Here is the track list for 26 Reformations of a Middle Class American Heart, Vol. 7: “We All Had a Smashing Time,” which I completed in October 2022.
Side A:
Orange Juice, Falling and Laughing (4:01)
The dB’a, Black and White (3:09)
The Go-Betweens, I Need Two Heads (2:32)
Metropak, Here’s Looking at You (3:32)
Electric Guitars, Health (2:54)
The Prats, Nobody Noticed (3:56)
Mission of Burma, Max Ernst (3:04)
The Scientists, Pissed On Another Planet (3:19)
Laughing Clowns, The Laughing Clowns (4:26)
Ski Patrol, Agent Orange (4:19)
Normil Hawaiians, The Beat Goes On (2:55)
The Stripes, Tell Me Your Name (3:09)
Television Personalities, Smashing Time (2:41)
Side B:
Pylon, Volume (4:14)
Young Marble Giants, Brand New Life (2:55)
The Comsat Angels, Waiting for a Miracle (2:59)
MX-80 Sound, Follow That Car (3:57)
The Fall, The Container Drivers (3:06)
Killing Joke, Primitive (3:39)
The Vapors, Bunkers (3:55)
Squeeze, Here Comes That Feeling (2:12)
The Soft Boys, Tonight (3:45)
The Beach Bullies, Start All Over (3:27)
The Records, Hearts In Her Eyes (3:22)
Vic Godard & The Subway Sect, Stool Pigeon (3:02)
The Pyschedelic Furs, Flowers (4:12)
This volume of 26 Reformations of a Middle Class American Heart begins a trilogy of single-year-specific mixtapes that attempt to establish a non-definitive framework for the development of indie music (I can’t keep calling it indie rock, even though that’s how it began being called — it includes too many other kinds of music to identify it as rock music, and it’s clear enough that it was that way from the beginning) as a genre between 1980, when it was new if not brand new, and 2008, when it attained a kind of saturation and became definitively a mainstream genre in spite of the contradictions between its name and that status. The specific years (1980, 1990, 2008) approached in this trilogy are not by any means a beginning, middle and end of indie music. Other years would do just as well for describing a historical trajectory. That said, they’ll do just fine as markers — for my own understanding, they have done just fine. I chose them because I was born in 1980, began listening to music on the radio in 1990, and grew disenchanted with the direction of indie music after 2008. I think these three years serve the genre’s history pretty well, to be honest, but I don’t think they serve it specifically well or exclusively well.
After all, when did indie music begin? It doesn’t seem unreasonable to say that it begins with The Velvet Underground & Nico, whose recording history, influence and commercial failure are all hallmarks of later indie music. On the other hand, The Kinks’ The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, with its distinct turn away from the prevailing blues rock and psychedelia of the time and towards a quieter, craftier town hall pop songcraft, is an indie gesture by a major band if I’ve ever heard of one. No? Then how about John Cale’s Paris 1919? Or the Modern Lovers’ Velvets-inspired recordings, which have the additional indieness of going unreleased for nearly a decade? Or Bowie’s albums from Berlin, with their various turns toward art, experiment, and collaboration? Or Swell Maps’ early recordings, which aren’t really punk, post-punk, or anything else either?
Whatever the actual origins of the genre, by 1978 the term was coined in a music magazine, and by 1980 labels like Postcard were organized specifically for its distribution. On this mixtape of songs from 1980, it isn’t easy to distinguish indie rock from post-punk from art-rock from synth-pop from alternative rock from new wave from punk from sad jangly pop. It’s all just kind of hanging out there, dispersed across a small but pretty distinct group of singles and albums, waiting to be seen as similar. You can judge for yourself whether it’s really indie music or something else; I’m comfortable saying that, yes, that’s what it is, and yes, it coalesced as an identifiable strand of guitar-based music sometime between 1979 and 1981.
I’ve organized it like so: the first half of the mixtape is drawn from singles and EPs — as with most new strands of music, the greatest energy is most discernible in that format before anywhere else. The second half of the mixtape is drawn from albums, where I think the music, while ultimately indie music from today’s perspective, has more in common with things like punk, power pop, and alternative rock than the music on Side A does. Side A has harder edges, side B has better melodies.
I’d be very curious, at any point in time, to hear anyone’s take on a pre-origin indie music mixtape. Any critic, artist, appreciator or amateur historian who has tackled the pre-1980 origins of the music — if you ever hear of such a document, please bring it to my attention in whatever way you can.
Sunday Mixtape #16: "We all had a smashing time"