PROVENANCE

what's real, what's reconstructed, what's yours

The request: find the original “Big Indie Rock Guide to Bands” (a.k.a. “Hipster Guide to Indie Rock” / “Pitchfork Guide to Indie Bands”), supposedly circulating on Usenet, Something Awful, I Love Music, and Hipinion around 2002–2004.

The finding (Sep 2026): the joke format is everywhere and thoroughly documented — the one-line “sounds like X, minus Y” description was the lingua franca of 2002–2006 music writing: Metacritic critics' blurbs, Slant's 2005 review riff, Mark Prindle's “Hip New Bands” micro-reviews, “Kind of Like:” fanlistings, and blogs like Those Geese Were Stupefied. Something Awful's own “Your Band Sucks” column (Dr. David Thorpe) was the era's flagship of the same comedic register.

But no single canonical document by that exact title surfaced in any reachable archive. Forum-era content from that window is largely gone: Hipinion purges old threads, ILM archives are inconsistent, Usenet music groups drowned in spam, and search engines de-index dead phpBB thread dumps. If the original existed as one list, it is not findable now.

So this page does three honest things:

  1. The Guide (front page) is a reconstruction — the format and the era, with real sourced lines credited to their publications and anonymous-style lines deliberately unattributed, as the originals were.
  2. The User Shitlist (/hall) is the living, crowd-sourced sequel — anyone can add an entry, and it is kept strictly separate from the guide.
  3. This page tells you exactly which is which. Nothing on this site pretends to be the original document.

Verified sources used in The Guide

  1. Metacritic, critics' summary for Editors, The Back Room (2006)
  2. chromewaves.net, review of White Lies, To Lose My Life… (2009)
  3. Slant Magazine, review of The Coral, The Invisible Invasion (2005)
  4. Warrington Guardian, “Yeah Yeah Yeahs? More like No No No…” (2003)
  5. Vice, “This Is Disco Punk” (2003)
  6. Rolling Stone, review of Modest Mouse, Good News for People Who Love Bad News (2004)
  7. Pitchfork, “200 Most Influential Musicians of the Last 25 Years”
  8. Westword, “Animal Collective is really just two Beach Boys records playing at the same time” (2010)
  9. PopMatters, review of Panda Bear, Person Pitch (2007)
  10. Tucson Weekly, “Spin Cycle” (2004)
  11. Village Voice, “Winter of Their Youth” (1999)
  12. Houston Press, review of The Decemberists, Her Majesty (2004)
  13. Those Geese Were Stupefied, year-end write-ups (2009)
  14. Yellow Green Red zine, archive (2012)

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