Because we here at The Dowsers are masochists, we turned NME.com’s recent 20 Greatest Indie Anthems Ever poll into a playlist. The results are as depressingly predictable as Amazon’s “customers who bought this item also bought” algorithm. Just over 50 percent of the playlist is given over to multiple tracks from a quartet of chart-topping derivatives: Arctic Monkeys (four), The Strokes (three), Oasis (two), and The Killers (two). Meanwhile, older and far more pioneering acts Joy Division, The Smiths, and The Stone Roses tally a paltry four between them. This data can be read one of two ways: either readers of NME don’t consider music before the ’90s indie or their Arctic Monkeys/Joy Division preference ratio really is four to one. The mere contemplation of the latter is a major bummer.
