I have to admit that when I first heard the term "indie poo", I laughed. I knew immediately what it was getting at. There's a particular strand of British guitar music around at the moment that can feel incredibly familiar: the clothes, the references, the vocals, the guitars, the obvious influence of Oasis and other bands that came before them. The phrase was apparently coined on TikTok earlier this year and, like most good insults, it works because you immediately understand the caricature.
The more I've thought about it, though, the less I like it. In fact, I don't like it at all.
Partly that's because I've spent most of my working life around developing artists. I've seen plenty of brilliant bands and plenty of terrible ones, and I've probably seen even more who started out fairly ordinary and became good because somebody gave them the space to develop. Young artists imitate things. Of course they do. The Beatles did it, The Smiths did it, Oasis did it and virtually every significant artist I've ever encountered began with influences that were much more obvious than they became later. Finding your own voice is a process, not something that magically happens when you're 18.
What bothers me more about "indie poo" is who we may actually be laughing at. When the joke moves beyond the music and starts encompassing accents, clothes, haircuts, where somebody comes from and the way young working-class people present themselves, we're entering different territory. There's a danger that musical criticism becomes social judgement without us even noticing it. Four young lads from a Northern town with guitars can become a stereotype before anybody has really listened to them, understood their circumstances or considered what opportunity they've had to develop.
This becomes more complicated when you work in education, artist development or around publicly funded music programmes, because these aren't simply conversations about taste. People make decisions about who receives money, mentoring, opportunities, studio time, showcases and development. That's where I think we need to be particularly careful about unconscious bias.
There are very good reasons why the cultural sector has introduced policies intended to address underrepresentation. Historically, significant groups of people have faced very real barriers to accessing the music industry and public funding. Women, Black and Asian artists, LGBTQ+ people, disabled people and others have not always had equal access to the rooms where decisions are made. Working to correct that is valid and necessary, and I don't want to see those policies dismantled.
But even good policy can be clumsily applied. In trying to correct one set of assumptions we have to be careful that we don't unconsciously create another. Genre isn't an identity, and it isn't a reliable indicator of privilege. A guitar band from Rochdale, Barrow, Stockport or a struggling part of Manchester shouldn't automatically be regarded as culturally less interesting or less deserving than somebody making electronic music, rap, experimental pop or anything else. Equally, an artist from an underrepresented background shouldn't feel obliged to make the sort of music, or tell the sort of story, that somebody on a funding panel expects them to make.
Class is particularly difficult because it can be much harder to see. Two artists can look superficially similar on an application form while having had completely different starts in life. One may have parents who can subsidise equipment, transport, rehearsal rooms and months of unpaid development. Another might be working thirty hours a week while trying to keep a band together. If we're genuinely interested in equality of opportunity, those things matter considerably more to me than whether somebody is holding a guitar.
There is another problem too. We are absolutely saturated with music. A lot of it isn't very good. That isn't peculiar to indie. There's terrible rap, terrible electronic music, terrible pop, terrible metal, terrible singer-songwriters and terrible experimental music. There always has been. The difference is that we now have access to virtually all of it. In the past, thousands of dreadful demos never escaped a rehearsal room or someone's bedroom. Today everybody has access to distribution and, just as importantly, everybody has access to channels of communication and promotion. Something can be recorded, released and put in front of thousands of people almost immediately: I don't think that's a bad thing. Quite the opposite. I'd rather have too much creativity than too little.
Not everybody who picks up a guitar, opens Ableton, starts rapping or writes a song needs to be exceptional. We have become so used to viewing music through the prism of careers, streaming numbers, funding outcomes and "artist development" that sometimes we forget the value of simply making something. Most people who make music will never make a living from it. That doesn't make making music pointless.
I think this becomes particularly important when we look at what is happening to young people more widely. We are rightly concerned about isolation, anger, misogyny, racism, extremism and online radicalisation. Music can't solve those things, and it would be ridiculous to suggest that it can, but creativity can provide somewhere else for people to put their energy, frustration and identity. A rehearsal room is somewhere to belong. A band requires people to listen to one another and compromise. A gig creates community. Writing a song gives somebody a way of articulating anger, fear or alienation rather than simply having those feelings fed back to them by an algorithm designed to keep them angry. That matters.
I've changed my mind about "indie poo". I still understand the joke and I'm certainly not going to pretend that I think all of the music being described is good. Some of it is derivative, some of it isn't ready and some of it may never be particularly interesting to me. But that's completely different from deciding that the people making it are somehow ridiculous for trying.
We should be able to hold several ideas at once. We should continue addressing historic underrepresentation in music and making sure public money reaches people who previously struggled to access it. We should be rigorous about quality when funding is limited. But we should also examine our own cultural and class assumptions, particularly when a joke on TikTok starts becoming a shorthand for an entire group of young musicians.
I'd rather see four kids from a Northern town making a derivative Oasis record than deciding there is no point making anything at all. I'd rather see somebody make an awful drill track, an overlong electronic experiment or a bedroom pop song that nobody listens to than feel they have no means of expressing themselves. Some of those people will eventually make something brilliant. Most won't. That's not really the point. Creativity itself is worth protecting. If we're serious about inclusion, that surely has to include people whose music we don't particularly like.
