INDIE GENRE AND INFLUENCES

BECKY BOYFIELD

INDIE GENRE

The indie genre covers a wide range of artists and media concepts. The indie genre is extremely diverse and can include the

following sub-genres; indie pop, indie alternative, indie rock and jangle pop. The term ‘indie’ began to be used as a way to

describe a type of music style. This style of music became highly popular in the 2000’s and began to grow from then on. The

typical lyrical content in this genre is very unique and to the heart which creates meaning to the artist. The lyrics play upon

emotions and feelings and more typically focus on the artists own problems and occurrences within their lives. Coldplay became

highly popular throughout the 2000’s and are still favourably recognised and loved in the present day. Some successful

outbreaks for the band was their songs ‘Fix You’, ’Yellow’ and ‘Paradise’. All these video’s had a continuous theme of disjuncture

as the ‘Yellow’ and ‘Paradise’ videos had no reference to their song lyrics at all. The album ‘X&Y’ which features the track ‘Fix

You’ was said to relate to Chris Martin’s doubts, fears, hopes and loves in his life. This album was partially influenced by Johnny

Cash and Kraftwerk.

The musical style of indie videos seem to look very warm in terms of lighting, which is helped due to exposure of natural light

and open spaces and this music is usually played with light acoustic or sometimes electric guitars. The lyrics in the indie genre

also usually consist of clean vocals. A typical indie song will follow two verses and two choruses, with a simple structure that the

audience can understand. The music style is very simple yet upbeat most of the time and a variety of bands can learn covers

and perform their own tracks. This then helps to make the music become very popular as it appeals to so many people. The

indie genre tries to give a reflective and emotive ideology to its audience and believes that it’s important to just try to fit in with

everyday people. They do not wish to be anything different from other people and want to promote the importance of just being

yourself. I would say that one of the main beliefs for the genre is for their music to come from the heart and for the music to feel

passionate and soulful. However the indie genre also wants to give a realistic outlook on life in general and remain true to its

conventions.

We have represented this in our own music video by linking the lyrical content with the performance and narrative aspects our

video. We knew when we first began planning our video concept that we wanted to transform the words in the song into not only

a meaning and passionate performance from the artist, but also a passionate and understandable feel from the narrative. Our

song is upbeat which bands like to uphold, but it is balanced by the emotive heartache of the female actress and her characters

backstory. Which creates that ideology that would become relatable to audiences.

HOW HAVE WE REPRESENTED THIS?

INFLUENCES

Most artists have been influenced by other artists of a similar

style. Robbie Williams as an example, was inspired by Kiss

when he made his ‘Let Me Entertain You’ video. Robbie uses

intertextual references in the video that tributes the band. Both

Robbie and Kiss’s careers both focused on the rock genre and

he used face paint in his video to show his respect for the band

he loved. We were also influenced by artists in the industry at

present. We looked at The 1975’s ‘Chocolate’ music video, we

have looked at Kaiser Chief’s video ‘Ruby’ and we have also

looked into Coldplay ‘ The Scientist’. These video have inspired

us because ‘Chocolate’ is a very simplistic video which plays

and focuses on the location mainly. The Kaiser Chief’s ‘Ruby’

video is also simplistic but focuses on how the world seems to

revolve around them, this concept we interpreted differently in

our video and within our narrative. Finally ‘The Scientist’ video

represents a type of love story tragedy which we have

interpreted into our own way through the use of a mask and the

reference to a scar that is affecting a couples love life.