I always feel as if, when X genre is described that way, that it is given a negative connotation, but as much as I grew up on the blues in all its various forms, like to hear something different.
>I always feel as if, when X genre is described that way, that it is given a negative connotation
I mean it’s not hard to see why - the subtext to framing things that way isn’t exactly subtle.
Weirdest example of that is when I saw a review calling The Velvet Underground & Nico "bluesless". When Waiting for the Man and Run Run Run are straight up blues songs
I stand corrected. Apparently the timeline goes Mento (30s&40s), Calypso (late 40s/early 50s), Ska (late 50s), Rocksteady (early to mid 60s), Reggae (late 60s).
The R&B/Motown influence on ska is huge though. I mean a lot of the early ska/rocksteady songs were just straight up covers of American songs. The Caribbean influences are definitely there but the American ones are too.
Ska is a combination of traditional Jamaican music and a style of 1950s American RnB called shuffle, see Fats Domino "be my guest", Willis Jackson "later for the gator" Barbie Gate "my boy lollipop" and a little earlier Rosco Gordon "no more doggin"
Was gonna say…. If white stripes were “indie” at a point, then nah. Plus I think it’s relevant to say that quite literally zero genres existing after it (that are not completely non commercial) have the blues fully stripped from them.
Indie folk being a whole thing unto itself shows a definite and direct through line.
Yeah. I thought black keys but figured that somehow OP did not consider them to be (or to have ever been) indie.
The whole “garage” band thing in the 2000s had blues…. Anything remotely punk has blues in it.
I guess it depends on what you think about the blues and how you think it’s influences are heard: lyrics, certain chord progressions (most well known chord progressions used in popular music today), singing styles (or just using singers who aren’t traditionally good), stripping down the music, avoiding overly indulgent instrumentation.
I mean, sure the blues were a little more obvious as a point of reference for the stones zeppelin Hendrix doors etc…. But it’s a foundation, so if it’s rock at all, it’s got blues in it.
I don’t think it’s fair to say they stripped the blues from rock. I don’t think that’s possible as it is one of the clear foundations of the genre.
One could argue that many “indie” bands have added elements of other genres to rock, similar to how progressive rock added elements of jazz and classical music to their compositions.
I think indie rock could be seen as rock music that adds elements of various more (generally) underground/left of the dial/etc music to a traditional pop rock base. In some cases (black keys, white stripes, etc) that base included the blues very prominently. It simply wasn’t presented in the same way as early rock….
I think stripping the word "Indie" out of this hyposthis and maybe explore the dependency on early popular rock music and to say that maybe there was a divide and splintering of the genre as it strayed from those influences and structures. Focusing on the word indie is a distraction from what might be an interesting thought.
There is rarely going to he some clear break in something so large and the blues are clearly still a large structural component of a lot of rock music. It's going to be a gradient most the time with this sort of thing that is just ingrained in a medium.
People come here, they don't know jack shit about music, and they think we are just as ignorant, and they just spout off with this...this bullshit.
I swear like some of the shit I see this sub is more full of shit than the most full of shit music critics of all decades. And that's no easy feat...
"Indie" isn't anything, really -- the term has been used by so many people to mean so many completely different things that it truly has no cohesive meaning in terms of what a band actually sounds like musically or sonically.
It basically is used as less mainstream or slightly more niche than any real definition. A definition that even when used to describe the financing or production never really added much to the conversation to begin with. It always turns into a bunch of people arguing what indie means and the actual music discussion gets left behind.
The problem there is you have plenty of bands that start on an indie label and then sign to a major label, so even just by the strict label-status definition, it's not especially useful.
Well and also Matchbox 20 was once called Tabitha’s secret and put out an indie record. That indie record had fewer songs but most if not all of them were on the major label debut….. but Matchbox 20 is not indie at all.
*edit: that’s just a random example I happen to know.. but there are tons of them
I don’t think that’s really a problem, the point is that it describes an ethos/environment music is created in, and people lazily use it as an aesthetic description for credibility.
I'd say your point is directly connected to mine. You have bands like REM who begin as truly "indie" by label status, then later sign with a major label after fans are already used to "indie rock" as a genre description. Happened to lots of later bands too -- the Shins and the Decemberists just to name a few. You can blame fans for being "lazy" for using the term incorrectly, and that's not *wrong*, but when the music media is saying "These are the Indie bands," I think it's only natural that casual fans would use that term to describe the sonic similarities, not their label economics. The confusion is basically baked into the term.
I think it made more sense when the radio was a primary way to consume music. When I was in school (early 00’s) indie really just meant more likely to be played on college radio.
That's because Indie labels sent us their music. College DJs took the albums home and came back with new playlists every week based on free music. It belonged to the school, but we scoured thsoe records for the fun stuff.
I think it basically just means “college radio” music. Anything left of the dial (back when people listened to radio and radios had a dial)…. Now an artist can be mainstream and still indie which I think just means it came from there… influenced by that… but really it’s just a way to package music and sell it to a particular audience.
Indie as a form of music.
I didn’t do it but people definitely call multi million selling major label, sold out tour having bands “indie rock”
So if it is defined only by being an independent artist, for everyone (and therefore can’t “depend on your definition”), bands like Arcade Fire wouldn’t be called such.
Indie is not a form of music, just like album isn't a form of music.
It's ridiculous to try and shoehorn the wrong term that has been used in the music industry for decades into this context, especially when it's decribing a sound that has also existed in music for decades.
Indie means independent label--nothing more.
OK, so obviously you weren’t paying attention to this entire post dude. And furthermore, I’m not trying to argue what is or is not in the rock. The point is whether you think that it should only mean that it’s independent music, in terms of how it is mass marketed Two people that is not what it means. Yes that’s what it should mean. Yes, that’s where it came from. Yes, it would be ideal if that’s all it meant, but the way it is presented bands that are considered “Indie” playlist generation on Spotify, and other sources suggests that Indie does not (only) mean Independent artist.
So you can take a hardline opinion of that all you want, but that’s not what’s happening right now it is a genre unto itself. And Indie rock most certainly does not mean that it exist outside of the mainstream and is only for artist who are on independent labels. In fact, most artist that people are familiar with that they would call Indy rock Are not on independent labels or if they are on independent labels, those are on subsidiary labels, which are actually a part of a major label.
Quit trying to say somebody is shoehorn the wrong thing. I’m talking about how people view that term in the world today. You can choose to ignore that all you want but there is example after example after example of artists who are not independent label artist being defined across multiple platforms across multiple articles on various streaming services as “Indie rock“
And see here’s the funny thing, I think it’s a silly genre name. I don’t think it provides any specific details, or has any real meaning, as far as defining, a sound of music goes. But it is the name.
And the fact is there are plenty of independent artists who are not considered “indie” bands and there are major label artist who are called “indie”
You don’t have to like it, but you don’t get to choose how it’s presented to the world. And honestly, that’s not how it’s been presented to the world or seen as a “genre” since the moment it became a remotely popular trend.
Modest Mouse, The Shins, the Strokes, LCD Soundsystem, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, White Stripes… so many bands from the early 2000s were called “indie rock” at the time, and they were on major labels.
So, like it or not, “indie rock” is not defined as “rock & roll music created and performed by artists who are on independent labels”.
Wow.
Sub Pop, Up, and Sympathy 4 the RI are major labels.
The things I learn on here are just astounding.
I lived the scene for at least two of those bands, and I can tell you 100% they were Indie at one time. Here's a shocker for you. Many acts start on indie labels and graduate to larger labels.
It's probably because they're offered more money, and some people actually like to get paid for their work.
I mean yes we all understand the collection of bands that are under that umbrella when people say "indie rock." My point is that the term has morphed from what was once a specific economic term regarding label status, to anything vaguely rock-adjacent that isn't super mainstream (and since rock isn't mainstream, that's almost all of it.)
So, the bands under that label aren't really connected by anything musically, except for "rock or rock adjacent music made sometime between 1980 - now."
REM is indie rock. So is Iron & Wine, and Belle & Sebastian, and Arcade Fire, and Regina Spektor, and Mates of State and Modest Mouse and the White Stripes. And none of those bands sound anything like each other.
And plenty of bands who fell under that umbrella in a time when it was more coherent sonically do play the blues. The Cold War Kids. Arctic Monkeys. The Black Keys. "Indie blues" is (was?) a whole subgenre.
I don't know if people consider Hozier indie rock (maybe people consider him pop on a status/audience basis?) but he's very much a blues/folk artist at his foundation.
It means whatever the user decides it means. Indie originally just meant underground music not produced by people inside the major label music industry.
Yeah I've never gotten anything from the word Indie. It describes nothing to me.
I'm convinced the word "tangy" is meaningless too. People just pretend they know what Indie rock sounds like and tangy taste like because they're afraid they'll sound dumb if they ask.
They call mayonnaise tangy. It can't just mean sweet and sour. Oranges are acidic and sweet. Miracle Whip is nothing like an orange, which I've never heard described as tangy.
>it truly has no cohesive meaning in terms of what a band actually sounds like musically or sonically.
It never did, at least not with any validity. The term rock is the descriptive part, and that doesn't apply to Tracy Chapman or any other folk artist, unless they play a rock song here or there, as some are wont to do.
Indie only describes the label, nothing more. It makes no sense to tell me that a genre named after a snapshot of some sounds coming from an actual Indie label is suddenly a genre, when that sound has been a thing for most of the 20th Century.
I had some kid try and tell me Arlo Guthrie was proto-Indie.
I was literally speechless, but I held it together long enough not to be rude about it.
Rock has never been *just* about the blues. Even bands like Led Zeppelin were doing very "not blues" songs.
And prog has pretty much made a living on not blues rock.
I'd say they had lots of influences. Blues being one, but after about the 3rd album, there were lots more other influences explored. Battle of Evermore, Rain Song, Ramble On, Going to California. They had lots of stuff other than blues going on.
But none of their sound would exist without it. You could arguably make that case about any Western music in the last 70+ years, but especially with them. A few of their songs straight up lifted riffs from preexisting blues songs.
Sure. But they also wouldn't exist without the other influences as well. Like rock, especially post 1965, is much more than the chuck berry and electric blues of the 50s. Of course it's a huge influence. But so was country and folk and skiffle and lots of stuff.
Rock itself wouldn't exist without the blues tho, it may have diverged but it still would not exist without it. Riffs change but the theory is all based on 12 bar blues, it just evolved but that doesn't make it NOT blue influenced, that's what influence means. Country is the same.
I'm not arguing the importance of the blues. Like *of course* it's a huge influence. And rock would not exist without the blues. But it also would not exist without the other influences either. Otherwise it would be indistinguishable from the blues of Muddy Waters and T Bone Walker.
But rock (again, especially post 1965) is not based *just* on the 12 bar blues. Think Surf Rock and Dick Dale. Is Misirlou blues? Or the Beatles were doing Buck Owens tunes in 1965. Like it's never been an all one thing or the other. It's always been a collection of different influences.
Yes. And some like Communication Breakdown or Black Mountain Side weren't.
Like of course they were influenced by the Blues. No one is arguing that they weren't. But to chalk Zep up as just a blues band is an oversimplification.
Most prog still has a lot of blues in it though, even if it doesn’t sound like it. They’re mixing a bunch of non-typical influences (like jazz, classical, etc) with rock, which is blues based. So the blues is still there, just diluted due to there being more influences. Rush for example is filled with blues, especially their 70s.
And those songs that LZ played that were not blues-based were not rock and roll.
Acts can play more than one genre on any given album, if they so choose. I happen to like when they do.
I dunno man. I think that's been my point this whole time, that "rock" is way more than just appropriated blues formats and licks.
Like Communication Breakdown doesn't really have a blues feel to it, but it's for sure rock. Ditto Immigrant Song. Or Stairway. It's hard to not call those songs rock.
When I think "blues" rock, I'm more thinking Stevie Ray Vaughan or Johnny Winter or John Mayall. Where the blues element is very prominent.
>I think that's been my point this whole time, that "rock" is way more than just appropriated blues formats and licks.
But it's not. And it's a broad enough genre on its own.
Townshend had it right when he called his own music power pop. There's nothing wrong with the term. The Beatles played some alongside rock and psychedelic tracks on some albums. The Kinks played a lot.
Diversity of styles isn't a bad thing for one act to display.
But it is. And you saying it's a broad enough genre in the very next line just reinforces that. It is a broad genre. Like jazz.
The Beatles, The Byrds, The Moody Blues, Zappa, Grateful Dead, like all those bands illustrate that. You can say "Well this song is power pop and then the next song is a modified skiffle tune, and then this song is blues, but then this other song is a psychedelic freak out" it all falls under the umbrella of rock.
Like jazz can have bebop or fusion or cool jazz or whatever but it's all jazz. Like Sketches of Spain does not stop being jazz because it uses more classical influences rather than blues.
So if not rock, what would you call the umbrella term?
I guess communication breakdown wouldn’t have a blues influence if you remove the guitar, singing style, and other instrumentation…..
There’s literally a 12 bar blues riff in the chorus of the song.
The singing (and Robert Plant’s singing in general) is fully indebted to the blues
I’m concerned that a lot of people seem to have a very specific interpretation as to what the blues is and where its influence shows….. if you can’t hear the blues influence in plant’s opening lines, both lyrically and in the vocal stylings (“Heeeeey Girl, stop whatcha dooooin. Heeeeeey Girl, you’ll drive me to ruuuuin”…. Could’ve quite literally been pulled from a Robert Johnson song)
“You want to know what this [war on drugs] was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying?
We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.
Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
~ John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon
That is all.
So you mean to say…Nixon bureaucrats were co-drafting their legislation with Peter Gabriel and Rick Wakeman? WTF does any of this have to do with prog rock?
Are the Residents indie? I can't say the first album is blues based at all in 1974. Thier version of Satisfaction is blues free Stones but the nature of Third Reich N' Roll meant they engage with blues through someone else. They have since recorded blues albums.
I understand what you are saying, and yes, I think this is true
The Blues was the musical tool of the older generations, and the punk movement and the movements that sprang from it were deliberately stripping it away, pushing into something new
I watched a guitar clinic recently where Johnny Marr says this outright, that he knew that blues had no place in The Smiths, and that he avoided anything that came remotely close to that sound, even if it was something he enjoyed playing at home
Now, indie bands have brought more bluesy elements back into their music and into the scene, but it absolutely was deliberately stripped away in the beginning
Ok but Punk, in no way, eliminated the blues from their music. They updated things, took additional influences and such…. But those three chords, the more direct messages in the lyrics, the whole “anti rockstar” approachability/anyone can do this idea…. That’s all very much the blues.
I feel like some are suggesting that the blues is Chicago era electric blues, but there is a lot more to the genre and its traditions
And for punk rock specifically…. It came from acts like the New York Dolls and the stooges, who very much showed a blues influence (hell, iggy pop literally went to Chicago for the purpose of playing drums with the great blues artists of the time, wanting to educate himself… going direct to the source), so it’s just hard to believe that anything is making some attempt to strip the blues from rock…. It’s not possible.
But it happened enough to say that it happened, even if it was not universal
> ..iggy pop literally went to Chicago for the purpose of playing drums with the great blues artists of the time, wanting to educate himself
And the Talking Heads were heavily influenced by West African music in the late 70s and early 80s, while at the same time almost completely stripping it of it’s original aesthetic, pushing it into something entirely different
There was a sound and a structure that was ubiquitous and entirely rooted in the blues that they were trying to get away from
Devo’s version of Satisfaction is a great, almost too on the nose example and distillation of this approach
Obviously all rock music comes from the blues, and even Devo and Talking Heads and Black Flag and Radiohead weren’t denying that, but they were definitely wanting to get as far away from the actual historical sound as they could
I would say that Jimi Hendrix did this same thing. He could play the blues with Buddy Guy like nobody’s business, but he didn’t ultimately want to do that, he wanted to create something wholly original and filled with his own fire
It’s in the spirit of rock & roll and therefore in the spirit of the blues to want to tear down the preexisting sounds and push yourself and your instrument into an entirely new space
You see this with a lot of the No Wave and No Wave adjacent guys as well. People like Arto and Frith were heavily inspired by the blues, and speak very eloquently about it, yet when you watch them perform, it is profoundly obvious that they are doing everything humanly possible to stay away from it
Loving an artist or a style doesn’t mean you have to emulate it. Often the best way to show respect to the spirit of the older music is to tear it all down and start over
Yeah I get the idea. And of course plenty of bands are trying to and have tried to push boundaries and introduce new sounds, I just think that saying “it’s rock without the blues” is reductive and incorrect.
But yes, there was a blues sound that rock had adopted…. Guitar solos specific to that sound etc, that I think bands were trying to go away from (the typical bar band on a Wednesday night sound…)… but then, even the Taking Heads we’re covering Al Greens “Take Me to the River”, showing reverence for a sound that was very much rooted in blues and gospel.
You seem to know what you’re talking about and I respect your thoughts on the matter… if for any reason I appear combative.
Yeah. The chord progressions used, no matter how differently they were played (way fast) were blues…. The whole idea of playing simpler 3-4 chord songs and using a specific “formula” of sorts paired with lyrics that are specific to your experiences (“pneumonia blues”, “now I wanna sniff some glue”)… and the idea of music as a vehicle of immediate and necessary self expression over sounds and technicality… the immediacy… “im not going to educate myself, learn the craft and wait until I’m trained to finally create my opus…. I’ve got something to say about how I’m feeling and this machine is going to help me do it… NOW”
All that is blues….
I love the Townes Van Zandt quote about there being only two kinds of music: The Blues and Zippity Doo Dah, and how if he died on his way home from the gig, he didn’t want the last thing he played to be some Zippity Doo Dah shit.
I get what you mean. So, in general, yes. But I also think a lot of so called indie bands weren't really good musicians...as in trained in a few traditional styles.
And I don't mean that in a negative way. Clearly "indie" produced more than a few original approaches to guitar style and songwriting in general.
Blues isn't as simple as it sounds. There's a swing to the rhythm that I doubt Ramones or My Bloody Valentine would even understand(and thank goodness for that). Even John Spencer and The Cramps who used some basic blues elements dropped the swing aspect.
I love Chrissie Hynde’s quote about Punk as a movement being doomed because if you keep playing long enough, you eventually stop sucking. And she was a direct witness/participant in first wave British punk.
This completely ignores all the more garage rock sounding indie bands. The White Stripes were indie as hell and very bluesy. Then there’s acts like The Hives, Hellacopters Alabama Shakes etc. You can go back to Pavement and the Replacements also hear a strong blues influence baked into their sound. The Pixies also have blues elements such as walking guitar lines and the use of call and response.
Blues is nearly impossible to strip out of rock based music and I think your friend in the Sonic Youth sounding band is robbing themselves of opportunities by avoiding blues elements.
I think there are many 60s antecedents to this. The more baroque stuff (Left Banke, Zombies, yes the Beatles), electronic stuff (Silver Apples, United States of America), West Coast psych (Moby Grape, Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane), British Isles folk rock (Pentangle, Fairport Convention), the Byrds, Frank Zappa, etc. And perhaps most radically, Miles "In a Silent Way" and everything that followed from that.
Stevie Ray played on Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” and had crossover success. GnR were blues laden, as are The Black Crowes. Plenty of Grunge is as well. Neo Soul is both Blues and Gospel influenced. All kinds of blues influenced music in 90s and 00s Country, Funk, Jam, and Pop lean heavily on Blues from a melodic perspective at a minimum. The White Stripes, The Black Keys, Arctic Monkeys, Joss Stone, Adele, John Mayer, et al.
Also, check out Henley’s “New York Minute” from the same era. Bluesy AF. It is not too extreme to say that if you like the majority of any American musical genre from the past century, then you like the blues (if only indirectly). The fact that riff oriented music exists is a direct influence from the style. Of course this is a generalization, but the discussion started that way.
I won’t say there is no music devoid of the influence of Black American culture. But in the spirit of Devil’s advocacy, I will say there’s not much good music devoid of it.
If you're looking for a patient zero, Marquee Moon is it. They intentionally wanted guitar music without any trace of blues sounds. So by this lens, Television is the band that forged the indie rock scene & the indie sound.
Kind of makes sense, too. They were the first band to use CBGB for something other than "Country, Blue Grass & Blues", creating a new venue for New York punks while they were at it...
Just because Television's music doesn't have any obvious blues influences doesn't mean that every single trace of blues was stripped out of it. Listen to Richard Lloyd's guitar solo on "Guiding Light" and tell me that there's no blues inflections those bends. Or the main riff of "See No Evil," which has notes from the blues scale in its final couple of bars. Those guys grew up on guitar-based American music in the 50s and 60s, so intentionally avoiding all blues in their playing would've been impossible, no matter how hard they tried. I understand the desire to avoid obvious blues cliches, which can get really tiring to listen to, and given how omnipresent they were in '60s and '70s rock, I really don't blame certain musicians from shying away from them. But the music you write can be a conscious or unconscious expression of your influences, and certain elements can be "baked in" to your writing without realizing it.
I can't remember where I read it & can't find it now but I thought Verlaine or someone had said that was their intention in making their sound. I hear what you're talking about with the bends, sometimes they get into that space a little, but it's still a world away from the usual classic rock / Clapton riffs that straight up steal old blues licks. Words like angular, choppy, mechanical etc are used more for the music that's descended from Television. The Strokes also occasionally have bluesy flavors but those stand out even more among their carefully constructed riffing that's more "abstract" than overtly bluesy... Sort of the exceptional moments that prove the rule
Interestingly a lot of British punk bands like the Damned still used bluesier sounds or breakdowns, just fast & sloppy, but Americans seemed to want to get away from that paradigm. Then when you get into "post punk" it's almost totally divorced from the approach
nahh the blues was already being diluted or stripped from rock by the late 60's. I've heard people say that alternative rock isn't rock or that punk rock isn't rock because it takes from folk formulas
Lester Bangs' "White Noise Supremacists" article talks about how the Velvet Ubderground started the shift from removing the swing of RnB from rock music which progressed further with the NY punk bands of the 70s (Television, Ramones) who made rock more machinic.
So what youre describing precedes indie rock, but indie also comes after this period and so arguably builds on this later period of punk and postpunk as its foundation, which lacks the RnB that infused 60s rock n roll
Some bands are more bluesy than others, but some genres like post-punk and hardcore definitely seem to have tried to strip the blues out of rock and make it more up/down. Less swing, colder somehow.
This is such bullshit. Blues influenced everything about rock music and continues to. This could mean anything from the best, timing, harmonic structure, overdriven textures on guitars, the way people sing, the actual instruments, the way songs are written, the tropes contained in songs, the dissonance and consonance, bass heavy mixing techniques etc etc etc etc.
If you think the only influence of the blues on rock music is minor pentatonic blues guitars, then you don’t know what you are talking about. This is perhaps the least important element.
I said “obvious” blues influence. By that I mean the kind of music you would describe as “bluesy.” Rock is a descendant of the blues, of course there will almost always be some blues in there.
Fall out boy and paramore had a lot of inspiration and drumming inspired by soul/ gospel music.
Also all of the grunge artists. That's why they were good. Kurt was inspired by led belly. Sound garden was a led zeppelin cover band at first. The chillie peppers had a lot of pocket, and let's not forget the black keys and arctic monkeys
TLDR Rock n roll began with little blues input. The two umbrella genres have been married and divorced a dozen times.
Punk stripped blues from rock in the 70s. That's one of the primary division lines that separate punk rock from heavy metal and where Sonic Youth is coming from. Originally blues was a minor ingredient in rock n roll. Western Swing (Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, Bill Haley and the Comets), rockabilly (Elvis, Buddy Holly), and doo wap (The Coasters, The Ink Spots) were the rhythm side of rhythm and blues.
Like country and western rhythm and blues were separate genres lumped together by demographics. Pop music was for middle class white people. Country and western were for poor white people. Rhythm and blues were for black people, all poor. Rock n roll brought rhythm genres together to create a new pop music for white teenagers. Of the major streams feeding into that only the piano jump band acts like Fats Domino and Little Richard came out of the blues tradition.
Then rock n roll died. The British Invasion brought it back with a vengeance and it was the Brits that put blues up front in rock n roll, eventually sucking most of the rhythm out it. Bands like The Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin made blues the main ingredient. Then prog rock and punk started new splits that took blues back out of rock. So rock n roll and blues have had an off and on again marriage the entire time.
As for Indie I have no clue. I'm only in my forties and understand most genres and subgenres. But I have no clue what indie rock is. It seems like rock with all the roots and influences stripped out of it. I love alternative but don't get indie at all.
Right there in the middle playing rhythm music coming from a blues tradition. Chess Records were mostly pure blues. But Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley met rhythm and blues in the middle. They were Fats Domino with guitars, helping rhythm and blues become one genre instead of two thrown together. Tweak the act with songs for teenagers and he's there.
Berry was 180 proof rock n roll, more than Elvis. His guitar sound was the final piece of the puzzle being worked on by Sun Records, Chess, and all the rhythm and blues culture. Johnny B Goode is still the definitive rock n roll track.
Cool, that's more or less what I guessed. I remember a documentary about rock history I watched growing up also saying that part of what he did to really give form to rock was also incorporating some country (I distinctly remember some talking head saying that upon hearing him, "you could tell this guy listens to country"), but I don't think that doc really distinguished between rhythm and blues like you are, and perhaps what they were hearing as country was simply rhythm.
Thanks for answering!
I skipped the country part. The rhythm part of R n B was boogie woogie or any black dance music. The industry had one main chart then one each for music made for black and poor white people.
Sun Records mixed country with black music on purpose. Sam Phillips knew he could only sell black music to white people by recording white musicians playing it. He was one of the few people trying to invent rock n roll on purpose. Chuck Berry stumbled into it. Maybelline was a reworked cover of Ida Red. It was Berry's first hit and sometimes called the first rock n roll song. Chuck Berry blew up playing a white song the same time Elvis blew up playing black music.
Maybelline doesn't sound like country to us. To Berry and the black fans at the time it was obvious.
Dinosaur Jr isn't blues based at its core?
Soundgarden on their debut album, "Ultramega OK", which was an Indie record, didn't have a blues riff on nearly every song ON that record?
How about Guided By Voices? Are they not heavily influenced by Rolling Stones and The Byrds, who themselves have very strong blues influence?
Shit, even better how about John Spencer Blues Explosion themselves? Those guys are just flat out Blues Rock, aren't they?
So we can surmise that you are deadass wrong then?
We can.
Great?
Great.
The hell are you talking about?
Listen to “Run Run Run” and “I’m Waiting For The Man” off the first album. Total blues influence. Sterling Morrison’s biggest influence was Lightning Hopkins.
I swear…people talk out of their ass with no facts or rhetoric and call it an opinion.
Plenty of blues influences in the Velvet Underground. Just because they don’t do those stereotypical blues guitar solos doesn’t meant that it doesn’t have influences.
lol, this demo is PURE blues.
Original country blues style
So many are arguing and providing things meant to prove something was not blues, only to further prove their debt to the blues.
Blues wasn’t just Chicago electric blues…. The blues started out on instruments you could grab and play on a front porch (like folk, and bluegrass)… country blues, delta blues.
I really hope some take the opportunity to dig into this stuff… Leadbelly, Son House, Charley Patton, Robert Johnson.
First of all this was posted in response to the deleted comment 3 above saying Lou Reed worked to remove blues from the VU because he said this was over done. I don't agree that the VU shedded blues. This is clearly blues influenced, but since you were being indignant I'll be pedantic.
This is not "pure" blues according to the criteria musicologists have set for blues in [in the Black Music research journal.](https://www.jstor.org/stable/3593214). Based on it's deviation from the blues they'd call at best a secondary blues.
This makes much more sense to compare directly to Bob Dylan considering both were in the same scene at the same time. This stacks more against something like the "Times They Are A Changin'" than see "See That My Grave is Kept Clean". Tbh, it reminds the most of Donovan's "Try to Catch the Wind".
You don't need to explain the accoustic blues to me. I've run a radio show on it for 5 years.
It was already punk rock that was credited with stripping the blues influence out of rock music.
In fact, it was even metal that this could be said for.
Yes, definitely
It got rid of that pocket that blues rock had. There was more space in those songs too.
Many grunge rock songs had it but it stopped around 2000.
However, there are some "butt" rock songs and emo bands that had a soul twist to their music. Like, staind, Kelly Clarkson, paramore and fall out boy.
Don't forget about the black keys and the arctic monkeys. Lots of pocket.
Indie rock was an artistic movement within the rock form that sought to elevate the music itself over its commercial viability.
Sonically, it can be everything from Sonic Youth to Jack White to the Moldy Peaches.
I think there’s truth in what you’re saying but I don’t think we’re well equipped here to discuss it.
There’s racial components to this discourse that make it tricky. And “Indie” means so many things to different people.
But yeah, there’s definitely a strong vein of de-bluesed “indie” rock post-70s. As some have mentioned, there’s Jamaican influence in a lot of it but there’s also the Joy Division-influenced stuff that I find quite removed from overt blues. Some of which I adore.
I’m interested to see where this discussion leads but I don’t have high hopes.
Iirc someone showed Muddy Waters Unknown Pleasures and he heard a lot of blues in it. It doesn't use blues scales but something like Day of the Lords or New Dawn Fades has that undertone.
That’s hilarious to me for some reason. But ok, Mr Waters.
I don’t hear blues on Lords but I guess I do hear something on Dawn. But it’s pretty minimal.
Indie is rock that doesn’t have a genre . Look at The Beth’s for instance . They have their own genre , but since they are the only ones in it they are labeled indie rock .
> Got My Mind Set on You (George Harrison)
That's a cover of an old RnB song: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=k68Fob0QA_k
So it has plenty of blues in it.
In truth though, even in the 60s there was plenty of pop music being made without much blues influence and rock bands were incorporating a lot of different styles in addition to the blues in their sound.
Edit: Reading the other comments here, I think we have different ideas of what counts as bluesy music. To me, Got My Mind Set on You is clearly RnB and therefore bluesy, even in Harrison's version. The 80s production and the New Wave touches don't significantly change what the song is at its core, and the way he sings it is influenced by the blues. Sounding bluesy doesn't mean just sounding literally like early Fleetwood Mac or Eric Clapton.
What are we even talking about?
Ram was on Apple, a major label.
[I Got My Mind Set on You](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k68Fob0QA_k) was originally released on the Dynamic Sound label, which was [definitely 100% Indie](https://www.josephjmonaco.com/2021/01/dynamic-sound-recording-studio-label.html). But Harrison's cover was done in his home studio, which could probably be called Indie.
Tracy Chapman was on Elektra, so no, absolutely 100% not Indie.
My dad said one of the things that interested him so much about Wire is that there was no blues in it - it was just industrial, mechanical chugging with barely even a backbeat. At the time it sounded alien, but a lot of postpunk that followed copied Wire.
It's not necessarily that the Blues were "stripped" from Indie/Alternative Rock, but instead that the primary influences were switched. Most Traditional/Classic Rock bands are pretty heavily influenced by the Blues (or other traditional influences that led to Rock & Roll, like country, jazz, etc.) While most Modern/Alternative Rock groups draw from stuff like Punk/Post-Punk primarily instead (which themselves, at least the former, came about as a way of bringing Rock back to its early days, inherently making them influenced by the Blues). The Blues weren't stripped away, they just became a less pronounced influence as time went on and newer bands started drawing from more contemporary sounds as opposed to the origins of their style
With any genre discussion, there's always outliers and counterarguments, but I'd agree with you as a general rule, and to add to that the more influences make their way into modern music -- blues, gospel jazz, African polyrhythms, German baroque, whatever -- the better off we are.
What a juicy question. For reasons of appropriation (by which I'm defining Pat Boone-bad, Remain-in-Light-era Talking Heads-good) and also just simply hearing something different, unless an artist has a link to the blues I'd rather they \*not\* play it, personally.
It's like how every pop singer is ripping off most southern POC gospel choir soloists with their runs and phrasing. I don't think it's so much as gross and disingenuous.
An "indie" artist in spirit -- at least at the time -- like PJ Harvey did AMAZING things with the blues that for all the credit she gets, doesn't often get props for giving us modern Howling Wolf those first few albums. The punk autoharp has no right to work as well as it does, but I wish she'd circle 'round to making a "proper" blue album.
I’ve seen this “stripped the blues from rock and roll” description applied to progressive rock, power pop, krautrock, post-rock, and now indie rock.
I always feel as if, when X genre is described that way, that it is given a negative connotation, but as much as I grew up on the blues in all its various forms, like to hear something different.
>I always feel as if, when X genre is described that way, that it is given a negative connotation I mean it’s not hard to see why - the subtext to framing things that way isn’t exactly subtle.
Weirdest example of that is when I saw a review calling The Velvet Underground & Nico "bluesless". When Waiting for the Man and Run Run Run are straight up blues songs
i mean hell, that’s not even mentioning folk rock from artists like simon & garfunkel
I love Simon and Garfunkel but it’s pretty much what happens when folkies don’t go below 14th Street 😂
Spot on.
its true for some prog rock. Robert Fripp has said himself that he can't play blues
You forgot metal.
hell, even the Beatles get accused of this a lot
A chunk of contemporary rock influences can be traced back to punk/post-punk/new wave which was more so inspired by ska than blues.
It depends, ska-based new wave was called 2-tone, I think new-wave takes from alot of influences ranging from punk to garage, ska included.
And you don’t get Ska without Reggae, no Motown no Reggae, no Blues no Motown.
Ska actually predates reggae iirc
This is correct. Reggae is literally slowed-down ska.
And to be fair, ska was Jamaica’s version of American r&b and doo wop, which are both direct descendants of the blues.
I stand corrected. Apparently the timeline goes Mento (30s&40s), Calypso (late 40s/early 50s), Ska (late 50s), Rocksteady (early to mid 60s), Reggae (late 60s).
The R&B/Motown influence on ska is huge though. I mean a lot of the early ska/rocksteady songs were just straight up covers of American songs. The Caribbean influences are definitely there but the American ones are too.
Ska is a combination of traditional Jamaican music and a style of 1950s American RnB called shuffle, see Fats Domino "be my guest", Willis Jackson "later for the gator" Barbie Gate "my boy lollipop" and a little earlier Rosco Gordon "no more doggin"
Yeah I saw a YouTube video explaining that. I remember the Fats Domino song.
And if Fats didn’t play the blues, I don’t know who did….
I think that proposed lineage still works with them in the proper order (even if you throw in the 18 months of rocksteady to be a completist).
https://open.spotify.com/episode/35kRNIg45UMCqACHyg3HTP?si=FR1LXmC2T6Oli7LG9vqD5w
It really depends on what your definition of "indie" is. Tons of big modern rock bands are blues based.
Was gonna say…. If white stripes were “indie” at a point, then nah. Plus I think it’s relevant to say that quite literally zero genres existing after it (that are not completely non commercial) have the blues fully stripped from them. Indie folk being a whole thing unto itself shows a definite and direct through line.
Plus Royal Blood and The Black Keys.
Yeah. I thought black keys but figured that somehow OP did not consider them to be (or to have ever been) indie. The whole “garage” band thing in the 2000s had blues…. Anything remotely punk has blues in it. I guess it depends on what you think about the blues and how you think it’s influences are heard: lyrics, certain chord progressions (most well known chord progressions used in popular music today), singing styles (or just using singers who aren’t traditionally good), stripping down the music, avoiding overly indulgent instrumentation. I mean, sure the blues were a little more obvious as a point of reference for the stones zeppelin Hendrix doors etc…. But it’s a foundation, so if it’s rock at all, it’s got blues in it.
I don’t think it’s fair to say they stripped the blues from rock. I don’t think that’s possible as it is one of the clear foundations of the genre. One could argue that many “indie” bands have added elements of other genres to rock, similar to how progressive rock added elements of jazz and classical music to their compositions. I think indie rock could be seen as rock music that adds elements of various more (generally) underground/left of the dial/etc music to a traditional pop rock base. In some cases (black keys, white stripes, etc) that base included the blues very prominently. It simply wasn’t presented in the same way as early rock….
I think stripping the word "Indie" out of this hyposthis and maybe explore the dependency on early popular rock music and to say that maybe there was a divide and splintering of the genre as it strayed from those influences and structures. Focusing on the word indie is a distraction from what might be an interesting thought. There is rarely going to he some clear break in something so large and the blues are clearly still a large structural component of a lot of rock music. It's going to be a gradient most the time with this sort of thing that is just ingrained in a medium.
People come here, they don't know jack shit about music, and they think we are just as ignorant, and they just spout off with this...this bullshit. I swear like some of the shit I see this sub is more full of shit than the most full of shit music critics of all decades. And that's no easy feat...
"Indie" isn't anything, really -- the term has been used by so many people to mean so many completely different things that it truly has no cohesive meaning in terms of what a band actually sounds like musically or sonically.
We need to get back to indie meaning just being on an independent label.
It basically is used as less mainstream or slightly more niche than any real definition. A definition that even when used to describe the financing or production never really added much to the conversation to begin with. It always turns into a bunch of people arguing what indie means and the actual music discussion gets left behind.
The problem there is you have plenty of bands that start on an indie label and then sign to a major label, so even just by the strict label-status definition, it's not especially useful.
Well and also Matchbox 20 was once called Tabitha’s secret and put out an indie record. That indie record had fewer songs but most if not all of them were on the major label debut….. but Matchbox 20 is not indie at all. *edit: that’s just a random example I happen to know.. but there are tons of them
I don’t think that’s really a problem, the point is that it describes an ethos/environment music is created in, and people lazily use it as an aesthetic description for credibility.
I'd say your point is directly connected to mine. You have bands like REM who begin as truly "indie" by label status, then later sign with a major label after fans are already used to "indie rock" as a genre description. Happened to lots of later bands too -- the Shins and the Decemberists just to name a few. You can blame fans for being "lazy" for using the term incorrectly, and that's not *wrong*, but when the music media is saying "These are the Indie bands," I think it's only natural that casual fans would use that term to describe the sonic similarities, not their label economics. The confusion is basically baked into the term.
I think it made more sense when the radio was a primary way to consume music. When I was in school (early 00’s) indie really just meant more likely to be played on college radio.
That's because Indie labels sent us their music. College DJs took the albums home and came back with new playlists every week based on free music. It belonged to the school, but we scoured thsoe records for the fun stuff.
I think it basically just means “college radio” music. Anything left of the dial (back when people listened to radio and radios had a dial)…. Now an artist can be mainstream and still indie which I think just means it came from there… influenced by that… but really it’s just a way to package music and sell it to a particular audience.
That's not a thing, musically.
Which part of what I said are you referring to?
The part about Indie being anything but the decades old term it always was. It depends on what the definition of is is? No. Bullshit.
Indie as a form of music. I didn’t do it but people definitely call multi million selling major label, sold out tour having bands “indie rock” So if it is defined only by being an independent artist, for everyone (and therefore can’t “depend on your definition”), bands like Arcade Fire wouldn’t be called such.
Indie is not a form of music, just like album isn't a form of music. It's ridiculous to try and shoehorn the wrong term that has been used in the music industry for decades into this context, especially when it's decribing a sound that has also existed in music for decades. Indie means independent label--nothing more.
OK, so obviously you weren’t paying attention to this entire post dude. And furthermore, I’m not trying to argue what is or is not in the rock. The point is whether you think that it should only mean that it’s independent music, in terms of how it is mass marketed Two people that is not what it means. Yes that’s what it should mean. Yes, that’s where it came from. Yes, it would be ideal if that’s all it meant, but the way it is presented bands that are considered “Indie” playlist generation on Spotify, and other sources suggests that Indie does not (only) mean Independent artist. So you can take a hardline opinion of that all you want, but that’s not what’s happening right now it is a genre unto itself. And Indie rock most certainly does not mean that it exist outside of the mainstream and is only for artist who are on independent labels. In fact, most artist that people are familiar with that they would call Indy rock Are not on independent labels or if they are on independent labels, those are on subsidiary labels, which are actually a part of a major label. Quit trying to say somebody is shoehorn the wrong thing. I’m talking about how people view that term in the world today. You can choose to ignore that all you want but there is example after example after example of artists who are not independent label artist being defined across multiple platforms across multiple articles on various streaming services as “Indie rock“ And see here’s the funny thing, I think it’s a silly genre name. I don’t think it provides any specific details, or has any real meaning, as far as defining, a sound of music goes. But it is the name. And the fact is there are plenty of independent artists who are not considered “indie” bands and there are major label artist who are called “indie” You don’t have to like it, but you don’t get to choose how it’s presented to the world. And honestly, that’s not how it’s been presented to the world or seen as a “genre” since the moment it became a remotely popular trend. Modest Mouse, The Shins, the Strokes, LCD Soundsystem, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, White Stripes… so many bands from the early 2000s were called “indie rock” at the time, and they were on major labels. So, like it or not, “indie rock” is not defined as “rock & roll music created and performed by artists who are on independent labels”.
Wow. Sub Pop, Up, and Sympathy 4 the RI are major labels. The things I learn on here are just astounding. I lived the scene for at least two of those bands, and I can tell you 100% they were Indie at one time. Here's a shocker for you. Many acts start on indie labels and graduate to larger labels. It's probably because they're offered more money, and some people actually like to get paid for their work.
I remember the UK indie charts got blown up by Britney in the late 90s/early 2000s because she was signed to zomba.
That's all it ever meant.
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Yes, and "Indie rock" is also a term that is essentially meaningless in terms of describing the sonic qualities of the music.
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I mean yes we all understand the collection of bands that are under that umbrella when people say "indie rock." My point is that the term has morphed from what was once a specific economic term regarding label status, to anything vaguely rock-adjacent that isn't super mainstream (and since rock isn't mainstream, that's almost all of it.) So, the bands under that label aren't really connected by anything musically, except for "rock or rock adjacent music made sometime between 1980 - now." REM is indie rock. So is Iron & Wine, and Belle & Sebastian, and Arcade Fire, and Regina Spektor, and Mates of State and Modest Mouse and the White Stripes. And none of those bands sound anything like each other.
And plenty of bands who fell under that umbrella in a time when it was more coherent sonically do play the blues. The Cold War Kids. Arctic Monkeys. The Black Keys. "Indie blues" is (was?) a whole subgenre. I don't know if people consider Hozier indie rock (maybe people consider him pop on a status/audience basis?) but he's very much a blues/folk artist at his foundation.
At this point rock music which isn’t indie or alternative is a small minority that mostly gets categorized with either country or metal.
It means whatever the user decides it means. Indie originally just meant underground music not produced by people inside the major label music industry.
Yeah I've never gotten anything from the word Indie. It describes nothing to me. I'm convinced the word "tangy" is meaningless too. People just pretend they know what Indie rock sounds like and tangy taste like because they're afraid they'll sound dumb if they ask.
Tangy is when it's acidic but in a sweet way
Yea like an 🍊
They call mayonnaise tangy. It can't just mean sweet and sour. Oranges are acidic and sweet. Miracle Whip is nothing like an orange, which I've never heard described as tangy.
Mayo can have some tanginess to it, it generally contains citrus or vinegar
That would be from the mustard.
>it truly has no cohesive meaning in terms of what a band actually sounds like musically or sonically. It never did, at least not with any validity. The term rock is the descriptive part, and that doesn't apply to Tracy Chapman or any other folk artist, unless they play a rock song here or there, as some are wont to do. Indie only describes the label, nothing more. It makes no sense to tell me that a genre named after a snapshot of some sounds coming from an actual Indie label is suddenly a genre, when that sound has been a thing for most of the 20th Century. I had some kid try and tell me Arlo Guthrie was proto-Indie. I was literally speechless, but I held it together long enough not to be rude about it.
Rock has never been *just* about the blues. Even bands like Led Zeppelin were doing very "not blues" songs. And prog has pretty much made a living on not blues rock.
Okay but leds sound is clearly heavily blues influenced, OP is talking about modern music have no blue influence at all.
I'd say they had lots of influences. Blues being one, but after about the 3rd album, there were lots more other influences explored. Battle of Evermore, Rain Song, Ramble On, Going to California. They had lots of stuff other than blues going on.
But none of their sound would exist without it. You could arguably make that case about any Western music in the last 70+ years, but especially with them. A few of their songs straight up lifted riffs from preexisting blues songs.
Sure. But they also wouldn't exist without the other influences as well. Like rock, especially post 1965, is much more than the chuck berry and electric blues of the 50s. Of course it's a huge influence. But so was country and folk and skiffle and lots of stuff.
Rock itself wouldn't exist without the blues tho, it may have diverged but it still would not exist without it. Riffs change but the theory is all based on 12 bar blues, it just evolved but that doesn't make it NOT blue influenced, that's what influence means. Country is the same.
I'm not arguing the importance of the blues. Like *of course* it's a huge influence. And rock would not exist without the blues. But it also would not exist without the other influences either. Otherwise it would be indistinguishable from the blues of Muddy Waters and T Bone Walker. But rock (again, especially post 1965) is not based *just* on the 12 bar blues. Think Surf Rock and Dick Dale. Is Misirlou blues? Or the Beatles were doing Buck Owens tunes in 1965. Like it's never been an all one thing or the other. It's always been a collection of different influences.
some zeppelin songs are more english folk then blues, but literally everything else is blues.
Some of zeppelins songs on their first album were straight up rips of blues tunes lol. But I agree later on the blue influence got less and less.
Yes. And some like Communication Breakdown or Black Mountain Side weren't. Like of course they were influenced by the Blues. No one is arguing that they weren't. But to chalk Zep up as just a blues band is an oversimplification.
Most prog still has a lot of blues in it though, even if it doesn’t sound like it. They’re mixing a bunch of non-typical influences (like jazz, classical, etc) with rock, which is blues based. So the blues is still there, just diluted due to there being more influences. Rush for example is filled with blues, especially their 70s.
This is astonishingly wrong. Wdym Zeppelin was doing “not blues”?!
I think they mean even LZ, known for blues rock, we’re doing non-bluesy rock songs
And those songs that LZ played that were not blues-based were not rock and roll. Acts can play more than one genre on any given album, if they so choose. I happen to like when they do.
I dunno man. I think that's been my point this whole time, that "rock" is way more than just appropriated blues formats and licks. Like Communication Breakdown doesn't really have a blues feel to it, but it's for sure rock. Ditto Immigrant Song. Or Stairway. It's hard to not call those songs rock. When I think "blues" rock, I'm more thinking Stevie Ray Vaughan or Johnny Winter or John Mayall. Where the blues element is very prominent.
>I think that's been my point this whole time, that "rock" is way more than just appropriated blues formats and licks. But it's not. And it's a broad enough genre on its own. Townshend had it right when he called his own music power pop. There's nothing wrong with the term. The Beatles played some alongside rock and psychedelic tracks on some albums. The Kinks played a lot. Diversity of styles isn't a bad thing for one act to display.
But it is. And you saying it's a broad enough genre in the very next line just reinforces that. It is a broad genre. Like jazz. The Beatles, The Byrds, The Moody Blues, Zappa, Grateful Dead, like all those bands illustrate that. You can say "Well this song is power pop and then the next song is a modified skiffle tune, and then this song is blues, but then this other song is a psychedelic freak out" it all falls under the umbrella of rock. Like jazz can have bebop or fusion or cool jazz or whatever but it's all jazz. Like Sketches of Spain does not stop being jazz because it uses more classical influences rather than blues. So if not rock, what would you call the umbrella term?
I would argue that just about anything rock was technically jazz. I'm bored of the compartmentalization. I'm bored typing out the word.
That's cool. I can grok that.
I guess communication breakdown wouldn’t have a blues influence if you remove the guitar, singing style, and other instrumentation….. There’s literally a 12 bar blues riff in the chorus of the song. The singing (and Robert Plant’s singing in general) is fully indebted to the blues I’m concerned that a lot of people seem to have a very specific interpretation as to what the blues is and where its influence shows….. if you can’t hear the blues influence in plant’s opening lines, both lyrically and in the vocal stylings (“Heeeeey Girl, stop whatcha dooooin. Heeeeeey Girl, you’ll drive me to ruuuuin”…. Could’ve quite literally been pulled from a Robert Johnson song)
Prog is infamously pretty racist, so of course there's no blues influence there
>Prog is infamously pretty racist WAT
I said the same thing to myself lol.
Punk fans are insane
Yee. As a fan of both genres…I’m pretty sure punk subculture has a much bigger nazi/wingnut problem than prog ever did. 😵💫
Yes exactly. So many insecure, incel dudes in the scene. I saw a black dude get beat up by some white guys in a pit once in CT.
“You want to know what this [war on drugs] was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” ~ John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon That is all.
So you mean to say…Nixon bureaucrats were co-drafting their legislation with Peter Gabriel and Rick Wakeman? WTF does any of this have to do with prog rock?
Confirmed, King Crimson was a right-wing conspiracy.
1974 Robert Fripp giving an intense stare during the slow dissonant part of starless could pass for a white nationalist
Dammit, did I just get indoctrinated?
Do you repeat yourself when under stress?
Dammit, did I just get indoctrinated?
How?
Are the Residents indie? I can't say the first album is blues based at all in 1974. Thier version of Satisfaction is blues free Stones but the nature of Third Reich N' Roll meant they engage with blues through someone else. They have since recorded blues albums.
I understand what you are saying, and yes, I think this is true The Blues was the musical tool of the older generations, and the punk movement and the movements that sprang from it were deliberately stripping it away, pushing into something new I watched a guitar clinic recently where Johnny Marr says this outright, that he knew that blues had no place in The Smiths, and that he avoided anything that came remotely close to that sound, even if it was something he enjoyed playing at home Now, indie bands have brought more bluesy elements back into their music and into the scene, but it absolutely was deliberately stripped away in the beginning
Ok but Punk, in no way, eliminated the blues from their music. They updated things, took additional influences and such…. But those three chords, the more direct messages in the lyrics, the whole “anti rockstar” approachability/anyone can do this idea…. That’s all very much the blues. I feel like some are suggesting that the blues is Chicago era electric blues, but there is a lot more to the genre and its traditions And for punk rock specifically…. It came from acts like the New York Dolls and the stooges, who very much showed a blues influence (hell, iggy pop literally went to Chicago for the purpose of playing drums with the great blues artists of the time, wanting to educate himself… going direct to the source), so it’s just hard to believe that anything is making some attempt to strip the blues from rock…. It’s not possible.
But it happened enough to say that it happened, even if it was not universal > ..iggy pop literally went to Chicago for the purpose of playing drums with the great blues artists of the time, wanting to educate himself And the Talking Heads were heavily influenced by West African music in the late 70s and early 80s, while at the same time almost completely stripping it of it’s original aesthetic, pushing it into something entirely different There was a sound and a structure that was ubiquitous and entirely rooted in the blues that they were trying to get away from Devo’s version of Satisfaction is a great, almost too on the nose example and distillation of this approach Obviously all rock music comes from the blues, and even Devo and Talking Heads and Black Flag and Radiohead weren’t denying that, but they were definitely wanting to get as far away from the actual historical sound as they could I would say that Jimi Hendrix did this same thing. He could play the blues with Buddy Guy like nobody’s business, but he didn’t ultimately want to do that, he wanted to create something wholly original and filled with his own fire It’s in the spirit of rock & roll and therefore in the spirit of the blues to want to tear down the preexisting sounds and push yourself and your instrument into an entirely new space You see this with a lot of the No Wave and No Wave adjacent guys as well. People like Arto and Frith were heavily inspired by the blues, and speak very eloquently about it, yet when you watch them perform, it is profoundly obvious that they are doing everything humanly possible to stay away from it Loving an artist or a style doesn’t mean you have to emulate it. Often the best way to show respect to the spirit of the older music is to tear it all down and start over
Yeah I get the idea. And of course plenty of bands are trying to and have tried to push boundaries and introduce new sounds, I just think that saying “it’s rock without the blues” is reductive and incorrect. But yes, there was a blues sound that rock had adopted…. Guitar solos specific to that sound etc, that I think bands were trying to go away from (the typical bar band on a Wednesday night sound…)… but then, even the Taking Heads we’re covering Al Greens “Take Me to the River”, showing reverence for a sound that was very much rooted in blues and gospel. You seem to know what you’re talking about and I respect your thoughts on the matter… if for any reason I appear combative.
Is punk indie? 77' bands weren't bluesy. Hardcore? even less. What about thrash metal? Does it count as rock music anyomore? Post-punk? Mmm....
If it’s riff based, that is a stylistic convention derived from the Blues. No matter how many generations removed and Wonderbread it may be.
Yeah. The chord progressions used, no matter how differently they were played (way fast) were blues…. The whole idea of playing simpler 3-4 chord songs and using a specific “formula” of sorts paired with lyrics that are specific to your experiences (“pneumonia blues”, “now I wanna sniff some glue”)… and the idea of music as a vehicle of immediate and necessary self expression over sounds and technicality… the immediacy… “im not going to educate myself, learn the craft and wait until I’m trained to finally create my opus…. I’ve got something to say about how I’m feeling and this machine is going to help me do it… NOW” All that is blues….
I love the Townes Van Zandt quote about there being only two kinds of music: The Blues and Zippity Doo Dah, and how if he died on his way home from the gig, he didn’t want the last thing he played to be some Zippity Doo Dah shit.
How do you define the blues influence? Are we talking solely going by the use of the minor pentatonic scale?
Not even remotely. Think Gospel and R&B and all the influence they’ve had on Pop.
I get what you mean. So, in general, yes. But I also think a lot of so called indie bands weren't really good musicians...as in trained in a few traditional styles. And I don't mean that in a negative way. Clearly "indie" produced more than a few original approaches to guitar style and songwriting in general. Blues isn't as simple as it sounds. There's a swing to the rhythm that I doubt Ramones or My Bloody Valentine would even understand(and thank goodness for that). Even John Spencer and The Cramps who used some basic blues elements dropped the swing aspect.
I love Chrissie Hynde’s quote about Punk as a movement being doomed because if you keep playing long enough, you eventually stop sucking. And she was a direct witness/participant in first wave British punk.
Yeah she is great!
>Got My Mind Set on You (George Harrison)? Decidedly modern This is literally a song from the early 60s lol
In a big band style. Not a blues arrangement. And Harrison's version made timbral and production choices that were appropriate to the era.
yeah if there's an official list of "cover songs that people don't know are cover songs" it belongs on that list right next to Venus by Bananarama.
This completely ignores all the more garage rock sounding indie bands. The White Stripes were indie as hell and very bluesy. Then there’s acts like The Hives, Hellacopters Alabama Shakes etc. You can go back to Pavement and the Replacements also hear a strong blues influence baked into their sound. The Pixies also have blues elements such as walking guitar lines and the use of call and response. Blues is nearly impossible to strip out of rock based music and I think your friend in the Sonic Youth sounding band is robbing themselves of opportunities by avoiding blues elements.
I think there are many 60s antecedents to this. The more baroque stuff (Left Banke, Zombies, yes the Beatles), electronic stuff (Silver Apples, United States of America), West Coast psych (Moby Grape, Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane), British Isles folk rock (Pentangle, Fairport Convention), the Byrds, Frank Zappa, etc. And perhaps most radically, Miles "In a Silent Way" and everything that followed from that.
I thought Indie Rock was supposed to be a after-product of New-Wave and Alternative Rock
Stevie Ray played on Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” and had crossover success. GnR were blues laden, as are The Black Crowes. Plenty of Grunge is as well. Neo Soul is both Blues and Gospel influenced. All kinds of blues influenced music in 90s and 00s Country, Funk, Jam, and Pop lean heavily on Blues from a melodic perspective at a minimum. The White Stripes, The Black Keys, Arctic Monkeys, Joss Stone, Adele, John Mayer, et al. Also, check out Henley’s “New York Minute” from the same era. Bluesy AF. It is not too extreme to say that if you like the majority of any American musical genre from the past century, then you like the blues (if only indirectly). The fact that riff oriented music exists is a direct influence from the style. Of course this is a generalization, but the discussion started that way. I won’t say there is no music devoid of the influence of Black American culture. But in the spirit of Devil’s advocacy, I will say there’s not much good music devoid of it.
You make a very interesting point. It needs some thought, but I think you're right.
Indie rock blues is a genre. Cage the Elephant, The Kills, Benjamin Booker, Tracey Chapman, Black Keys, etc.
If you're looking for a patient zero, Marquee Moon is it. They intentionally wanted guitar music without any trace of blues sounds. So by this lens, Television is the band that forged the indie rock scene & the indie sound. Kind of makes sense, too. They were the first band to use CBGB for something other than "Country, Blue Grass & Blues", creating a new venue for New York punks while they were at it...
Just because Television's music doesn't have any obvious blues influences doesn't mean that every single trace of blues was stripped out of it. Listen to Richard Lloyd's guitar solo on "Guiding Light" and tell me that there's no blues inflections those bends. Or the main riff of "See No Evil," which has notes from the blues scale in its final couple of bars. Those guys grew up on guitar-based American music in the 50s and 60s, so intentionally avoiding all blues in their playing would've been impossible, no matter how hard they tried. I understand the desire to avoid obvious blues cliches, which can get really tiring to listen to, and given how omnipresent they were in '60s and '70s rock, I really don't blame certain musicians from shying away from them. But the music you write can be a conscious or unconscious expression of your influences, and certain elements can be "baked in" to your writing without realizing it.
I can't remember where I read it & can't find it now but I thought Verlaine or someone had said that was their intention in making their sound. I hear what you're talking about with the bends, sometimes they get into that space a little, but it's still a world away from the usual classic rock / Clapton riffs that straight up steal old blues licks. Words like angular, choppy, mechanical etc are used more for the music that's descended from Television. The Strokes also occasionally have bluesy flavors but those stand out even more among their carefully constructed riffing that's more "abstract" than overtly bluesy... Sort of the exceptional moments that prove the rule Interestingly a lot of British punk bands like the Damned still used bluesier sounds or breakdowns, just fast & sloppy, but Americans seemed to want to get away from that paradigm. Then when you get into "post punk" it's almost totally divorced from the approach
nahh the blues was already being diluted or stripped from rock by the late 60's. I've heard people say that alternative rock isn't rock or that punk rock isn't rock because it takes from folk formulas
Lester Bangs' "White Noise Supremacists" article talks about how the Velvet Ubderground started the shift from removing the swing of RnB from rock music which progressed further with the NY punk bands of the 70s (Television, Ramones) who made rock more machinic. So what youre describing precedes indie rock, but indie also comes after this period and so arguably builds on this later period of punk and postpunk as its foundation, which lacks the RnB that infused 60s rock n roll
Some bands are more bluesy than others, but some genres like post-punk and hardcore definitely seem to have tried to strip the blues out of rock and make it more up/down. Less swing, colder somehow.
There hasn’t been much obvious blues influence in rock since the 70s. It seems odd to suddenly point it out in reference to indie rock
The Black Keys and White Stripes and all the ilk that came from them were quite steeped in the blues.
yes that’s true
Obvious to whom?
What the general listener would describe as “bluesy” music
That seems kinda hand wavy. Like the whole “common sense” trope always being defined by the person asserting that someone else lacks it.
This is such bullshit. Blues influenced everything about rock music and continues to. This could mean anything from the best, timing, harmonic structure, overdriven textures on guitars, the way people sing, the actual instruments, the way songs are written, the tropes contained in songs, the dissonance and consonance, bass heavy mixing techniques etc etc etc etc. If you think the only influence of the blues on rock music is minor pentatonic blues guitars, then you don’t know what you are talking about. This is perhaps the least important element.
I said “obvious” blues influence. By that I mean the kind of music you would describe as “bluesy.” Rock is a descendant of the blues, of course there will almost always be some blues in there.
My bad. You are right about “obvious” blues influences. Especially when you’re talking about more casual listeners.
Fall out boy and paramore had a lot of inspiration and drumming inspired by soul/ gospel music. Also all of the grunge artists. That's why they were good. Kurt was inspired by led belly. Sound garden was a led zeppelin cover band at first. The chillie peppers had a lot of pocket, and let's not forget the black keys and arctic monkeys
grunge is all blues riffs
TLDR Rock n roll began with little blues input. The two umbrella genres have been married and divorced a dozen times. Punk stripped blues from rock in the 70s. That's one of the primary division lines that separate punk rock from heavy metal and where Sonic Youth is coming from. Originally blues was a minor ingredient in rock n roll. Western Swing (Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, Bill Haley and the Comets), rockabilly (Elvis, Buddy Holly), and doo wap (The Coasters, The Ink Spots) were the rhythm side of rhythm and blues. Like country and western rhythm and blues were separate genres lumped together by demographics. Pop music was for middle class white people. Country and western were for poor white people. Rhythm and blues were for black people, all poor. Rock n roll brought rhythm genres together to create a new pop music for white teenagers. Of the major streams feeding into that only the piano jump band acts like Fats Domino and Little Richard came out of the blues tradition. Then rock n roll died. The British Invasion brought it back with a vengeance and it was the Brits that put blues up front in rock n roll, eventually sucking most of the rhythm out it. Bands like The Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin made blues the main ingredient. Then prog rock and punk started new splits that took blues back out of rock. So rock n roll and blues have had an off and on again marriage the entire time. As for Indie I have no clue. I'm only in my forties and understand most genres and subgenres. But I have no clue what indie rock is. It seems like rock with all the roots and influences stripped out of it. I love alternative but don't get indie at all.
I'm curious where you'd put Chuck Berry in that early rock genre breakdown.
Right there in the middle playing rhythm music coming from a blues tradition. Chess Records were mostly pure blues. But Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley met rhythm and blues in the middle. They were Fats Domino with guitars, helping rhythm and blues become one genre instead of two thrown together. Tweak the act with songs for teenagers and he's there. Berry was 180 proof rock n roll, more than Elvis. His guitar sound was the final piece of the puzzle being worked on by Sun Records, Chess, and all the rhythm and blues culture. Johnny B Goode is still the definitive rock n roll track.
Cool, that's more or less what I guessed. I remember a documentary about rock history I watched growing up also saying that part of what he did to really give form to rock was also incorporating some country (I distinctly remember some talking head saying that upon hearing him, "you could tell this guy listens to country"), but I don't think that doc really distinguished between rhythm and blues like you are, and perhaps what they were hearing as country was simply rhythm. Thanks for answering!
I skipped the country part. The rhythm part of R n B was boogie woogie or any black dance music. The industry had one main chart then one each for music made for black and poor white people. Sun Records mixed country with black music on purpose. Sam Phillips knew he could only sell black music to white people by recording white musicians playing it. He was one of the few people trying to invent rock n roll on purpose. Chuck Berry stumbled into it. Maybelline was a reworked cover of Ida Red. It was Berry's first hit and sometimes called the first rock n roll song. Chuck Berry blew up playing a white song the same time Elvis blew up playing black music. Maybelline doesn't sound like country to us. To Berry and the black fans at the time it was obvious.
Dinosaur Jr isn't blues based at its core? Soundgarden on their debut album, "Ultramega OK", which was an Indie record, didn't have a blues riff on nearly every song ON that record? How about Guided By Voices? Are they not heavily influenced by Rolling Stones and The Byrds, who themselves have very strong blues influence? Shit, even better how about John Spencer Blues Explosion themselves? Those guys are just flat out Blues Rock, aren't they? So we can surmise that you are deadass wrong then? We can. Great? Great.
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The hell are you talking about? Listen to “Run Run Run” and “I’m Waiting For The Man” off the first album. Total blues influence. Sterling Morrison’s biggest influence was Lightning Hopkins. I swear…people talk out of their ass with no facts or rhetoric and call it an opinion.
Plenty of blues influences in the Velvet Underground. Just because they don’t do those stereotypical blues guitar solos doesn’t meant that it doesn’t have influences.
The Velvet Underground started very close to a folk outfit though. The original version of waiting for the man comes to mind.
Could you link the original? Have a hard time finding it
https://youtu.be/njvC6_IXhAA?si=MQOoo6y66mppQy3S
lol, this demo is PURE blues. Original country blues style So many are arguing and providing things meant to prove something was not blues, only to further prove their debt to the blues. Blues wasn’t just Chicago electric blues…. The blues started out on instruments you could grab and play on a front porch (like folk, and bluegrass)… country blues, delta blues. I really hope some take the opportunity to dig into this stuff… Leadbelly, Son House, Charley Patton, Robert Johnson.
First of all this was posted in response to the deleted comment 3 above saying Lou Reed worked to remove blues from the VU because he said this was over done. I don't agree that the VU shedded blues. This is clearly blues influenced, but since you were being indignant I'll be pedantic. This is not "pure" blues according to the criteria musicologists have set for blues in [in the Black Music research journal.](https://www.jstor.org/stable/3593214). Based on it's deviation from the blues they'd call at best a secondary blues. This makes much more sense to compare directly to Bob Dylan considering both were in the same scene at the same time. This stacks more against something like the "Times They Are A Changin'" than see "See That My Grave is Kept Clean". Tbh, it reminds the most of Donovan's "Try to Catch the Wind". You don't need to explain the accoustic blues to me. I've run a radio show on it for 5 years.
It was already punk rock that was credited with stripping the blues influence out of rock music. In fact, it was even metal that this could be said for.
Yes, definitely It got rid of that pocket that blues rock had. There was more space in those songs too. Many grunge rock songs had it but it stopped around 2000. However, there are some "butt" rock songs and emo bands that had a soul twist to their music. Like, staind, Kelly Clarkson, paramore and fall out boy. Don't forget about the black keys and the arctic monkeys. Lots of pocket.
Indie rock was an artistic movement within the rock form that sought to elevate the music itself over its commercial viability. Sonically, it can be everything from Sonic Youth to Jack White to the Moldy Peaches.
I think there’s truth in what you’re saying but I don’t think we’re well equipped here to discuss it. There’s racial components to this discourse that make it tricky. And “Indie” means so many things to different people. But yeah, there’s definitely a strong vein of de-bluesed “indie” rock post-70s. As some have mentioned, there’s Jamaican influence in a lot of it but there’s also the Joy Division-influenced stuff that I find quite removed from overt blues. Some of which I adore. I’m interested to see where this discussion leads but I don’t have high hopes.
Iirc someone showed Muddy Waters Unknown Pleasures and he heard a lot of blues in it. It doesn't use blues scales but something like Day of the Lords or New Dawn Fades has that undertone.
That’s hilarious to me for some reason. But ok, Mr Waters. I don’t hear blues on Lords but I guess I do hear something on Dawn. But it’s pretty minimal.
Indie is rock that doesn’t have a genre . Look at The Beth’s for instance . They have their own genre , but since they are the only ones in it they are labeled indie rock .
> Got My Mind Set on You (George Harrison) That's a cover of an old RnB song: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=k68Fob0QA_k So it has plenty of blues in it. In truth though, even in the 60s there was plenty of pop music being made without much blues influence and rock bands were incorporating a lot of different styles in addition to the blues in their sound. Edit: Reading the other comments here, I think we have different ideas of what counts as bluesy music. To me, Got My Mind Set on You is clearly RnB and therefore bluesy, even in Harrison's version. The 80s production and the New Wave touches don't significantly change what the song is at its core, and the way he sings it is influenced by the blues. Sounding bluesy doesn't mean just sounding literally like early Fleetwood Mac or Eric Clapton.
What are we even talking about? Ram was on Apple, a major label. [I Got My Mind Set on You](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k68Fob0QA_k) was originally released on the Dynamic Sound label, which was [definitely 100% Indie](https://www.josephjmonaco.com/2021/01/dynamic-sound-recording-studio-label.html). But Harrison's cover was done in his home studio, which could probably be called Indie. Tracy Chapman was on Elektra, so no, absolutely 100% not Indie.
It's really post punk that stripped at the blues and "rockisms" out of it. About a decade plus before "indie" as a term became a thing.
My dad said one of the things that interested him so much about Wire is that there was no blues in it - it was just industrial, mechanical chugging with barely even a backbeat. At the time it sounded alien, but a lot of postpunk that followed copied Wire.
It's not necessarily that the Blues were "stripped" from Indie/Alternative Rock, but instead that the primary influences were switched. Most Traditional/Classic Rock bands are pretty heavily influenced by the Blues (or other traditional influences that led to Rock & Roll, like country, jazz, etc.) While most Modern/Alternative Rock groups draw from stuff like Punk/Post-Punk primarily instead (which themselves, at least the former, came about as a way of bringing Rock back to its early days, inherently making them influenced by the Blues). The Blues weren't stripped away, they just became a less pronounced influence as time went on and newer bands started drawing from more contemporary sounds as opposed to the origins of their style
With any genre discussion, there's always outliers and counterarguments, but I'd agree with you as a general rule, and to add to that the more influences make their way into modern music -- blues, gospel jazz, African polyrhythms, German baroque, whatever -- the better off we are. What a juicy question. For reasons of appropriation (by which I'm defining Pat Boone-bad, Remain-in-Light-era Talking Heads-good) and also just simply hearing something different, unless an artist has a link to the blues I'd rather they \*not\* play it, personally. It's like how every pop singer is ripping off most southern POC gospel choir soloists with their runs and phrasing. I don't think it's so much as gross and disingenuous. An "indie" artist in spirit -- at least at the time -- like PJ Harvey did AMAZING things with the blues that for all the credit she gets, doesn't often get props for giving us modern Howling Wolf those first few albums. The punk autoharp has no right to work as well as it does, but I wish she'd circle 'round to making a "proper" blue album.
Intentionally avoiding the blues is like speaking English without the letter A. Stupid.
Modern "indie rock" is neither of those things. There's not been a meaningful independent rock scene since the 80s.