“Indie” means “independent” as in “independent label” as such, indie music is maybe the only genre that’s theoretically based on the artists’ label affiliations rather than their sound.
Yet many of the notable bands saddled with that increasingly abstract epithet are on majors these days. Thus, in 2014, its meaning changed to refer to a sound, as is more conventional with genre tags. When did this change happen? It would be ridiculous to try and pinpoint a moment, but a large proportion of the musical and cultural hallmarks occurred in 2004, ten years ago.
Here are a few events that put 2004 on the map as the year “indie” simultaneously became both a big thing and nothing at all.
July 28, 2004: Garden State is released.
Indie film and music were both inspired by Zach Braff’s 2004 movie, which helped set the sensitive-guy/Manic Pixie Dream Girl couple trope as indie’s gold standard of cuteness. The songs on the soundtrack – most notably by the Shins, though he did have the mua-ha-ha-worthy idea of having Iron & Wine’s cover of Such Great Heights by the Postal Service – brought indie pop under this umbrella. Thus, the music and its nascent aesthetic were permanently packaged together and introduced to the mainstream.
See also: Juno, Juno soundtrack, Michael Cera, (500) Days Of Summer, (500) Days Of Summer soundtrack, Zooey Deschanel
September 14, 2004: Arcade Fire makes “whoa-ohs” a thing.
On “Wake Up,” the biggest song on their debut Funeral, Arcade Fire tapped into the potential of wordless vocals to express a youthful joy that perhaps lyrics couldn’t adequately capture. That idea was not lost on the pop industry, and the “whoa-oh” is as rampant in 2014 as dubstep drops were in 2011. The song’s use in the trailer of Where The Wild Things Are, in tandem with the movie’s woodland-monster visuals, explains a lot of contemporary indie pop aesthetics (most explicitly in the video for American Authors’ “Best Day Of My Life”).
See also: American Authors’ “Best Day Of My Life,” Of Monsters And Men’s “Little Talks,” Young The Giant’s “Cough Syrup,” Fun’s “Carry On,” Imagine Dragons’ “Radioactive,” and even non-indie pop like Beyonce’s “XO,” Maroon 5′s “Daylight,” and Tove Lo’s “Habits (Stay High).”
September 28, 2004: Brian Wilson finishes Smile.
The solo completion of Brian Wilson’s scrapped Beach Boys masterwork Smile gave indie bands a purpose in capturing the album’s ideal of “transcendence.” Thus, while the early-’00s indie landscape was full of cynical guitar bands, the later half of the decade saw an increased acceptance of artists with Wilson-scale ambitions and passions for wacky instruments. Hence, the overflow of glockenspiels, vocal harmonies, and obscure string instruments that continue to dominate indie music.
See also: The Ruby Suns’ Sea Lion, Animal Collective’s Feels, Grizzly Bear’s Veckatimest, Sufjan Stevens’s Illinois, Califone’s Roots & Crowns, The Shins’ Wincing The Night Away, Panda Bear’s Young Prayer and Person Pitch, Neon Indian’s Psychic Chasms, Gotye’s Making Mirrors
November 2004: Death Cab for Cutie signs to Atlantic.
In the early 2000s, Death Cab was one of Barsuk Records’ biggest successes, a paragon of how to launch an assault on the pop industry from the underground. After Transatlanticism charted, the group got snatched up by Atlantic Records – a demonstrably non-indie record label. Though Death Cab didn’t change its sound too much, this gesture effectively invalidated the original meaning of “indie,” for better or worse.
See also: the entire pop industry.