Alt and Indie— the new sound
Quarantine looms. Despite our best efforts, the threat of our state–or country–shutting down again is a real possibility. This brings us to the question of how to spend our free time, and the best answer for that lies in the past.
What hobbies did you pick up last spring/summer? Maybe it was sewing, maybe baking bread (of all things), or perhaps you achieved a level 5 island on Nintendo’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Or maybe you explored new genres of music, like I did, and found a certain attraction to less-mainstream creations, like “Sofia” by Clairo or “1901” by Phoenix.
This recent attraction to indie, alternative, and other less well-known genres of music has created a new normal: the abnormal. At the time of writing this, number 11 on Top 100 in America is “Therefore I Am” by Billie Eilish, a certified alternative artist, and number 25 is “Osmosis” by Emma Charles, an indie artist. But why does this matter, and how did it happen?
Recently, the music industry has been experiencing a surge in popularity of the indie genre, which hasn’t been this popular since the ’90s. This is in part because of boredom. Quarantine forced us all to re-evaluate our interests, and there’s nothing more critical to a teenager’s self-image than their music taste.
According to a New Yorker article, dated March of 2020 (at the beginning of our long summer quarantine), staff writer Amanda Petrusich examined why we all expanded our music tastes and developed new loves for old music. She writes on how vinyls, both new and old, were a nice sound to drown out the mayhem outside. But, with a three-week lockdown happening currently in the state of Michigan, we may have to revert to old times and break out the records.
Amanda encourages us all to listen to old records, but also new ones, available locally at record shops and thrift stores (be safe with COVID though). Many indie and alternative artists have begun to produce vinyls,CDs, and virtual copies of their music, in order to appeal to the rise of vinyl music. But no matter where you go, or how you listen, indie and alternative sounds will always be there. Just maybe a little closer to the mainstream now than ever before.