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

the racial dynamics of contemporary vs. 70s/80s indie seem obvious to me (that is, a kind of retreat from engagement with contemporary black music without the shielf of irony) but as for the supposedly exclusory nature of contemporary indie as it is understood by people just forming their tastes and places in the listening universe, i'm not as confident.

(obThread, isn't this thread really just "Indie Guilt C/D" rephrased as "Indie Guilt: Classic or CLASSIC!!!" meanin' no disrespect SF-J, mainly responding to the unique degree of bile that seems to emerge whenever the question of indie rock is raised)

This indie-people-running-from-hip-hop thing is really interesting to me. It must be a younger generation thing, and maybe that explains why I don't read Pfork, because whatever "indie" was doing for me was increasingly replaced by lots of non-"indie" styles, esp. hip-hop.

If I was born in West Africa I would probably be a victim of the misconception that those traditions of making sounds like dancing had anything to do with music. Which it didn't, because if it did, then African culture would have had two different words for dancing and music even before imperialism.

Ah nabisco, if you didn't read Azerrad's book because of your dislike, how are ya any different from "indie" kids disdaining hip-hop?

I guess I don't really get this? I mean, I don't get how it works as an analogy, leave alone that I don't think I've ever really claimed to be any different from indie kids who don't like hip-hop: I don't listen to very much hip-hop at all! I just remember thinking hey, that sounds like a cool book -- and then I looked at the bands it covered, and they were mostly bands I didn't like, so I didn't read it. (???) If your point is something like "why beat up on indie kids for ignoring hip-hop when you wouldn't beat up on hip-hop kids for ignoring indie," well, point it at someone else, I tend to agree with you on that one. Sterling and Kerry could verify: my shelves are like 98% shit-that-sounds-like-Stereolab, I have no room or inclination to beat up on indie.

Except as it is you were born in Europe and are a victim of different misconceptions, which somehow the vast majority of Europeans escaped.

By the way, re: a teenage indie fan circa 2003, I can give you a couple versions of it -- in a few minutes.

Swoon!

I think indie bands knew that they couldn't do hip-hop without seeming condescending, and probably couldn't do it well at all; I think indie fans listen to and like hip-hop but reverted to the music they felt 'comfortable' boosting; I think this is the major argument against 'indie' rock.* Hell, hip-hop's been sampling more Geir-centric white-guy prog-melodic shit than indie's been imitating for 20 years.

*maybe indie hip-hop as well

And Darnielle is likely right--no dis taken. Can we skip the Geirness? Or maybe start an equally proiftable thread, like, Is torture moral? Or, Is lead heavier than cheese?

can i get a short bit on the why and/or the how?

not necessarily agreeing or disagreeing... just curious.
m.

Me too, by the looks of it. No biggie.(that was not a reference to the late, overweight rapper)

Not necessarily, but it would be smelly, considering there have been black people within most genres. Dunno if there were any black prog musicians (but there probably were, and anyway, several Miles Davis albums of the 60s/70s were pretty close to prog). There definitely have been black rock acts, such as Lenny Kravitz, Living Colour and Jimi Hendrix. There was Arthur Lee of Love doing 60s San Francisco psychedelia, there was even the drummer in Britpop band Ocean Colour Scene. There was an easy listening singer (Nat King Cole) Plus several pure melodic pop acts, such as Tasmin Archer, Seal, and also those MOR oriented ones like Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston. Stevie Wonder also did a lot of stuff during his 70s heyday that (particularly several of the ballads) was clearly more "white" than "black" musically.

The most obvious rascists, however, would be those who love RATM, Beastie Boys, Eminem and Vanilla Ice while they dislike all black hip-hop acts.

Anyway, Sasha - I think you're reading me pretty well, especially given that I was pretty angry/pressed for time when I wrote what I did in this thread this morning and didn't give it as much thought as I wish I had. The questions of this thread have been running through my head all day long though, which has been a good thing.

Re: . Where else would you get "Why can't they have their own thing?" How do we know it's *their* thing? Either these cultures are distinct or they're not. They can't have their *own* thing if we're also asserting that indie is not monolithic.

Yeah, that's the problem, isn't it? It's monolithic and not all, it's different but exactly the same as everything else. I think this is just too complex to explain away without seriously disrespecting genres, artists, races, and millions of individuals who have made/are making decisions based on a lot of different things. It's a brilliant question which is a very interesting thing to think about and consider in smaller conversations, but I'm afraid that any attempts at answering the question will be clumsy and reductive. Music is so huge, I don't think any of us should presume to understand or fully comprehend it all.

SFJ, describing the Drag City catalog as "arid, Modernist whiteboy shit" is ultra-depressing to me. Given that one of the few indie labels that doesn't release "records...chosen through a 'no blues,' 'no jazz,' 'no funk' filter" is their crosstown colleagues Thrill Jockey, and everyone bitches about them, what I think we have here is a case of severe psychological conflict....yadda yadda

I didn't say anything about Thrill Jockey, for starters. And there's no "severe psychological conflict"--just different language to describe different things. I sensed a change in behavior in musicians, from the vantage point of my ripe old age, is all. I don't, de jure, want Bardo Pond to work with Juvenile, though perhaps I do get a twinge of essentialist hope that it would be nice if they wanted to. Maybe I just play rough with my friends, some of whom I call wack whiteboy Modernists, and they call me Robbie Nevil right back and we all go home happily and watch Space Ghost.

For the 42nd time--the mapping idea wasn't about BAD and GOOD. Black != good, and white != bad, though purple does = fly. Examples: Red Krayola, whiter than Peruvian flake, are often amazing. Large Professor's First Class, a bonafide black genius! on an indie label! And it's totally boring. And so on. Liz Phair, deeply unindebted to the African-American musical continuum = kick-ass songwriter, the "now" aside. Donnie, totally and completely black guy = totally and completely derivative faux Hathaway of staggering boringness. Smog, less boring than J. Lo, more boring than Clipse. What a wonderful world!

Sidebar: Bach is dope.

The discussion seems mostly to have looked at this from one direction--from the indie-rock perspective--but would it not be instructive to turn the question around, too? Though I agree with the premise that indie rockers in the '90s were "worried about looking assed-out and detaching their engines from black music so as to not get it 'wrong'" (the evidence is certainly in the--lack of--grooves), is it off-base to suggest that at least part of the reason is because hip-hop and various dance musics in the '90s (house and jungle) also by and large didn't have the same open-door policy towards rock and (primarily white) rockers that early hip-hop and late disco did? I'm not suggesting a reverse racism or anything like that, merely suggesting that it wasn't only '90s indie rock that was different from the '79-83 model that gets held up a lot around here. I'm sure lots of indie kids in the '90s loved the Wu Tang Clan, for instance, but it was something they maybe felt they had to love from a distance (which I'd argue was not nearly so much the case with punks digging Grandmaster Flash in '81) (and I *know* that Flash got booed off stage at a Clash gig, etc.). Er, help?

And hey, I hear some grooves in early Red Krayola, as I do in a lot of psych stuff. Hell, I was just listening to Can's Tago Mago on the way home, and if someone wants to argue that the music on it isn't funky even though it was made by a buncha Germans and a Japanese guy, they can kiss my white ass.

sorry sasha.