Is the Guardian's music coverage getting good?

not that that was particularly grammatically correct but whatevs. Rant

Wasn't it the Latitude festival there was 2 rapes? I think B&S played that iirc

think I was thinking of Woodstock 99. Had no idea that it happened at latitude, my mum went there last year!

yeah it just goes to show it can happen anywhere.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-suffolk-10676193

true. I don't imagine mother going to festivals will quell rape statistics.

Which is why it's very strange that the "indie professor" thinks indie is more enlightened than other genres.

I'll bet there's less groping at Shostakovich recitals.

This is from an earlier "indie professor" blog

This may be a dumb question, but what criteria are you using for "indie" here – musical/hairstyle, or artists who aren't signed to a major?
Simianbaffin

Not a dumb question, and one that lots of people asked in one form or another. I'll try and tackle the question that takes 57 pages to answer in my book in the shortest way possible. "What is indie" is the issue that is most contested, dissected, and passionately debated by journalists and fans alike. For me, indie is found in the arguments people have. For example, no one argues about ownership in hip-hop and nobody worries about who wrote the music to decide if you are "jazz" or not. For indie, there are five major arguments. I like to think about them as teams. First is "Team Independent Label/Distribution". For people who use this definition, it doesn't matter what you sound like or your practices. You just need the label (US) or distribution (UK) of the artist to be not owned by one of the four major international record corporations. The ideal is that independent labels interfere less, are more ethical, are "small" and reflect a local scene. However, no one seems to worry about the ownership of artists' publishing companies or booking agencies. This tells you independent ownership is more about perception of autonomy rather than actual autonomy. Second is "Team Attitude". For "Team Attitude" it is about the spirit of independence, the most punk criterion. This would include artists with creative control, DIY practices, egalitarian non-conformists who value individualism. Third is "Team Aesthetics/Genre". This is the one that creates the most exasperation for purists. Here, indie would be stylish four-piece beat combos with skinny guys and skinny girls in skinny jeans wearing their everyday clothes on stage, a twee, retro, or lo-fi sound, simple songs with intelligent, nostalgic, escapist, or depressing lyrics. This team allows audience members to be indie as well. Fourth is "Team Taste". These elitists claim to recognise the most authentic and quality music, it's just that the best music is the music that they like. It's a question of "artistic merit" and it is why Mr Tomfoolery "indie kids pretend to like rap music". They are the aesthetically elect. They are also the objects of collective ire.

Finally, there is "Team Non-Mainstream" (whatever the mainstream is, I am not). The mainstream is seen as a bloated centralised authority run by corrupt bureaucrats more concerned with sales than artistic expression. Therefore, indie would be anything that is the opposite of what we perceive as mainstream: diminutive, intimate, local, personalised, modest, original, intelligent, raw, austere, and substantive. I'm not privileging any of these teams. People want you to choose a side. Yet, if you take these premises together, you'll find out that they have more in common than you might initially think.

iirc...

http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/7/2010/09/340x_pastebig.jpg

(the answer was yes)

has anyone read her book that she mentioned?

However, even in 2006, when Pitchfork reviewed my book on the culture of indie music, the writer actually talked about my cleavage!

matos said it was the most intelligent book ever written on music

but what did he think of the cleavage?

he said it was one of the smartest in years, to be accurate

I read the book a little after my college years. It was one of my ethnomusicology professor's favorite book. For an anthropology book it was an accessible read. Which is a hard feat concerning the academic field. After reading it I got some sense of indie culture (I guess...) but it has opened my mind to listening to it more often. However, I don't remember seeing boobies.

no one argues about ownership in hip-hop and nobody worries about who wrote the music to decide if you are "jazz" or not

Either I'm missing her point here or this is bullshit.

it's just bullshit

okay, the whole thing is bullshit on lots of levels. first the breaking of things into "teams" is achingly foolish, and worse, it's simplistic and doesn't speak honestly to how most fans conceptualize the music. rather than there being some dedicated group of people who unthinkingly reduce the genre to any music that happens to exist on an independent label, and another opposing group countering that it's all about "indie attitude," these tend to be complementary and less reductive understandings. same goes for the hostility to some presumed mainstream, which exists primarily as a political/aesthetic justification for the former two. and most of us, i think, can see that indie aesthetics (as codified in the pop genre she smirkingly reduces to "stylish four-piece beat combos with skinny guys and skinny girls in skinny jeans...") arose out of that conceptual background, but eventually eventually began to separate themselves from it.

so much half-baked, snarky nonsense in that quote. "However, no one seems to worry about the ownership of artists' publishing companies or booking agencies. This tells you independent ownership is more about perception of autonomy rather than actual autonomy." bullshit. it only tells us that the writer is proud of her own perspicacity and has no idea how important book your own fucking life has been to the development of indie music.

I get the impression that it's written for its audience even more than the rest of the paper's bloggy stuff - if you hold your nose and jump into the c*mment s*ction it's largely a load of yahoos writing "lol indie sux and is gay" over and over, and the skinny jeans chestnuts she drops in seem to be as much in pre-emptive defence as anything, not that that makes it any more exciting to wade through.

There's a kernel of truth in the "perception of autonomy rather than actual autonomy" thing, insofar as you have to be fairly deep in the DIY punk rabbithole to find ppl talking about blacklisting or otherwise disliking booking agents, but more or less everyone has an idea of a shitty label - it's more of a surface level part of a band's identity. But yeah your last sentence is otm

i thought you was "great British wagemann" and lold

scary thought

For example, no one argues about ownership in hip-hop

i lol'd

ha ha ha. I do like the book, though, esp. the way she breaks down the way a concert audience's positions from the stage make up specific zones.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/interactive/2011/jun/11/history-modern-music-timeline

I've already spotted one mistake in it, but I think that particular article was written by an ILX0r!

the r&b and hip-hop section seems a bit light on R&B

the indie section sort of peters out about 1992 which seems accurate

spiral scratch ep a stunning omission from indie

wow there are as many as four genres now?

lol surprise I have several issues with the hardcore punk article (written by our own Stevie) as well...

(although that's just a matter of opinion, not a factual error like the other one)

this one? http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/jun/14/ian-makaye-bad-brains-hardcore

don't have any issues w/ anything in the main text, guessing he didn't write the section headline

Ah, well if that's the case then that was what I was mainly objecting to, and how that colours the rest of the article.

Like if it was Ian MacKaye and Bad Brains popularise hardcore then fine (but I'm picking nits).

xpost Spiral Scratch is mentioned in Morley's piece about the Lesser Free Trade Hall gig.

very much a potted history - ie what do our writers know about - than a definitive one. just another way for the site to get more visitors/to sell more papers through a not exactly essential supplement.

Yep, a potted history. But what do people expect in a series of 24-page supplements?

In the interests of honesty, I ought to confess to those who don't know that I edited the indie one and the rock one.

Pretty sure the ILM hip-hop poll is a more useful resource/archive for any possible purpose than the Guardian hip-hop timeline.

A+ interface though!

Just fyi then,

Recorded during the Falklands war in May, flexidiscs of How Does it Feel to Be the Mother of 1,000 Dead? were smuggled, guerrilla-style, into random albums by distributors Rough Trade. It sailed out under its own steam in November, replacing Robert Wyatt's Falklands-themed Shipbuilding at the top of the independent chart.

The flexi that was smuggled into random albums was Sheep Farming In The Falklands, and it was recorded the year after the Falklands war.

Morley writing about the Free Trade Hall Gig? Woah! I was wondering when he'd break his silence about that gig. So many unanswered questions about whether Mick Hucknall was standing stage left or stage right, and whether Peter Hook tried to smuggle three cans of Top Brass bitter into the gig in a Tesco carrier bag or not.

xp. You're half-right and I was half-wrong. Sheep Farming, not How Does It Feel, was indeed the flexi but it was recorded and first released during the war - it was only the official seven-inch that appeared a year later.

It's true, "Sheep Farming" was a 'comedy' song, until they decided that it needed a more serious response once people started dying...

I was wondering when he'd break his silence about that gig

haha

it was only the official seven-inch that appeared a year later.

Haha shit you're right, I had a feeling as soon as I submitted that I was myself going to be wrong in some way, it's the pedant's curse.

Always tricky to pinpoint the first truly indie release. I get the argument for making it "So It Goes" - but as I recall, Stiff weren't absolutely totally unquestionably 100% independent, although memory fails as to in what respect. So I've always benchmarked Spiral Scratch instead: a fully homegrown operation, giving a platform to a new band (rather than a former member of a signed band). Or then again, you could start with The Count Bishops' Speedball EP on Chiswick, at the back end of 75...

Stiff's first bunch of singles were distributed by United Artists.

Then they 'joined' Island records, sort of.

Desperate Bicycles? Or is that way too late?

Ah, I had Island in the back of my mind. Yeah, Desperate Bicycles were, ooh, about three or four months after Spiral Scratch - and SS did the whole "breakdown of production costs on the sleeve" thing, which kinda marked it out ideologically.

I think the Speedball e.p. is also what I would say.

Then again, there's always been 'independant' records, I'd even consider "Immediate" to be in the running...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/series/a-history-of-dance-music?page=3 dance music bit is pretty good.
thought the 90s section of the Indie one was baffling.