Class, etc Pt. 2: Indie vs. Pop Culture

kids grew up on r&b and hip-hop more than ever. electronica happened and happened big. the dj is king. the rapper is king. suddenly kids who really are authentically on hip-hop are coming up regardless of their race....

they get into their late teens, start checking out way more music, finally get up and get out... some of them may check out some indier stuff... and punk... and flesh it out... but inside, it's hip-hop that's what.

and so you get har mar superstar and gold chains and on a much larger level...nu metal...(a total page taker from nyc hardcore nearly a decade ago... can i get some biohazard love?) biohazard and it's ilk were the minority back in the 90's... but wait until kids who were born in the mid and late 80's come up....

and that's what we have now...

the underground has a lot more beats cause 3 year olds shook their booty to salt n pepa not the bay city rollers....

i have no idea what i'm talking about...
m.

and actually i think 311 is a perfect example. anything championed by grand royal might be more to the point, tho. some things are just viewed through shit colored glasses.

The problem is that indie has held onto this exclusion-of-black-input like it's some sort of code of ethics, resulting in either a) something very close to heavy meal (hardcore, grunge) or b) rock 'n' roll pointlessly devoid of rhthmic information (garage revival, alt-country). Even in the 80s, bands like the English Beat or New Order seemd kind of exceptional, rather than widely influential. (For that matter, I can remember boneheads at the time deriding Remain-in-Light-era Talking Heads for selling out.) The black-exclutionary rule worked brilliantly once but was obviously bucking the rest of the century (musical miscegenation) and turned into it's own dead-end, its own catechism quite a while ago.

Mashups = return of the repressed.

http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/record-reviews/g/gravy-train/hello-doctor.shtml

If only it didn't make me think of Survivor.

m.

[Also Arch I'm tempted to post anonymously to admit this but: I've actually always had a soft spot for 311. They seem like pleasant kids.]

Okay, but do you want to create music along the lines of theirs? (anonymous posts in the affirmative accepted--no, encouraged--if you can explain why).

Yeah, but why they won still makes for interesting conversation.

Thank you thank you Kerry. This is totally the greatest revision that went on post-Nirvana: how many untold thousands of punk-funk, goth, reggae, wimpy-synth, Brit-jangle, industrial-soul, and folk bands got cut loose from the accepted history of college radio in 1991? The biggest casualties were the M.O.R. rock bands, all of a sudden resurrected as "bland pop" in the form of Third Eye Blind or whomever: it's this dirty little indie secret that as of 1988 and even a way after that, those bands would have been all over college radio, just like Del Amitri, Ghost of an American Airman, and Trip Shakespeare -- later to feed into "bland pop" Semisonic -- were. And all the variety got cut loose. On the college radio station I was listening to at the time, Nirvana almost single-handedly wiped out Erasure, Marshall Crenshaw, 10,000 Maniacs, the Pet Shop Boys, Black Uhuru, Fishbone, and plenty of the other stuff that lent this great all-over-the-map urgency to what I then thought of as "alternative."

For the record, I've always thought "Held" by Smog to be a great example of an "undanceable" "indie" musician's stab at a "danceable" song.

shouldn't some discussion concerning the 'influence' of the (now about 5 year old i guess) file-sharing revolution intersect with q's about sub-cultures and (the near-impossibility of maintaining) genre fanaticism in 03? 'sampling' music and modes of fandom has never been easier - maybe the humanist in me hopes that the reaction of now-marginal "white kids with angular guitars/laptops" culture to being allowed to find out how they get on with the Other in safety of the same bedroom they compose their songs from would be JOY, not increased insularity. in other words, i think, yeah, things are getting better - i think there's a real possibility of p2p filesharing(/the internet in general) acting as the rosetta stone to hiphop's codes upon codes.

another thought: the writing around the (few? maybe not really) acts eager to eat up music from non-proscribed sources seems to place a lot of emphasis on 'getting it right'. any indie-centric music eager to nibble from the neptunes (majesticons?) is going to start out sounding a little clumsy - i'm not sure that clumsiness is something we should be trying to avoid. surely the eagerness with which many people toss the rappropriation of cex, har-mar [who i haven't heard so..] etc into the 'parody'/borderline-racist 'point-and-laugh' bin while applauding how roll deep crew'll rub shoulders with mike skinner says something (something worth discussing) about race relations in US as opposed to elsewhere?

Anyway, if you look at it beatwise, I'm not sure there isn't more continuity from the '80s to the '90s than discontinuity. American hardcore and alt-rock didn't have much swing except in the most abstract sense. Steve Shelley and Grant Hart, for example, are both great drummers in their own way, but there's not a lot of funk in their trunks. The Minutemen played around with jazz, but in a "cerebral" post-bop sense.

And yeah, you can dance to anything if you like it enough -- the difference is between music that identifies itself as dance music, advertises itself as such, and music that doesn't. Not much post-1980 Amerindie has really identified itself as music for dancing. Right, there was Fishbone, but the very fact that Fishbone was the de facto black band of choice for '80s college rockers tells you how relatively isolated a phenomenon they were.

is the difference that, to indiecentrics, hip hop is the other in america, while dance is the other in britain. and that techno/house/jungle clubs are not seen as exclusionary or intimidating as hip hop clubs? inclusivity and all that (though this is not necessarily the case?). but yet the state of indie music in britain is possibly even more parlous than that in america?

(erm, also, surely stereolab are a danceable indie band of the last 10 years, but again not in an american way i guess)

lowercase: c or d? easier!

free jazz is a thorny one. the thumbnail theory repeated by musicians and club owners is: free jazz = black people on stage and white people in the audience. true or not? discuss.

Not true, jess. There's plenty of "firey black nationalist" free jazz recs that Thurston's endorsed, for better or for worse. And New York Art Quartet has played with SY, y'know, the group with the man that embodies "firey black nationalist" for most people (at least in New Jersey): Amiri Baraka.

SFJ, hear hear on Minutemen. I personally can't understand why they would be classified as "non-dance." You can wiggle to that shit!

But then again, a lot of the stuff being classified on here as "non-dance" doesn't feel that way to me. I dance to it, but then again maybe I'm the exception to the rule.

from: http://www.pataphysics-lab.com/journal/archives/002146.html

rewind 10 back to 1993... spin sampler "shit this 4"... er..."spin this 4"...how has spin changed? most of these bands fell off the face of the earth. see:

a tracklisting:

Connells - Slackjawed

generic indie rock. hooky to a degree. bland.

Cords - Eat Your Heart Out

reminds me quicksand a lot. that nyc hardcore sound. loud. angry.

KMFDM - A Drug Against War

hehe... industrial hadn't fully OD'ed yet. nice noodly guitar samples. very hessian and i find that pretty funny now.

Jester - I Remember The Night

a weird mix of hip-hop, industrial, and big guitars. it's like proto nu metal. samples of horns ringing out.

Def Threat - Baby Bubba

a completely awesome hip-hop song. samples some classic soul... bob and earl perhaps? why this song didn't blow up is hard to fathom. amazing how well some hip-hop ages.

Psykosonik - Silicon Jesus

trancy hardcore house... of course at the time it probably more fit in with wax trax scene. 808 is all over. boring, yet bumping drum machine. depeche mode meets ministry feeling vocal accompaniment. again, funny.

90 North - Arkman

there's an element of this that's really good heartfelt indierock. the sound isn't the kind of thing you hear much these days. i like his voice a lot. the chorusy parts are sucky jangle groove though. (see: spin doctors)

Mazzy Star - Fade Into You

of course, a classic tune that hit. a beautifully moody western ballad.

Verve - Slide Away

verve... another band that would be. this is a lot more psychedelic. it's on that post stone roses, mbv, ride kick. walls of noise. but more accessible and poppy. one of the more tolerable tracks on this cd. whistful and explosive.

My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult - Delicate Terror

thrill kill was breaking out into a more sample dance thing. the guitar is cliche. distorted vox. seinfeld poppy bass. deviant in a very commercially viable way. industrial for gen x yuppies.

Plan B - Life's A Beat

groovy dance stuff. distorted vox lure and lurch. very world soul. close to painful. something played during the credits of a bad hollywood movie.

Boneclub - Native Son

hard rock .... kid rock with no so much hip-hop?

Engines Of Aggression - Illusion Is Real

ministry jr. same drum machine on overload. same political samples. same distorted voice. velveeta outrage.

Zappa's Universe - Jazz Discharge Party Hats

funny shit. a story about wearing the panties of some stuck up annoying college girls. song meanders in a nice formless way with zappa's story. mildy amusing.

Gavin Bryars with Tom Waits - Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet

a great tune... tom waits on a gospel tip. quite artsy to a tee.

The Cranes - Jewel

classic, beautiful folk. childlike vocals that elevate the tune. the cranes didn't exactly disappear. a little wash of guitar here and there to add to the whistle.

also...

jessefox,

I mean, name an indie band of the last 10 years with a great rhythm section

what? are you crazy?

just a few bigger names... stereolab, tortoise, shellac, june of 44/shipping news/etc, the make up, fugazi...

am i misunderstanding your intention?
m.

Tuff Titty Rap [Thurston]

we've been asked to participate
in a Ma-donna rocker that can reactivate
we're ciccone youth from new york city
get the pizza connection cos it's a tuff titty

now I know my rhyme ain't bustin' no time
cos my rap be crying like a homeboy sigh
his name's mike watt, he's gonna get cut
some knuckle head defines to the group on new alliance

fuck yeah, fuck yea

[end lyrics]

I'm not sure how they could not see it as "black". They certainly are quite vocal about their admiration for the black artists in this vein, cf. Thurston's essay on his favorite free jazz albums, posted somewhere on the Interweb. Thurston has also done numerous collaborations with black free jazz musicians. Yes, it's true that he doesn't espouse black nationalist politics, at least to my knowledge, but wouldn't it be a bit inappropriate if he did?

the thumbnail theory repeated by musicians and club owners is: free jazz = black people on stage and white people in the audience. true or not? discuss

At most free jazz concerts I've been to there is usually a mix of black and white people in the audience.