Lots of the time you can tell if music is indie by its cover and song names before even hearing it. This is called “good branding.” I have been pondering this question ever since I accidentally bullied Dada Trash Collage into changing their MySpace. To explore, I decided to start with image trends, combing through Pitchfork and other music blogs. I divided what I found into good, so-so and bad attention to indie trends.
Indie Cool
These things say “I’m unique and ironic and in-the-know.”
Triangles
For some reason, triangles are the indie shape of the moment. Maybe it’s their loose symbolism as a gay shape, or maybe it’s their pyramid-like structure’s connection to tribal cultures that makes them so delicious for mid-to-upper-class mostly straight kids. Triangles are especially cool when they show up in places you’d never expect, like on this girl’s head.
Conscious beings who have no idea they are the face of your “brand”
This includes animals, kids in old photographs “just being kids,” and people in vastly different cultures. Doing so is nonsensical and deliciously funny, and ironic indie kids hold humor as the only sincere sentiment.
Feathers
Feathers are cool because they are connected to animals but also stereotypical Native American aesthetics. Indie kids have lots of nostalgia, and we miss these aesthetics that we can no longer recreate due to political incorrectness. Thus we return to them in their original animal nature.
Blurs
Blurs are artistically nice in that they dissociate an image from its functional context, allowing you to just appreciate the aesthetics like you’re all stoned or something. Blurs happen a lot on sampler-based music, because using electronics dissociates music from its boring origins, AKA instruments.
Nostalgic collages
These are like looking into your sister’s junk drawer, which was one of my favorite things to do as a kid. (She had soap decoupaged with pictures of ice skaters, I remember that vividly.) Nostalgia is at the core of indieness, because indie kids are postmodern, and postmodernism recognizes that everything artistic comes from a network of references to other things. Our initial network is built of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Smarties, if we were raised right. Mixing up these elementary images in chaotic pattern mirrors our grown-up recognition that the world is more chaotic than an episode of “Ghostwriter.”
Pictures that look old
Indie stuff is new. So new that at first people are like, “WTF is this?” Even if it’s something old, like electronica, indie kids put a twist on it to make it unfamiliar and weird and then call it “chillwave.” Juxtaposing its revolutionariness with old images is funny, because the people in the past look old-fashioned and foolish not knowing how cool and indie they are all of a sudden.
Re-appropriating nature from boring soulless midlife crisis cabin walls
At people’s cabin’s they have lame pictures like this:
Painted by fine arts grads who had no style and grew up to be housewives who read “Country Home and Garden” on the toilet. But that doesn’t mean that nature can’t be cool and indie. It just has to have a signifier to show that it has been “marked” by indie culture, like a big yellow line. Better designers use interesting type and a surreal color scheme:
Actually good art by real artists:
Occasionally real, famous people make art that is coincidentally indie. Although I’m not sure if that portrait is indie, or if I just like it because I also like well-painted portraits.
Male humor
Some indie artists use art that is distinctly male in its humor because it is silly and meaningless and kind of intimidating. We have to like it, because “guy humor” is always cool, like Judd Apatow and “South Park”
So-so indie trends
These say, “You accept me, but I’m still part of some other scene that isn’t so into trend-slaving, like beach rock.”
Super light, sans-serif fonts in square formation
In this era of max-customization, Helvetica and friends like Futura say, “I know how cool minimalism and MacBooks are. I know when to stop, LADIES!”
Cluttered psychedelics that are too conscious they are cluttered psychedelics
“This looks like something my dorky dad would have liked while he was smoking pot in the ’70s, but because I am making fun of him, I am using these images in a superior, cultural commentary-type way.”
Using digital cameras to look like Holga film cameras
Holga cameras are the shit with their light leaks and big flashes, reminding us of the days when art took effort and relied on chance. Sometimes we can fuck with digital images and light capture to re-create this feeling.
Promo photo where you dress like a dork
Some newspaper wants a photo of you, so you make sure to stick it to the man by having a weird mustache and wearing something bizarre you found at a thrift shop.
Failures
These were important enough to get on Pitchfork despite their misuse of the rules, so the music must be good.
Blurs distracted by overly-promotional images of the band
You can’t actually put your band on the cover unless your band looks like irreverent woodland creatures who just stole all your sister’s Ritalin, snorted it and then raided a closed-down Chuckie Cheese to circuit bend all the toys into a tribal gospel music party. (MGMT?) If you put your band looking serious, you say, “We too have experienced similar hardships to Dave Matthews, and have similarly catharted them into our music.”
Really shitty use of Native American stuff
It’s like sports plus politically incorrect plus iPhone camera. Ew.
More super important images of the singer
“We just got off ‘American Idol’”
Masculine aggression
Masculine humor is ok, but images symbolizing masculine aggression tend to be used by bands that actually want to make money. (At the tragic cost of never knowing how douchey they are.)
Letting your friend make your artwork
“We couldn’t break it to him that it was bad. He spent so long on it.”
Trying too hard to fulfill an indie trend even though the image is lackluster
Whatever the fuck this is
Hope that helped. Did I forget anything? Drop me a line lang0750@gmail.com
