Seems like an obvious segue from yesterday’s blog of declaration (a lazy half-baked manifesto?) I’m going to make an attempt to pin down what I am. Doubt I’m going to get too far, because the question is, am I indie? Am I an indie designer?

I tried looking “indie” up in Wikipedia but there’s no entry other than “indie music”. My musical ability could be defined as “nonexistent” (though I have plans to take a guitar class this fall, so maybe “indie rocker” could be in my future.)

I’m scratching my head about the term “indie” because I think it alludes to being independent.

But independent from what? Big corporations? Mainstream forms of manufacturing?

Does it mean I’m old if I can’t relate to this term? It’s not like “indie” is new-fangled. I just finished reading a fantastically written and interesting book about “Sassy” magazine: How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine of All Time by Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer. [FYI: this book was so entertaining and a perfect summer read for those who are fiction-phobic such as myself. Though I am quite fond the Bronte sisters and their contemporaries.]

In the 90′s, Sassy magazine was somewhere between mainstream and not–their advertising was the regular teen mag stuff: Clairol, Tampax et al. but the articles were not typical teen fluff. I was an avid reader and I remember articles with substance. Anyway, they covered “indie music” (I have no memory of this, so I feel I’ve got to keep it enclosed in quotes). Since their advertisers were mainstream, I’ll argue the magazine was too. Point being, I think the “indie music” scene and Sassy had a symbiotic relationship.

This was not the case for all things indie. Jesella and Meltzer’s book talks about “zines” and how the authors of zines were in trouble if Sassy wrote about them– zines couldn’t handle the additional subscription base.
Sounds to me like zines are more “indie” than “indie music”. I didn’t see an entry in Wikipedia for “indie zine”; maybe there should be. Maybe “indie music” is a misappropriated title, and they should instead call it “zuzic”, since “zine” is clearly an indie magazine.

Oh, semantics.

What’s the point? I think there’s too much time spent on categorizing, and not enough energy spent on creating and existing. I still don’t know what “indie” is, and I’m not really interested in becoming part of a group. I have my own business for a reason, and it’s because I want to find my own way and not have to be part of someone else’s decision making process. Oddly though, I find that I avoid “indie” things because I don’t define myself and in the process I’m probably missing out on something that could fit me like a T. How am I to know?