The term “indie rock” used to mean something different. As a genre designator, “indie rock” was always pretty useless. The vast majority of recorded rock ‘n’ roll comes out on independent labels, and there’s never been much of an aesthetic through-line uniting even the stuff that actively embraces the whole “indie” idea. But “indie rock,” as a term in common use, didn’t always connote upwardly mobile bookish tweeness. That probably happened sometime in the mid-’00s, when a certain form of NPR-friendly Decemberism became a dominant strain of American underground rock. Maybe this was the Pitchfork effect. (If it was, then I’m as complicit as anyone else; I wrote for Pitchfork at the time.)