'90s Indie Rock

In the early '90s, as alt-rock overtook the mainstream like army ants, music at the fringes needed a new brand ID: "indie." Not just one scene, but dozens — space rock, sadcore, riot grrrl, and boatloads more — flourished at hip record stores, clubs, and radio. D.I.Y.-until-we-die superstars Superchunk extend a middle-finger salute to deadbeat roommates everywhere in their speaker-blistering rage-up "Slack M**********r." If any band ever ran indie rock's stylistic table, it's the ever-morphing Yo La Tengo, whose understated post-pomo love letter, "Autumn Sweater," only barely hints at the trio's jaw-dropping breadth. Stephen Malkmus' sarcastic stream-of-consciousness lyrics mesh perfectly with Pavement's penchant for sonic chaos in their beautiful mess of a lo-fi noise bomb, "Cut Your Hair." And arena-filling power chords form an uneasy alliance with the theremin's monster-movie ooooo-eeeee squeal in the Pixies' slightly surreal "Velouria."

In Next Steps, we're gonna hear an aspect of indie rock that very quietly made a very big splash.

From sadcore and dream pop purveyors to a new generation of space rocketeers, indie's more contemplative corps is no less captivating than its post-punk, post-grunge noisemeisters. Sigur Rós' sophomore album, Ágætis Byrjun, not only won the inaugural Shortlist Prize, but it was also declared Iceland's Best Album of the Century. The lacy sonic wash of its "Starálfur" unfolds like an alien lotus flower, chamber music from an ice cathedral light-years away. Closer to home, the San Francisco-based Red House Painters' Mark Kozelek elevates navel-gazing to an art form in the sweetly jangling "Grace Cathedral Park," lamenting a lost youth that, at 26, he hadn't even left behind. And Scots space-rockers Mogwai (who took their name from the Cantonese word for "ghost") let us eavesdrop on a found-sound phone call in "Tracy," its half-intelligible dialogue floating in and out of the boomy-bass soundscape like a radio station just fading out of range.

In Deep Cuts, the sisterhood speaks, from the banks of the Potomac to the banks of the Amstel.

Don't think for a second that women had their noses pressed against the window of indie, looking in; some of the scenes' most indispensable bands packed a lipstick as well as a wallop. D.C. stalwarts Velocity Girl hooked up with Smiths producer John Porter and cranked their fuzz box to its speaker-busting redline in "Sorry Again," creating in the process pumped-up power pop that critics dubbed "bubblegrunge." Dutch indie Bettie Serveert's "Palomine" ebbs and swells in dreamily fluid motion from folky jangle to muscle-flexing power riffage while vocalist Carol van Dijk drifts through the lyric as if paging through her diary, pressed flowers cozied-up next to concert tickets torn in half like a fragile heart. And Luscious Jackson's hip-wriggling seductiveness drives "Citysong" into a funk-filled frenzy, as lead singer Jill Cunniff unleashes her pheromone-drenched purr over a come-hither bed of hip-hop beats.

Whether it was merely irony or what Tom Robbins called "zeitgeist frappe," the '90s spawned an alt-rock schism, with the pop press (as well as the genuinely hip) decrying the very word alternative as so mainstream that it needed a substitute. And just like that, indie suddenly became alternative's alternative. In the post-grunge major-label land grab, many pioneer indie imprints got swallowed up (or co-opted), while others clung to the D.I.Y. ethic and thrived like never before. The artists who made the indie-to-major transition — including American Music Club, the Flaming Lips, Modest Mouse, and Uncle Tupelo — strove to retain not only their indie attitude, but also their all-important indie cred. And those bands who, for aesthetic, political, or salability reasons, stayed in the indie world (including Sebadoh, the Sea and Cake, and Bikini Kill), changed the rules — and the sound — for everyone. Literally dozens of scene-ettes made up the birth of indie, and from riot grrrl to space rock, we've got 'em all.