Hold On Now, Youngster...

Every musician is also an audience, and if the ever-growing pile of new music my exhausted mailman brings me every day is any indication, more and more audience members are becoming musicians, too. Since long before "indie" was a buzzword, the loosely defined scene has celebrated participatory self-expression-- whether in the first independently released punk records ("It was easy, it was cheap, go and do it," sang the Desperate Bicycles in 1977, on one of the first ever), the hand-assembled 7" singles of 1980s indie pop, the four-track cassettes of 1990s lo-fi, or even the revival-meeting catharsis of the Arcade Fire and "Form a Band" exhortations of Art Brut. Nobody writes them like they used to, so it may as well be you.