utter nonsense

Monday, May 17, 2004

intresting read found via the bridge (who woulda thunk theres still life there???)

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4933394


Indie outbreak: Wayne Coyne's Flaming Lips are at the vanguard of a new golden age in rock


By Devin Gordon
Newsweek

May 17 issue - Have you ever been outside in 106-degree heat? The air is crushing. You dehydrate instantly. You fantasize about cooler places, like Arizona. In 106-degree heat, the average indie-rock fan—thin, brittle, white as chalk—will spontaneously burst into flames. So it was a shock when 60,000 of them braved the elements recently for the Coachella music festival outside Los Angeles. Two days, all outdoors, all to see 82 bands with names that sound like parodies of band names: Death Cab for Cutie, Broken Social Scene, the Flaming Lips and one that could've been the festival's motto: ... And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead. (Yes, that's a real band. And yes, they're good.) Two years ago, the indie-rock scene was sputtering. Coachella was a quirky, decently attended event. And now? "I had no idea it was such a big deal," says Death Cab frontman Ben Gibbard. "We were touring in Japan beforehand and people kept telling us they were flying from Japan to be at Coachella."

After a grim decade, the rock scene is once again producing music—lots of it—that's worth getting on a plane to hear. And better still, people are buying it. Last month, Seattle bizarro-rockers Modest Mouse turned heads when their new CD debuted at No. 19 on Billboard's album chart, selling 80,000 copies in a week. Gibbard has become such an indie rainmaker that his side project, the electronic-pop duo the Postal Service, has sold 250,000 copies of its first CD, "Give Up." "Five years ago, a record that sold 50,000 copies was a huge success in our world," says Rich Egan, president of Vagrant Records, home of punk pinups Dashboard Confessional. "The standard has totally changed." File-sharing, once thought to be the death knell for the music industry, has actually helped trigger a spending spree. Even MTV and big radio are starting to notice, playing artists they wouldn't have touched three years ago. Does the current scene have a Nirvana, an R.E.M., a U2? Not yet. "But I've talked about this with friends a lot lately: something amazing is about to happen," says Gibbard, 27. "I don't want to guess what it'll be, but you can just feel it coming."


posted by: Kerri at 7:32 pm
Post a Comment