Los difusos límites conceptuales del indie español de la segunda mitad de los 90post-rock vs. tonti-pop

Résumé

The term indie has become one of the most diffuse labels within popular music since the 80s, when it began to be used referring to a commercial attitudeand a particular sound. As Matthew Bannister reflects, until the arrival of grunge it grouped a set of scenes with certain sonic differences but a series of common aesthetic and ethicalprinciples.In the 90s indie became a very wide label, due to the increasing contacts between the independent labels with the majors and the influence of the new digitaltechnologies, electronic music and hip-hop. In this article,I will analyzethe discourses produced around two antagonistgenres,coexistentwithin the Spanish indie of the second half of the nineties: post-rock and tonti-pop Through a comparative study of the discourses developed around them and the analysis of some of their most representative musical manifestations,I will evaluatehow both genres fitted inside the national indie scene. This will allow us to comprehend the tensions that arise between a conception of the scene oriented towards anexperimental, intellectualizedand international discourse and a conventional, endemic and closer to pop vision, which eventually would prevail. Although both positions may seem apparently irreconcilable, the features which both developed were present in the indie of the eighties, from which each genre emphasizeda series of elements at the expense of others, making disappear the equidistance that existed between pop and more underground and experimental tendencies –and hence between the search for economic capital and cultural capital–to give way to a more diversified conception of this field of cultural production, which it's currently kept.