“I liked [that band] before they sold out”

If you frequent any entertainment sites/magazines (especially Rolling Stone in this case), you probably know where this is going. Even if you think you live under a rock, if you've been to any off-campus house parties in the last two years, you probably are at least vaguely familiar with The Black Keys. Just look up the song "Everlasting Light" and it will hit you: "That guy with all the tattoos put this on at x's house when we were listening to Big Boi; what a buzz kill." Really just look up any of their songs and you will most likely get a déjà vu sensation not felt since that time Nickelback released two songs that were almost the same. You've heard it before, you know it, you're just not quite sure where ‘til you look a little closer.

Speaking of Nickelback though, they come into play here with the little bit o' controversy The Black Keys managed to conjure up. In the latest issue of Rolling Stone, The Black Keys drummer Patrick Carney says "Rock & roll is dying because people became okay with Nickelback being the biggest band in the world," and lays out the logic behind The Black Keys getting the snub from music snobs: Nickelback is popular (massive sales and seemingly endless airplay), Nickelback is awful ("watered-down, post-grunge crap, horrendous shit," according to Carney), therefore all popular things must be awful.

This, obviously, is poor logic— yet it is such a big part of popular music culture. Probably almost everyone you know hates Nickelback with a passion. I know I don't listen to them, and have horrible memories of being a teenager and having to hear a shitty Nickelback single that could have been written by a tractor every fifteen minutes on the only rock radio station available. Nickelback is the only reason I could think of for why Canadian content laws are bullshit (though Americans can't escape the band either).

Somebody must like them of course, but those people don't know anything about music, right? They probably haven't even heard of The Dirty Projectors. They probably don't think David Bowie's Berlin trilogy is an underrated masterpiece. Or maybe they don't even know who The Suburbs are or that there was a fire at the arcade recently. This "pop = bad" reasoning makes us bad people, no? It envelopes us with a potent must of musical superiority and pretentiousness so deep that breaking out of it becomes as hard as figuring out what was in the suitcase that everyone wanted so bad.

This attitude is what's pissing off The Black Keys. The group went from indie treasures to pop rock super stardom in not even two years' time. Their rough-around-the-edges, fuzzy garage rock can be heard literally everywhere now. Their songs are in so many car commercials and TV shows all of the sudden you'd think they were CCR or a copyright-dodging-U2-imitating studio band doing Rogers ads. Oddly enough, The Black Keys try to distance themselves from the indie fan crowd, and rightly so as their brand of music doesn't quite scream indie-as-fuck like some of their counterparts. Which is the strangest part: their music is pretty formulaic; it takes many a cue from classic rock and is really fucking poppy/catchy/radio friendly. This seems sort of the antithesis of indie.

^{Drummer Patrick Carney. Pretty much Justin Bieber                                                                    PHOTO: WIKIMEDIA COMMONS}

Now when I say "indie," I'm not referring to some genre of music like country or hip hop; there is no indie music per se. Indie, as I see it, is more of a socio-cultural construct. The most literal (and probably the best) definition is simply the band is on an independent label (The Black Keys are on Nonesuch Records which is a subsidiary of Warner. Hmm…). Any musical similarities between bands on indie labels should be coincidental.

But of course that's not the case and the label "indie music" was born. The word indie has come to represent a sound, an ethos, and a subculture. We all have some concept of what "indie" is, and these different interpretations have probably led to a lot of heated rants— but that is not what this is. This rather is an exploration of a new dichotomy in pop-rock; that is, the face-off between stadium-filling-radio-rock and popular-on-a-blog-playing-at-Lee's Palace-next-month-rock. What happens when one band switches sides? Why can't a band be both?

We find The Blacks Keys at this stage. The Black Keys have been active since 2001 and have released seven albums. It wasn't until their fifth album, Attack & Release (which was also when Danger Mouse became involved in their production and songwriting), came out in 2008 that they started to become pretty well known due to the album's debut at number 14 on the Billboard 200 list. The next two albums, Brothers and El Camino, debuted at numbers three and two, respectively. The Black Keys are now chart topping mega rock stars with songs that spread like Norovirus (get well soon, NASH74 comrades!).