When did Indie go mainstream?

I turned on VH1 the other day, and the number one song on their morning "Countdown" (of the ten videos they decided to play, I guess) was Mumford and Sons "Little Lion Man".  I really dig the song, and this wasn't the first time I'd heard it, but I never thought I'd hear it on VH1 (I guess I never really expect to hear any music on VH1 or MTV, but that's a different matter.)

There was a time when this kind of music would never have had a chance of being "mainstream" and I don't know what exactly has happened in the last decade, but that has changed apparently.  I remember in 2000 when I discovered audiogalaxy, and suddenly was getting into Neutral Milk Hotel, the Magnetic Fields, and Belle and Sebastian.  I remember getting hit by a ton of bricks by In the Aeroplane over the Sea and Transatlanticism.  But mostly, I remember the completely accidental way I discovered Spoon.

By late 2001 I was searching the internet for absolutely anything "indie" and because I hadn't heard about allmusic.com yet this meant just googling "indie rock" and trying to comb through it.  Eventually I found a spoof article on how to fake being an indie rock snob, and buried there in the snarky advice he said "pick a band to know everything about - maybe someone who never seemed break despite their brilliance, like Spoon."  So I check them out (illegally, of course.  This was the real ground breaking thing about Napster et al to me - I couldn't afford to buy albums to check out bands I was interested in, but if I could check out a song for free, I could get hooked.  Record companies should look into it - it's a business plan that's worked well for crack dealers for a while) and the first song I listen to was "Anything You Want."  I was on a dial-up modem in those days, and it took twenty minutes to download a song on a good night - and I had to do it when no one wanted to be on the phone, i.e. after 10pm.  I had a strict one-chorus rule in those days - the band had through the first chorus to grab me, or their bandwidth was given to someone more deserving.

I maintain that "Anything You Want" might be Spoon's best song to this day.  I was a fan enough from that point to buy Kill the Moonlight from the Tower Records on Sunset in LA when my friends and I went to see the Who (RIP John Entwistle, two days before the concert we were supposed to see.)  And then I found A Series of Sneaks in 2003, and listened to it daily on my busride to and from work on a Discman.  That's not the surprising part - Spoon is an amazing band.  What's surprising is that I've kept an eye out for years for mentions of Spoon, convinced that I'd stumbled across them in some sort of fluke, and that it was entirely possible I could have lived my life in total ignorance of them.  Or worse, that I was living my life in ignorance of some other, hypothetical life-changing band.  The last eight years have convinced me that I probably would have heard of Spoon (they've probably been one of three bands to give Radiohead a run for "Most interesting band of the last 10 years, along with Death Cab for Cutie, and the White Stripes.)  Though it remains a bit slimmer than I'd like - the Stranger than Fiction soundtrack, hearing "The Underdog" on the radio; these are some of the only Spoon sightings that I haven't actively sought out as a fan - by no means a slam dunk. The hypothetical nightmare scenario remained.

But with indie going mainstream, this seems less and less likely.  Death Cab for Cutie are arena stars now; TV on the Radio play on Colbert.  Bands that would have been condemned to Dinosaur Jr.'s fate a decade ago are pretty hard to miss nowadays.  And I'm not a selfish indie rock snob who liked all these bands before they were cool.  I get jazzed when my girl cousins' favorite musician is Bon Iver.  I like being able to talk to all these people about music that means so much to me, after spending so long fighting over the radio with co-workers and bosses who think Ben Folds Five is an angry band, or that Alana Davis is amazing (and that she wrote "32 flavors".  There is a part of me though who hopes that it isn't like alternative, where it was just another fad and in five years, no one will care about the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs album.  But no matter the reason, I did get lucky, and they'll never take Spoon from me.