What is the difference between alternative and indie

Thread Tools. Plus grammar chat with the mods. User Name. Remember Me? Mark Forums Read. The difference between Indie Rock and Alternative Rock A friend posed this question to me the other day who isn't into either genre , and I was stuck for words as to what answer to give. I tend to think of Indie Rock as chick rock. I've been obsessed with this distinction lately, following some interesting discussion about this in the highly recommended!

Indie-Rock Heavyweights Poll thread. I decided to do what any person with no life would do, and that's crunch some numbers. I took a list of 50 albums, and then did two Google searches for each one.

First search would be the artist, album title, and the term "alternative": "pearl jam" "vitalogy" alternative Second search would be the artist, album title, and the term "indie": "pearl jam" "vitalogy" indie Get the hit counts from both searches, compute the percent of the total between the two searches that came from the "indie" search, and there's a crude measure of the degree to which an album is more "indie" than "alternative".

I chose the 50 albums this way: - 10 albums identified as "indie", from the Indie-Rock Heavyweights thread. I chose the ten albums that were leading the poll, although sometimes changed to a different album by the same artist if I was worried that the title was too common a word to get and would get too many false positives.

These acts specialized in heavy rock, and didn't really get the most positive critical reception. I identified these as "post-grunge".

I considered these "mainstream acts", and feel like the proportion of hits here would give us a good baseline to work off of; their percent indie is the "default" percent indie. This makes some sense to me after I think about it: these bands followed in the wake of the earlier "alternative" acts, so they get that label, but, unlike the earlier bands, have not at all influenced today's "indie" acts, so they never get mentioned in discussions of "indie" music.

So they are probably closer to "indie" and "alternative. Location: Springfield, MO. I think is when the term "indie" or what we refer to as "indie" or the categorization of certain bands from that time period as indie really took off. Others may disagree with me on the time frame. I'm just going by my personal experience here, especially since I never heard of or payed attention to the term "indie" till later.

I think that stuff at the time was still considered "alternative" at least to me but I think over time we started to re-categorize it. Now I don't consider something like The Hives "alternative" at all, but they were getting play on mainstream alternative rock radio at the time. The Caesars had "Jerk It Out" in too which was a big hit with me but again, that was "alternative" or just "garage rock" to me. I would have liked to have seen the dates of release on your list, I think that would have been helpful in determining and comparing and deciphering the data.

I do agree with your assessment of certain bands like the Killers being "borderline. EasterEverywhere likes this. Maybe that "alternative" bands sound like "indie" bands but record on major labels or their subsidiaries?

I like Miles Davis' assertion that there are two kinds of music: good and bad paraphrased. All other genre distinctions are insignificant. Rosskolnikov , Sep 4, Dave S likes this. I don't suppose you'd like to go back and add in the dates of release? Location: New York. I think you have to go through the history of theses genres to understand where they come from, and why the terms are confusing as to music of today.

Terms like "college rock" and "alternative rock" were commonly used to describe bands in the '80s and early '90s like R. As with New Wave, the bands labeled as "alternative" acts did not share common musical traits.

But there were some common elements: the type of audience, the scene in which the bands worked, the ethos under which the music was made. You could not define "alternative" music clearly, but like pornography, you knew it when you saw it.

For example, the Smiths were more often referred to as "British indie rock" than as "alternative rock". When Nirvana hit mainstream success in the early s, many "alternative" style bands won major label contracts, broke onto Top 40 radio and started playing arenas.

Around that time, I recall that "indie rock" became more commonly used. It usually referred to bands that were distinctively outside the major-labels and outside the Top 40 radio sound of that time -- for example, lo-fi acts like Guided By Voices, Pavement or Sebadoh. In , you could still call R. During the early to late s, I think music fans understood well the difference between "alternative" rock versus "indie" rock.

There's a much-quoted lined from that old "Blues Brothers " movie, in which a staff member of a rough-and-tumble redneck bar offers that the venue's stage plays host to "both kinds" of music: "Country and Western.

Well, yes and no. Alternative and indie, at their roots, stand more for vague ideas and beliefs than any kind of specific musical styles of sounds, and truly the only real difference is the location of the artist: alternative was the preferred nomenclature of American artists while indie came straight from the British Isles. Yes, indie is at heart the English expression. In the U.

In the wake of punk rock in the late s, the do-it-yourself ethos had flowered in England. Yet at some point, the simple classification changed. Many point to the iconic cassette compilation "C86," which was given away with an edition of the English weekly "NME " in The album sought to chronicle a burgeoning English guitar-pop underground called either "cutie" or "shambling" at the time.

As these descriptive names suggest, these bands played a twee , amateurish form of home-made music drawing deeply from sunny '60s acts like The Byrds and the Velvet Underground. Rough Trade recording artists, The Smiths, were the biggest band in the U. Known as a proudly indie band whose obvious debt to The Byrds contrasted their frontman Morrissey's Oscar Wilde rakish wit, The Smiths unsurprisingly released "C86" to great critical acclaim.

Sometime thereafter, indie meant being synonymous with this particular style, this particular cassette. Stylistically, this meant a retro-phonic, largely sexless form of music with jangly guitars and the vague taint of nostalgia.

Indie no longer referred to the factual realities of record distribution. Indie was somewhere between a state of mind and a singular guitar tone. After a quarter-century of sexually-frustrated, bookish boys and block-fringed girls playing proudly indie music labels, you'd think it would've made indie a definable style, if not a singular sound.