The Top 40 Bands in America Today (via Kottke.

Oh really?

Well, reading through the comments, it seems that taking shots at the list would be useless at this point. As one guy said, they "just asked questions and tallied the votes." It's just disappointing that the music bloggers that responded have such...dull tastes. Not that all of those bands on the list suck; a good number of them don't. But it was so predictable. Didn't indie kids get into the music (some of them, anyway) because they thought mainstream pop was too predictable?

I think this just encapsulates my frustration with indie rock in general, because none of the music takes any risks. More than any other style of music (nowadays, anyway), indie rock seems to be the most static. Even "disposable" music like glossy dance-pop or crunk tends to go somewhere. What does indie nation counter with? LCD Soundsystem? The Rapture? Pop (in the verse-chorus-verse sense) definitely has a most welcome place in the music landscape, but do you mean to tell me that Interpol and Sufjan Stevens is as good as indie nation can do? At the risk of sounding like a crotchety old indie nerd, but this shit would be an afterthought in the indie world just ten, fifteen years ago.

Beyond that: don't these people listen to anything else? Where's the metal? Where's the jazz? Where's the hip-hop? Are people who fancy themselves open-minded music listeners (and that is usually reason number one whenever more mainstream folk question them on their tastes in music) really that uninterested in things outside of indie rock? It's puzzling, for sure.