Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation peaked at No. 99 … in the U.K. It never even charted in the U.S. Pavement nicked Billboard’s top 100 with its final album, spending a week at No. 95. Sleater-Kinney made it to No. 80 before bowing out.
In other words, there’s a reason that stuff gets referred to as indie rock, and it’s got nothing to do with fuzzy guitars or understaffed record labels. They’re called indie because they exist independent of mainstream attention. At least, they did, before 2007, when Modest Mouse scored the top spot on the Billboard 200 in March. And the Arcade Fire and The Shins both hit No. 2. And Interpol clocked in at No. 4. Heck, even Spoon spent some time at No. 10, before they’d ever played Saturday Night Live.
To clarify, for those who aren’t familiar, the Billboard 200 is the big boy of album charts, you know, the one that charts everything—Beyonce, Maroon 5, Kenny Chesney, Eminem—regardless of genre. And recently had Spoon in its top 10.
To some degree, we saw a similar blip in the early 1990s, when Nirvana, Pearl Jam and the like—bands with a sound similarly distant from the average top 40 listener’s taste—broke into the top of the charts. But where those acts were products of a magazine-cover-grabbing musical craze (grunge), Modest Mouse and the Arcade Fire and The Shins and Interpol don’t have much in common. Except that lots of people refer to them as indie rockers. Or at least, they did.
Taken one step further, it could be argued that 2007’s trend away from the mainstream—or, perhaps put more accurately, the mainstream’s trend away from itself—also extended to the hip-hop world, where Kanye West cold-cocked 50 Cent in the pair’s September sales battle. Though no one would mistake West for an indie outsider, his name in large part was built in the blogosphere, where his conscious early rhymes were embraced by a select few even as 50 gained front-page press worldwide.
So, why the perceptible shift in the public’s musical taste? Perhaps the successful chart invaders have simply toned down their indieness; Modest Mouse today doesn’t grate as hard as the Modest Mouse of 10 years ago. Maybe indie-oriented websites like Pitchfork and the recently departed Stylus have made it super easy for young listeners, and their parents, to find out about music a little bit edgier than Avril Lavigne and Green Day. Or is it even possible to dream that the world might actually be changing, and that just because the kid next door listens to Hinder, we’ve realized that, as individuals endowed with free will and high-speed modems, we don’t necessarily have to do likewise? Nah. Now when does that new Chingy album come out again?