I’ve known for years now that you can always count on the Oxford American for a fantastic Annual Music Issue, but I’ve only just noticed (thanks to Derek) how much of said issue they actually offer up online these days. I just read a great Bill Wasik piece from the issue, ostensibly about that band Annuals, but which reads, for me, more like an elegy for the “Indie Rock” as I’ve always known it.

Let me put it this way: if “Indie Rock” was a person, it would currently be a dead, rotting corpse, having wheezily coughed out it’s last, cigarette-smoky breath after waking up hungover just after noon several years ago*. The thing we’re looking at as “Indie Rock” these days is a kind of reanimated walking zombie, pumped full of cyborg technology, it’s face sadly, garishly painted in an attempt to hide the rot. Tirelessly, it marches down our streets, mindlessly, ceaselessy farting out an unending stream of tunes that are never good enough to be “good,” nor bad enough to be “bad,” but are nonetheless perfectly suited to numb our overstimulated brains as we ride the train to work or stare for hours at the pixellated walls of our computer screens. If what JL said is true, and “life” is what happens to us while we’re “making other plans,” then I’d say never before in history have peoples’ “lives” been so “filled” with “music.” Kept unobtrusive and in the background, it’s the perfect soundtrack for those times when we need to keep focused on something (if not anything) else. To quote The Onion:

“I can download Starbucks music on my iPhone while ordering a latte and talking on a conference call? Wow, I’ve hit the douchebag trifecta!”

(*it probably looked a lot like Paul Westerberg)