The Dream of the Nineties

"The best work of that indie heyday—and 1997 alone offered Elliott Smith's Either/Or, Stereolab's Dots and Loops, Whiskeytown's Strangers Almanac, and Teenage Fanclub's Songs From Northern Britain—compares well to any year. And while every band was different, the world that had been opened up by Nirvana, Sonic Youth, and the Smiths meant an ocean of succinct, structured songs complicated by feedback, overdrive, odd guitar tunings, feminism, Gen X irony, and intense emotion that would never have suited the macho 'classic rock' paradigm of Album Oriented Radio. Behind it was an anti-commercial ethos that made an unsteady peace with commerce.
"Bands built whole careers on oddball, not terribly commercial niches, with the Apples in Stereo crossing Pet Sounds with the Silver Apples, Velvet Crush splicing power pop with introvert Byrd Gene Clark, and Luna finding the hidden possibilities in the Velvet Underground's poorly selling self-titled LP. There was a 'beautiful losers' ideology to indie, but in a parallel to what was occurring with American independent cinema, some of this was happening on big corporate labels or quasi-indie imprints; Matador, Elektra, SubPop, and 550 Music all had ties to either Warner Bros. or Sony.
"So art and money came together: Never again, it seemed, would routine blues progressions, hair metal, or corporate pap rule the charts."

Scott Timberg at Vox recalls "Peak Indie."