The whole record industry is still relentlessly male," Haynes told the Bliss Aquamarine zine in the early 90s. "Sure, the press will pay lip service to riot grrrl, but you just have to look at how eagerly they fall in love with Primal Scream's new we-are-the-lads, booze-drugs-and-chicks image to realize how superficial it is." Talulah Gosh, he said, "were loathed to an absurd, hysterical extent by people who basically couldn't handle the idea of women being in a band and yet not conforming to stereotypical 'rock-chick' roles or simpering at the mic-stand in various states of undress...So they were labeled cute and twee...People who use 'cute' and 'twee' as insults because they're uncomfortable with us being un-rock'n'roll and non-macho say more about their own insecurities and traditional reactionary attitudes than they do about us."
The best analogy for Sarah's position, interestingly enough, comes from the 60s. If indie was the stylish music-of-choice for those "student types"-- a bit like listening to the Beatles back in the 60s-- then following Sarah was a little like listening to folk music: It was soft, idealistic, intimate, and supposedly made by people Just Like You; its system of fanzines and singles was like some sort of private gift culture. When Bob Dylan went electric in 1965, folk purists complained that their boy was becoming "just another pop group," destroying the intimacy of folk performance. And when, in the early 90s, certain Sarah bands started dabbling in dance and noise, the label's trainspotters came out with the same complaints: That their scene-- simple, pure, and private-- was being ruined.
Matt and Clare were quick to point out that liking cute things didn't mean only liking cute things: "That's like saying Agatha Christie only liked whodunits because that's all she wrote," said Haynes. If that sounds as defensive as his reaction to the "twee" label, well, you've stumbled onto the biggest problem with Sarah: wasn't this stuff just reactionary, frightened, backward-looking pap; comfort music for prematurely old geeks who couldn't handle anything actually daring? Didn't their smoothed-out take on 60s pop mostly just cut out the parts that came from black people? Wasn't this stuff basically conservative-- lame white boys with no new ideas, holing up in their own closets and writing songs about how girls didn't like them? And why should anyone be interested in celebrating how pathetic they were?
There's a level on which those accusations is spot-on-- or at least as spot-on as they'd be about preferring the Decemberists to noise bands. For a lot of people, this music only really worked during those awkward teenage years where it genuinely helps to hear some kindred sappy spirits; as they got a little older, they turned their backs on it, digging into more progressive scenes like rave and avant-garde rock. But as part of a balanced musical diet, plenty of Sarah's records feel essential, like a bunch of children, virgins, and librarians have distilled all the sweetest pop of guitar-pop into a sparkling dream. And musically, these bands aren't incredibly different from listening to vintage American country music: They share the same simplified guitar strum, straightforward melodies, laid-back comfort, and stilted sad-song lyrics. Certain Field Mice songs can read like Patsy Cline for English schoolboys.
And the Field Mice are a good example of how it worked. Fans wound up calling this stuff just "pop," flat-out, as if what was on the radio wasn't, and listening to the first singles from this band-- just two guys and a drum machine, guitars strumming casually under melodies that are nothing but breathy hooks-- it makes sense: What part of this can you consider anything but pop? Hence the go-to expression of the Sarah fan-- "pure, perfect pop"-- and the famous, telling complaint: "In a perfect world, this would be on the radio." It's easy to understand. A song like "Emma's House" makes all-pop simplicity seems like the rarest and most beautiful thing in the world; for the four minutes you're taken by its earnest strum and puppyish melody, it seems silly that anyone would try to do anything else. The same could go for the jangling guitar-pop of the Sea Urchins, or the cosmopolitan acoustic comfort of Blueboy, or-- critically-- the chirpy bounce of Heavenly.
Plenty of people will tell you Heavenly were the greatest indie pop act of all time; some people would remove the "indie pop" qualifier. The band was a reincarnation of Talulah Gosh, with almost the same lineup; its style was a reinvigoration of anorak style, twee girl-group harmonies, and peppy pop-group energy. With Heavenly, though, the performances were remarkably tight, with guitarist Peter Momtchiloff playing impossibly twisty pop lines; their melodies and harmonies were precise and catchy, sophisticated and wistful. Most important of all, they matched elegant pop sing-alongs with sharp content, in lyrics that took indie-kid life with a sometimes-cutting seriousness: Their P.U.N.K. Girl EP is so bouncy and full of hooks that it can take a while to notice it's kind of a concept record about date rape. It didn't hurt that the band members were just the type indie pop kids love to make hearthrobs out of: three nice boys in stripy shirts and two cute, smart girls with barrettes in their hair. Heavenly could be the indie pop litmus test: If you don't find it hard to resist a song like "Tool", and if you don't find singer Amelia Fletcher singularly adorable, this stuff probably isn't for you.
Through the early 90s, England's indie pop influences bled out in a lot of new directions. Bands like the Jesus & Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine had spent the late-80s blasting indie's 60s pop aesthetic with noise; once Loveless sparked the shoegazer trend, plenty of indie pop bands followed suit. On labels like Cherry Red, bands like the Charlottes and Blind Mr Jones went as dreamy as they could manage; the singer of Secret Shine played Sarah Records' 1995 farewell party in a handmade t-shirt reading "My Bloody Secret Shine." The Field Mice picked up on shoegaze and dance music both, working their way into a sugary stew of sound. The grace and comfort of "pure, perfect pop" carved out its own spot in mainstream indie, too, thanks to bands like the Sundays. The peak of twee had come and gone, and what had largely faded was the sense of primitivism-- with everyone trying so hard to be dreamy-pretty, production values and good musicianship and sheer ambition had to come back.
The primitive spirit-- the rebellious fuck-you-I'm-twee aesthetic-- was shaping up elsewhere, as the indie concept ran its own course in America.
Part Two: America, Olympia, and Twee-as-Fuck Culture
For most of the 1980s, Americans didn't have so much "indie"-- at least not in the sense that British people used the word. There were jingle-jangle rock bands like R.E.M., but their aims tended to be fairly professional. There were independent labels, and independent bands, but a lot of them were outgrowths of punk (like the bands on SST) or back-to-basics rockers (like the early Replacements)-- music with all those punk signifiers of fire and machismo.
Jonathan Richman aside, one significant exception came from the Pacific Northwest-- something like, geographically speaking, the Scotland of America. In and around Olympia, Wash.-- home of the notoriously free-form Evergreen State College-- a different notion of indie would take shape: Kids recording primitive pop and self-releasing it on cassette.
Imagine the surprise of the west-coast punk scene, then, when it got Beat Happening, the biggest thing ever to happen to indie pop in America. The roots of Beat Happening were ridiculously primitive, and some of their early-80s recordings sound-- quite literally-- like three eight-year-olds with a guitar, some pots and pans, and a boombox, singing songs about holding hands and going swimming. By the time they released the albums they're remembered for-- say, 1988's incredible Jamboree-- they'd grown more sophisticated in sound without losing that feel; if anything, they'd honed it into something even more absurdly affecting.
The band members billed themselves as simply Bret, Heather, and Calvin, and that convention would become standard for the pop scene: First names only, as if these were just the kids who lived over on the next block. The music was reduced to the same number of moving parts: Heather with a primitive drum stomp that can make Meg White look like Keith Moon, Bret repeating four-note guitar riffs over and over, and Calvin Johnson, the first star of American twee, bellowing and yowling in an impossibly deep, booming, near-tuneless voice. When they threw distortion on the guitar and revved up their go-go-styled beats, they sounded like the Cramps or the Fall. When they played pop, they kept that kids-with-a-boombox vibe going strong: four-chord patterns and naive singalongs about apple picking and crushes. Most of what's written about this band is all about that sweet pop and those childish affectations, but that misses the substance at the core: Their music was dark, damaged, full of fright and sex and death and vulnerability-- just like any real childhood.
Set against the masculinity of punk, this stuff sounded like absolute defiance, like a call to arms. The culture of punk, after all, was a lot like culture at large: its sense of cool had to do with toughness and invulnerability and skill, with renouncing innocence and childish naiveté. Beat Happening poked holes in the fierceness of those punks by essentially outdoing them-- their hopscotch stories felt punker than Black Flag tattoos ever could, and their primitive sweetness found the one thing these supposedly daring non-conformist punks wouldn't be caught dead doing. Their sound annoyed the hell out of anyone who didn't love them, but that was a bonus. Henry Rollins could posture and yell and (famously) heckle this band, but Calvin could just lean out over his audiences and throw them candy. It was another snotty dare: "What, are you too cool for candy?"
Even more important was Calvin's role in creating indie labels. In addition to K Records, the label he ran with Candace Pederson, he'd worked on the Sub Pop fanzine, which grew up into the label of the same name. Its first motto was "Decentralize Pop Culture", yet another dream of a world in which pop music felt like tapes traded from friend to friend. Across town, another label christened itself Kill Rock Stars, with the same agenda. One Beat Happening song sealed the metaphor: "Teenage cavemen/ Rocked with skin and bones," the same way these kids would. The music being made wasn't even necessarily the point; the real joy was creating a pop world that was decentralized, local, personal, and handmade, one where a primitive bedroom recording could be enjoyed not just by your friends but by a whole community. When K celebrated itself with a festival, they called it the International Pop Underground-- as if the world's indie pen-pals were gathering for their first meeting.
The accessibility of the thing was critical. These days, K gets written off as a minor label for cutesy pop rejects, which it kind of has become. Look back to those roots, though, and you'll notice half the basis of northwestern indie rock circling nearby. It was the Olympia scene that birthed riot grrrl; it was the International Pop Underground festival that introduced Modest Mouse and Bratmobile. One of Calvin's other bands, the Go Team, briefly included a young guitar player who called himself "Kurdt Kobain"-- a kid who so loved this stuff that he'd tattooed the K Records logo on his arm.
It was the same story around the U.S.: Indie's rock and pop sides coexisting in a scrappy, private underground. In Washington, D.C., the band Unrest moved from hardcore punk roots to making a fetish of early British indie. Nearby, Jenny Toomey founded the landmark Simple Machines label, and published a detailed guide on how you could do the same thing yourself; when the label undertook the ultra-indie project of a year-long "singles club" (one themed seven-inch per month, mailed by subscription), the bands on board ranged from pop travelers (Lois Maffeo, Small Factory) to rockers and punks (Superchunk, Jawbox). In New England, in particular, strummy indie pop and rock were nearly the same thing; the Blake Babies became a mainstay of late-80s college rock, and the Lemonheads, inspired by Australia's indie pop scene, would even take a few twee moves to the mainstream.
The most striking thing about the pop strain was its relationship with gender roles. Proper American punk wasn't always so different from the cock-rock on the radio-- largely a boy's game. The indie pop world was the opposite. Much like English twee, this was a scene open to all sorts of girls, including-- maybe even especially-- the sorts who weren't inclined to shoot for sex appeal or try to rock with the boys. Suddenly these girls could decentralize into a pop culture of their own, trading tapes from one to another, whether or not they had the conventional skills of the rock boys' club. For Calvin's friend Lois Maffeo, that meant starting a band called Courtney Love (there's a story there) and playing acoustic indie-folk. For the four women in Sacramento's phenomenal Tiger Trap, that meant being able to play and release a form of "punk" that was both musically impressive and thoroughly girly, the audio equivalent of a glitter-glued notebook. Between that spirit and the ever-present sound of punk, it's no surprise that the Olympia scene spawned riot grrl.
And then the 90s came, and just like in England, "indie" and "alternative" became popular-- in precisely the hard-rocking, masculine, centralized form that indie pop usually shied away from. The mainstream honed in on the underground's hard-rock side, and, acts like Superchunk and Modest Mouse would go on to become Important Bands; acts like Tiger Trap and Heavenly would, for good reasons and bad, fade into history. And there on the television, ironically, was the K-tattooed Cobain, still wearing his cardigans and covering songs by the Vaselines.
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And then came the important part-- the part where indie pop became a culture. The alternative rock of the 90s, after all, was a return to a lot of the masculine values certain strains of indie were chipping away at. And just as Sarah Records stepped up to hold the torch for indie pop purity, plenty of Americans did something even better: They embraced the stuff with a passion. With the same defiance that fueled Beat Happening, plenty of American kids decided to damn the rest of the world and devote themselves to everything unfashionable about the indie pop aesthetic, everything your average Soundgarden fan would run from: sweetness, girliness, cuteness, brattyness, amateurish performance, and childish innocence. Sarah's Matt Haynes defended his bands against the "twee" label; when charged with the same, Americans sneered back with t-shirts that read TWEE AS FUCK. Alongside the "underground" of alternative, they'd create another decentralized underground-- a system of tiny labels (March and Bus Stop and Slumberland) and seven-inch singles (by bands like Rocketship and Honeybunch, Cub and the Softies), and an international underground of adorable kids trading handmade pop from bedroom to bedroom.
"For years and years we've had a Maximum Rock'n'Roll scene with old-school punk stuff," Tullycraft singer Sean Tollefson told The Digital Collegian. "Maybe it's a reaction to that. It was like how rockin' can we be. It could be 'how cute can we be.' Cuteness can still be punk, but in a different way." Heavenly's Amelia Fletcher saw something more like freedom in there: "It's about not being ashamed of it. I mean, I spent from age 13 to age 17 trying to act like I was 25 and trying to prove to boys that I knew all about sex, when I didn't, and trying to prove I was cool and no one could hurt me, when they could. At 18, I thought 'fuck it, I don't care anymore. I'm just gonna be what I feel like being.'"
That liberation spread in a lot of directions, even when the bands weren't being cute: The pop scene of the 90s spit out everything from comfort music to handmade oddities, everything from rambling nice-guy rock to gorgeous synthpop. Part of the joy was in that feeling of freedom and defiance-- the feeling of throwing off the shackles of "cool" and geeking out on something sweet, the feeling that anyone with a tape recorder could make something wonderful.
This wasn't indie as Serious Progressive Music-- it was indie as a dream-world lifestyle, a world full of incredibly nice kids making incredibly nice music, sending one another mix tapes in the mail, putting on shows at one another's houses. And that mirror image of the music world took shape again: suddenly there was a scene that didn't so much aspire to coolness or toughness or sexiness. Suddenly there was a scene that made stars out of shy boys who probably got swirlied in high school, and idols out of girls who dressed like librarians-- a scene where the pinnacle of style was to be a nice, normal person who made some tiny, lovely thing on your own.
If that just sounds like Lisa Loeb with shitty production values, well, yeah: A lot of indie pop was just terrible, absolutely god-awful and embarrassing. But a lot of it wasn't. It's difficult to offer a run-down of the bits that succeeded, since part of the point of the thing was the smallness of the results-- the way individual people, hand-making pop in their own ways, would wind up with something subtly idiosyncratic, something personal and special. Another part of the point was the scale of the thing, the way one hand-crafted artifact could be more important than a career; there was nothing the scene loved better than making "legends" out of some everyday kids who released one great single. This stuff was one giant scatter-- of crappy things, and of wonderful ones.
The most confrontationally twee band of them all was probably Cub, a trio of Vancouver girls whose style aspired to something like fourth-graders pretending to be Josie and the Pussycats; they gave presents to their audiences, played shows in their pajamas, and wrote deliriously juvenile songs like "My Chinchilla". Back toward Olympia, Tullycraft played the sorts of rickety powerpop and punk that some critics decided to call "cuddlecore," putting put some extra glue to the scene with a ridiculous song called "Pop Songs Your New Boyfriend's Too Stupid to Know About", which slagged off the Green Day-loving beau and wondered what had happened to the ex-girlfriend's appreciation for Heavenly. K went right on releasing records, including some terrific ones by the Halo Benders, Calvin's new band with Built to Spill frontman Doug Martsch. And Tiger Trap's Rose Melberg teamed up with Jen Sbragia in a band called the Softies-- just two voices, two electric guitars, and a distilled version of the scene's whole rainy-day sad-and-sweet girly vibe. Whether it was because of the echo of Beat Happening or a reaction against Seattle's much-loved hard rock, this region produced some of the most willfully twee music of the era.
For Berkeley, Calif.'s Slumberland Records, one of the best and most forward-looking imprints of the scene, it was just the opposite. Their amazing 1994 compilation, Why Popstars Can't Dance (answer: "because guilty feet have got no rhythm") brought together a more progressive selection of pop-united styles: early drones from Stereolab, the sharp guitar and overwhelming organ buzz of Rocketship, the shoegazing post-rock of Lorelei, the earnest strum of Honeybunch, homespun sweetness from Glo-Worm, the intensely personal home recordings of Linda Smith, and grotty English buzz from Boyracer. The selection of bands managed to touch on nearly every major strain of the scene; as an introduction to the indie pop world, it's hard to do better than this.
In D.C., the influence of England's shoegazers hit hard. Black Tambourine only ever managed to record 10 songs, all blasts of jangly noise, but it was the seed of much more than that. In addition to recording the ultimate crush song about Stephen Pastel, the group's members splintered off into any number of much-loved acts-- singer Pam Berry to groups like Glo-Worm and the Castaway Stones, and the others to Velocity Girl, a shoegazer band that became an indie pop crossover.
New England would do its share, as well. Throughout the late 80s and early 90s, bands like Blake Babies and the remarkable Honeybunch would strip indie down to an accessible pop jangle that was less cute and more just comfortable, everyday-likeable-- something just laid-back and melodic, like youth-culture's old country music. The Blake Babies' Juliana Hatfield, along with the Lemonheads' Evan Dando, would ride that vibe to something kind of like stardom. Honeybunch drummer Claudia Gonson would go on to join Magnetic Fields, who started off as the best kind of indie pop-- the group's earliest singles, a sort of oddball bedroom synthpop, seemed to come out of nowhere, like the best sort of gift. Their first and greatest success, "100,000 Fireflies", became a staple of indie mix-tape making; it was so surprising, and so surprisingly great, that it just had to be shared.
In the Midwest, Chicago's March Records collected a decent assortment of raggedy pop, and Bus Stop quickly became known as "the American Sarah Records." Minty Fresh traded in more ambitious forms of pop, including plenty of bands imported from Scandinavia's ultra-sugary scene. Co-ed trio Bunnygrunt brought the cuddlecore aesthetic to St. Louis. And, as with Boston's Lemonheads, some strange connection seemed to develop between Chicago and Australia's long-running indie world, with people like the Cannanes' Randall Lee splitting time on opposite sides of the world.
"Cuddlecore," of course, had its problems. In its earliest flush, when fans embraced truly embraced childishness as a style, there were disconcerting streaks of regressiveness in there-- some of the same problems that plagued Sarah Records, only with an extra dash of irony. There were points where cuteness felt like a caricature, and a pose: when girls went around carrying Strawberry Shortcake lunchboxes instead of purses, being twee seemed less like a rejection of cool and more like the creation of a new, worse form of it. Tiger Trap's Rose Melberg went ahead and admitted the escapism of the thing: "It's really comforting to put yourself in a child-like state of mind. The aesthetic is so immediate-- it's big, bright colors, big, simple words, simple melodies. Things like that are easy to understand. I see it as my inability to grow up. I try not to really grow up. I may want to stay ten years old." Another problem came, oddly enough, from the friendly, supportive nature of the scene: the last thing you'd ever hear a popkid say was that she "hated" an indie pop band. This makes for nice atmosphere, but pretty poor quality control.
And here's the part where I admit that I've been misleading you. Thankfully, the twee vibe was never quite as inbred and insular as it seemed. Its core constituency may have embraced TWEE AS FUCK with a passion, but the borders of their scene were relatively permeable. Bands like Velocity Girl and the Magnetic Fields were, in the end, just mainstream indie. Bands like Small Factory switched naturally from sounding pop to sounding like Versus-- a regular old indie rock band still beloved of popkids. Even with the hardest core of twee bands, one imagines that plenty of their records were sold to people with no particular concept of a pop underground-- one imagines plenty of rock fans just heard a Softies record somewhere, liked the sound of it, and slotted it somewhere in their lower racks of their CD collections. And if you asked these musicians whether or not they thought of themselves as part of a "twee" scene, the vast majority of them would surely have said no-- they'd surely have said they were just making the music they wanted to, and they wanted it to be evaluated on exactly the same terms as everything else.
Hence the eventual fate of indie pop, in both the U.S. and the UK: At some point, the scene just started to dissolve out into the indie world in general, creating a natural spectrum between the pop and the rock. By the late 90s, Americans were loving the psychedelic pop sounds of the Elephant 6 collective, and people everywhere were going nuts for Belle and Sebastian-- all polished, accessible music that would be hard to imagine without the story of indie pop lurking somewhere behind it. Mainstay pop labels like March would go on nurturing a true twee scene, including a brief vogue for geeked-out synthpop, and Kindercore would do the same for the Athens, Ga., scene. The twee rebellion would take hold in new places, from Spain to Hong Kong, and the "pure, perfect pop" would keep on coming, from acts like Club 8 and the Montgolfier Brothers. But hardly anyone, these days, thinks of indie pop as a story of its own; new bedroom acts like the Russian Futurists and the Radio Dept. get appreciated-- quite rightly-- on the larger terms of indie. When people hear music that makes sense largely in an indie pop context-- say, Wolfie's Awful Mess Mystery, an insanely good record that hardly anyone likes-- they mostly just think the band is doing something wrong; they mostly just think they're listening to crap.
Strange, then, the way we've forgotten the indie pop story-- especially given the number of people who spent time dipping into it. Poke around American indie fans in their late 20s or early 30s, and you'll find a massive cache of middle-class suburban kids who loved at least some of this stuff, even if it was only for a year or two. And how could they not? If you were a sweet kid, or a bookish kid, or a shy kid, stumbling across bits of this stuff could feel like a revelation-- the sudden appearance of some band that seemed to be coming from the same place you were. By the time you turned 21, you'd probably get over it a little, and mostly move on. But for those years-- and every time you threw your old Tiger Trap records on-- it'd remain a little miracle.
Part Three: Listen to This
A massive, three-page article about indie pop: Why now?
Two reasons. The first is that today's indie audience has managed to embrace plenty of indie pop-styled bands without ever thinking of them in those terms. There's Belle and Sebastian, who in another era probably would have released their albums on Sarah Records, or Postcard, or 53rd and 3rd. There are the Lucksmiths, an Australian band whose fans should really, really listen to some Honeybunch. There are the Ladybug Transistor, with a style that's something like psychedelic twee, and the Clientele, whose dreamy-soft moods have the same personal feel as old-English indie pop. There are the Magnetic Fields, with their popscene roots, and there's the Postal Service-- whose Jimmy Tamborello got his start with the twee-ish synth combo Figurine.
And from there stems the second reason: Today's indie world looks to be shaping up for the same kind of split that makes twee essential. Today's "indie" world is remarkably professional; its notable acts, like the Arcade Fire, are the sort that would once have released their records on major labels. At the same time, we've seen the rise of something analogous to the hardcore bands of the 80s. It's the underground world of post-hardcore noise where things are really happening, and along with that has come an old schism-- between the tough punks and the drama geeks-- with Pitchfork's own Tom Breihan worrying about the Decemberists being "indie bedwetter dweebs" in his Village Voice blog. Chances of some woman recording a series of weird, girly four-track songs in her bedroom and offering them up to the world like a beautiful private gift, the way Liz Phair once did: slim.
In all honesty, its about time the rock kids got their forward-looking tear-it-up moment: the indie world of the past decade has been far too content to strum its way comfortably along, going nowhere. But one side deserves the other, and there's every chance that during the next few years we'll need more of that homespun pop-- not professional bedwetters like the Decemberists, but more of that proud, decentralized underground. If you're young and starry-eyed, here's your chance to get in ahead of the game: Grab a cheap guitar or a cheap keyboard, a four-track or a boombox, and make what you can. Someone, somewhere, will love you for it.
And if you need inspiration, here's something like the format that introduced me to the pop world: the mix tape. Twee mixtapes were personal; they came from faraway points in the International Pop Underground, with handwritten labels and notes enclosed. No time to do that for all of you, but here's the next best thing. Pick one song per artist, and you should fill up a CD nicely.
The Television Personalities: "This Angry Silence" (1981)
It's all the grand, triumphant moves of rock-- from the guitar windmills to the desperation in the lyrics-- as played by kids who don't care whether they're pulling them off or not. It's also one of the clearest routes into the subtle trick at the heart of a lot of indie pop: the way the sound of trying and "failing" can be a success all on its own. They're not rocking in the conventional sense-- they sound way too schoolboy-wimpy for that-- but they're rocking nonetheless, and it sounds all the more grand and human for it.
Look for: And Don't the Kids Just Love It
Beat Happening: "Indian Summer" (1988); "Bewitched" (1988); "Our Secret" (1984)
It's just four notes and some barely there drums, but "Indian Summer" is magnificent, and haunting enough that a surprising number of indie bands have wound up covering it. (Dean Wareham, of Galaxie 500 and Luna, called it "indie's 'Knocking on Heaven's Door'-- everybody's done it.") The imagery is all pastoral beauty-- "breakfast in cemetery, boy tasting wild cherry"-- but there's a sense of impending loss in there that's kind of devastating: When Calvin goes hushed and sings "we will never change," it's like he's trying to make the summer last forever.
"Bewitched", on the other hand, makes the hard vibes explicit. This is one of those Cramps-styled songs, where three-note guitar blares, drums bang, and Calvin bellows as snotty as possible-- "I've got a crush on you, I've got a crush on you." In "Our Secret", one of the band's earliest tracks, you can hear all sides of the band in a fragile drone that captures some deeply affecting sense of childhood's purity. It's also more clever and complicated than it seems; notice how Calvin's voice plays the role of a bass guitar, and makes the chords change?
Look for: Jamboree and Black Candy-- or You Turn Me On, in which this "childish" band grows up into something lush and dreamy.
Talulah Gosh: "Beatnik Boy" (1986); "My Boy Says" (1987)
Talulah Gosh's short career wound its way from blasts of bouncing girl-group joy (like on "My Boy Says") to bratty punk ("Break Your Face"), but "Beatnik Boy" was their most idiosyncratically twee track-- like pop recovered from some subtly-altered version of the fifties, where minimalist English girl-groups and cutesy rockabilly guitar were the norm. The format of the title-- and that of Heavenly songs like "Lemonhead Boy" and "Cool Guitar Boy"-- would become a staple of American indie pop.
Look for: Backwash, the band's entire collected works.
Honeybunch: "Mine Your Own Business" (1991); "My Contribution to the Greenhouse Effect" (1991)
This stuff is "pop" indeed-- casual guitar strum, perky organ hums, and elegant, all-hook vocal melodies. The surprising thing is that there's nothing the least bit cute about it-- just a laid-back summer-night comfort. "Mine Your Own Business" may be their best single, and "My Contribution to the Greenhouse Effect" is a cleverly tuned breakup lyric-- all those greenhouse gases are coming from a backyard bonfire of an ex's gifts and letters. If anything in America makes that connection between indie pop and old country music, it's this band-- this time it's Patsy Cline for New England grad students.
Look for: Time Trials, the band's entire collected works.
Magnetic Fields: "100,000 Fireflies" (1995)
Now that Stephin Merritt-- and Honeybunch drummer Claudia Gonson-- have become court jesters for the NPR set, it's easy to forget how odd and idiosyncratic their early singles were. That's a shame, because this song may still be the band's best-- and the ultimate staple of indie mixtapes. There's beauty in the bouncing rhythm and chiming synths, and there's beauty in the high, choirgirl quaver of Susan Anway's voice, but the freshest bit was (of course) Merritt's lyric. The first lines make you sit up: "I have a mandolin/ I play it all night long/ It makes me want to kill myself." This was everything you wanted from indie pop-- something beautiful and strange, popping up seemingly out of nowhere.
Look for: Distant Plastic Trees, or the 6th's Wasps' Nest, which brings together guest vocalists from across the pop underground.
Tiger Trap: "Puzzle Pieces" (1988), "My Broken Heart" (1988)
Now here's the feminine principle in indie pop: one of the girliest bands ever, and all without ever sounding the least bit meek or unsure. "Puzzle Pieces" stomps along at superfast punk speed, but its true-love lyric and crisp, girlish vocals are all glitter and construction-paper hearts. On a song like "My Broken Heart", the band still blazes, and singer Rose Melberg sings sweet while still sounding absolutely assured, almost deadly.
Look for: Tiger Trap, on K Records-- highly recommended.
Heavenly: "C Is the Heavenly Option" (1992); "Hearts and Crosses" (1993); "Three Star Compartment" (1994)
"C Is the Heavenly Option" isn't Heavenly's best song, but it's a key indie pop moment. This, after all, is a duet between the genre's biggest heartthrobs-- frontwoman Amelia Fletcher and Beat Happening's Calvin Johnson, one of the group's chief supporters, teaming up to dispense romantic advice. If there's any defining indie pop experience, it's popkid couples driving around in their cars and singing along with the respective parts. More substantial is "Hearts and Crosses", the centerpiece of the band's "kind of a concept record about date rape." For a few minutes, it seems like another sharp-and-bouncy song about crushes. But then comes the bridge, in which the crush rapes the girl in question. Followed by a peppy keyboard solo-- probably the most crushing peppy-keyboard-solo in the history of recorded music. On "Three Star Compartment", the group's interlocking melodies and girl-group bounce have honed themselves to perfection.
Look for: Le Jardin de Heavenly, Decline and Fall of Heavenly, and the P.U.N.K. Girl EP-- this is the core of indie pop right here.
The Field Mice: "Emma's House" (1988)
Two guys, a drum machine, and probably the best single ever released on Sarah Records. Like Honeybunch or Australia's Go-Betweens, the Field Mice could make all-pop simplicity seem like the only thing worth doing. It's hard to pin down exactly what subtle trick they used to accomplish this, but they managed. Singer Robert Wratten doesn't just have a direct line into the schoolboy heart-- if you don't have one, he just might manage to install it for you.
Look for: Snowball, reissued with accompanying singles.
Rocketship: "You and Your New Boyfriend" (1994); "I Love You Like the Way that I Used to Do" (1996)
Some indie pop bands were amateurish; Dustin Reske's Rocketship was not. The best of Reske's productions are crisp, clear, and ambitious, bringing sweet pop bounce together with Stereolab-style organ drone and My Bloody Valentine ambience. "You and Your New Boyfriend" has the melodies and lyrics of prime-era indie pop ("you both ride your bikes past my house every day, sun or rain"), but its fizzy organ lines and sparkling production are as spaced-out as indie's progressives. "I Love You like the Way that I Used to Do" is even more ambitious, with quick, ultra-bright guitar chords racing around a world of trebly washes.
Look for: A Certain Smile, a Certain Sadness-- highly recommended; "Hey Hey Girl".
The Softies: "Hello Rain" (1995)
After Tiger Trap stopped making its rambling girl-punk, singer Rose Melberg moved on to one of the most wonderfully girly duos of the decade: the Softies played exactly the way the name implied. "Hello Rain", the lead track on their first album, is all about mood, full of deep reverb and teary, wistful sighs. It's another good litmus test for the indie pop project: if you don't find this incredibly pretty, the popkids can say, you're either a horrible person or you're trying too hard to be cool.
Look for: It's Love
Glo-Worm: "Tilt-a-Whirl" (1994)
Brushed drums, acoustic guitar, and deep-reverb vocal harmonies from Pam Berry. This is pretty, homespun pop of the best kind; ultra-pretty recording coexists wonderfully with an intimate, living-room vibe.
Look for: Glimmer, maybe.
Barcelona: "I've got the Password to your Shell Account" (1999)
This is total geek, obviously: a bratty synth-pop tune with a c:\\-prompt threat for a wandering boyfriend. In the same vein: Figurine's lovely "IMpossible", a dancepop duet in which a long-distance relationship dissolves over instant message, and one of few break-up songs where the break-up in question actually happens, during the bridge.
Look for: March Records' Moshi Moshi: Pop International Style, a two-disc collection spanning the late-nineties' shiny-sounding global twee scene-- including Barcelona and Figurine (USA), Club 8 and Cinnamon and Ray Wonder (Sweden), Spring and Le Mans (Spain), and 800 Cherries (Japan).
Pastels: "Different Drum" (1990); "Yoga" (1994); "Mandarin" (1995)
The biggest part of the Pastels' endless style came directly from their less-than-perfect voices: both Stephen Pastel and Aggi Wright drawled their way around their notes in a lazy, swooning way that's incredibly charming. (Nothing has ever been more indie pop than having boy and girl singers at the same time.) Their anorak-slacker cover of "Different Drum" is all droopy style, and as they moved along toward a much more sophisticated pop future, they learned to use that quality to beautiful effect-- on tracks like "Mandarin", or their droning gem "Yoga", those swoops and drawls are integral parts of the songs themselves.
Look for: Truck Train Tractor collects those anorak-style singles, but Mobile Safari is the real jewel. By Illumination, the band had gotten beyond "indie" and into an elegant pop dream.
Cub: "Tell Me Now" (Daniel Johnston cover, 1996)
The Vancouver trio Cub managed to encapsulate everything that bugged people about indie pop-- self-satisfied girliness, willful amateurism, and dippy, juvenile lyrics (see "My Chinchilla"). So who better for them to cover than Daniel Johnston, a mentally troubled singer whose crude, homemade recordings had an equally off-kilter notion of "pop?" Coming from this band, Johnston's lyrics still sound less ridiculous and more just ridiculously honest: "If this really is love / then let's get it on."
Look for: Betti-Cola.
Tullycraft: "Pop Songs Your New Boyfriend's Too Stupid to Know About" (1995)
Not that I've ever understood why some people go crazy for Tullycraft, but you can't talk about indie pop without talking about this song-- a big, name-dropping celebration of the in-crowd. Over some typically joyous indie-rock moves, singer Sean Tollefson lets loose his bratty yelp to pick on his girl's new U2-loving boyfriend and ask what's happened to her indie pop loves: Heavenly, Nothing Painted Blue, Lois, and...Neutral Milk Hotel.
Look for: The Long Secret, a compilation from Harriet Records. (Both the label's name and the compilation's are Harriet-the-Spy-related.)
Wolfie: "Hey It's Finally Yay" (1998)
Twee, yeah, but then again: These four kids play like they think they're out-rocking AC/DC-- with cheapy instruments in a mid-Illinois garage. They're also just bursting with joy, from the boy/girl vocals (chirpy deadpan versus bratty drawl) to the keyboard leads and tambourine-shaking buildups. Something in the combination of carefree melody, garage-pure setup, and hyper-energetic "rock"-- along with this combo's sharp songwriting skills-- make this stuff a revelation, for whatever tiny portion of listeners "gets" it.
Look for: Awful Mess Mystery, one of-- if you ask me-- the best records of the nineties.
Black Tambourine: "Thow Aggi off the Bridge" (1991)
Not the band's best moment, by a long shot-- that would be "For Ex-Lovers Only"-- but this is a prime example of an indie pop staple: the crush song. Even better, the crush here is on Stephen McRobbie of the Pastels-- and the simple, happy request, wrapped up in a blast of jangling noise, is to toss bandmate Aggi Wright into the nearest river.
Look for: The Complete Recordings, all ten songs of it.
The Hit Parade: Hitomi (1991)
I first heard this one on a mixtape from Laura Watling, who'd go on to win the Indie pop List's 2001 "Most Fancied Indie pop Personality" award. For much of their career, the Hit Parade would draw lines between indie pop and dance music-- much the same way Saint Etienne would. With this song, though, the vibe drifted way over toward Sarah Records territory: acoustic guitars winding like Blueboy over synths and drum machine, and a fresh, bedroomy pop vibe that's all sappy smiles.
Look for: The Sound of the Hit Parade
Blueboy: "Boys Don't Matter" (1994)
Blueboy named themselves after both an Orange Juice song and a gay skin mag, and their music had the same adult-cosmopolitan vibe as Honeybunch. Nylon-stringed guitar, string arrangements, lilting vocals-- this stuff wasn't "cute," just sleepy-beautiful. It also featured some deceptive lyrics: people assumed this was more weepy boy-girl stuff, even when Keith Girdler was singing about homophobia or prostitution.
Look for: If Wishes Were Horses.
Velocity Girl: "Pop Loser" (1993)
Velocity Girl were the most successful of America's indie pop shoegazers-- and on their second album, they dropped the noise and shot for full-on pop complexity. Listening to this song, from their first album, you might have guessed it would happen: this wasn't just a slice of pop scenery, but a loving, bouncy joke on the scene. The lyrics here could be coming from the ultimate college-radio popgeek, nurturing a bumbling crush: "All day long I guess I've had the same thought/ Wanted to show you all the records I bought/ Waited at the bus stop and I stared in disgust/ But then I realized you don't ride the same bus."
Look for: Copacetic for melodic shoegazer buzz, Simpatico for classically styled near-British pop.
The Vaselines: "Molly's Lips" (1988)
It's one of the best-known songs on this list, thanks to Nirvana's cover of it. The original, though, is a surprising combination of twee style and, well, something else: the jangling backing and Frances McKee's high, choirgirl vocals are vintage C-86 indie, but Eugene Kelly's deadpan drone under the "chorus" gives it a jolt of danger. The sound is a perfect example of Scotland's shambly style-- and the strange, subtle charm that can make a rickety indie production seem like a better idea than a well-made production.
Look for: The Way of the Vaselines, a terrific compilation of this band's shambling punk.
Small Factory: "If You Hurt Me" (1993)
Just like the original wave of punk, indie pop had a local, just-between-fans vibe that managed to make certain songs feel a lot more wonderful than they had much right to be. Such was the case for this one, from Rhode Island indie underdogs Small Factory. It came as part of Simple Machines' year-long singles club, paired with a Tsunami song for the August edition: a coy little lovesong that unravels into a terrific joke.
Look for: Industrial Evolution, a compilation of singles. Even better, Simple Machines' celebratory Working Holiday compilation-- all the records from that singles club, along with a disc of live performances from the festival that capped the project off.
The Sea Urchins: "Pristine Christine" (1987)
It was the first single ever released on Sarah Records, and the sound is appropriate: This is a perfect example of what that "pure, perfect pop" agenda revolved around. Nothing particularly wimpy here-- just a jangly, infinitely 60s pop song, somewhere between the Byrds and the Monkees, performed in chipper, upbeat style.
Look for: Stardust.
Boyracer: "In Love" (Marine Girls cover, 2002)
End your tape with this one. Boyracer's ultra-noisy pop buzz was a favorite of the indie pop set, but don't tell frontman Stewart Anderson that: the last time I tried to recommend his work to Belle and Sebastian fans, he wrote to let me know he felt more affinity with old Australian punk. Which is right, and audible. Then again, this 2002 track is a cover of the early English indie primitivists the Marine Girls (including future Everything but the Girl singer Tracy Thorn), revved up into a joyfully bratty blast of guitar buzz. It's appropriate, for a bitter, sarcastic song about an ex: "I hear you're getting along without me/ I hear you're in love."
Look for: We are Made of the Same Wood-- or, for more of the high-energy pop blast on this song, 2002's To Get a Better Hold You've Got to Loosen Yr Grip.
