Who will rid me of 21st-century indie?

Who cares about the "indie" music released in the noughties and 2010s? Do YOU? Stupid question, of course, but what I mean (I think) is: has anyone really been paying attention to the stuff (noise, post-rock, alt-folk, neo-grunge, bedroom pop etc) that came out on small labels during this period? Yeah OK, lots of people will have done so in a very obvious sense. There's been a highly developed media culture around much of this - the NME championing the brasher/poppier stuff, write-ups in the Quietus, Clash magazine, WIRE (my own read), hundreds of bloggers and PRs doing their thing, not forgetting the labels and artists themselves crashing around on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to make a bit of look-at-us-we've-got-a-new-record-out noise. And then the fans/consumers who also add to the clamour on social media (which of course came of age during his period). But ... what if a lot of this falls on deaf ears? Goes into the void? Most of it surely does. It's coming out soon, it's out, there's a gig or two to support it, there's a bit of press (if you're lucky), then ... it's gone. Forgotten. Anyway, I take to the airwaves (my obscure blog) with these thoughts after picking up a biggish (30-strong) batch of  secondhand 7" singles at the weekend. A massive £1 each in the "bargain bin" of one of east London's semi-cool (or thinks it is) record shops. Or to be more precise, they were a pound a piece if you bought ten at a go (£1.99 each otherwise). And my point is ..? Well, here goes: these records were carefully priced. I've been going to this particular shop and its sister outlets in London fairly regularly in the past couple of years and they price everything with a Discogs-informed eye to market value. They often scrawl something like "US grunge" or "brown vinyl" on their annoying over-sticky-and-sometimes-impossible-to-get-off price labels. They know their product. 

Unloved and unwanted: the Niluccio on noise top 30 

In the couple of boxes I sweatily sifted through on Saturday afternoon there were also oddities like about seven different Bad Manners singles or (less oddly) things like a Stranglers single (Something Better Change/Straighten Out). The latter I was surprised to see at £1.99 (or £1 if part of ten), but generally the older stuff was less interesting. Some of it was in fact the usual cheap box fodder: scratched Human League or Blondie records, even Stock Aitken Waterman dross or Cliff Richard records. But ... there was also the stuff I bought. Which in the main is not dross. In fact, from what I've been able to gather from whizzing through a few of them - quite the contrary (check out this Twitter thread I half-heartedly put out yesterday). To date, I've listened to stuff from Big Deal, Dead Coast, Dutch Uncles, Grimm Grimm, Deathcrash, Nina Slash, Flats and one other. Apart from the shall-remain-nameless "one other", they're all decent. In a couple of cases they're really good. In one case (Big Deal's cover of Big Star's Thirteen, b-side to their Homework single) it's so good that I would - to use the classic example - save this from a house fire before about 95% of my other records. Rock and roll is here to stay ...

Or maybe I've got this all wrong and these aren't in fact much cop. Perhaps, but er ... I can only trust my own ears. So why are "hip" London shops selling off this stuff for cheap? They think nothing of pricing 70s roots reggae singles for £49.99 a piece, classic ("rare") soul cuts for even more, and more workaday stuff like 80s Nick Cave albums for £20-25. The explanation is probably fairly simple: the "market" (dread term) hasn't caught up. Enough time hasn't yet elapsed for people to start taking a "historical" interest. Or maybe they never will. This music (very roughly UK-US indie 2000-2019) is perhaps doomed to be slightly unloved/unappreciated compared to others. In recent years, I've listened to a fair bit of future dub and the weirder end of dance music and these, by contrast, are highly esteemed by the music cogniscenti and usually expensive to buy (extortionately so in the case of new releases). But stuff by your typical small-label indie-folk band from Edinburgh operating circa 2009 - not so much. Hmm. During the past couple of decades I've been to an unhealthy number of gigs in London's smaller venues (plus a few around the country) and, I guess, I've ended up appreciating quite a bit of the music in question almost by default. Possibly I'm too uncritical. True, I do sort of "support" it because of what it represents, but ... it also sounds pretty good to me. Interestingly, one of the 30 records I picked up at the weekend still had the accompanying record label press release slipped inside the sleeve. My guess, then, is that at least some of these records were cast-offs from a record industry hack sent them as review copies. In fact, several of the records looked suspiciously pristine: the music critic not bothering to play them even once perhaps ...? So maybe this is another aspect to the neglect of turbulent 21st-century indie. The critics are bored of this music and don't listen to it. They're wrong.