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

I'm left chewing on the whole idea of authenticity and, on the meta-level, how it is appealed to in 99% of music criticism ("Jack White captures the real soul of rock & roll." "Gutter garage is the real thing." etc. etc.) I'm inclined to not accept it at face value, which I think jives with the critique of indie rock because the problem is that the musicians were TOO concerned with their authenticity, or more importantly their lack of therein.

My problem is that authenticity assumes some sort of idealized notion of what REAL ROCK N' ROLL (or whatever genre you're talking about) is, and tends to mystify the past while poo-poo'ing the present (unless something in the present captures that REAL blah blah blah). It's slippery though.... because what I love most about music is how it's all part of a particular stream and nothing exists in a vacuum. So maybe I can accept awareness but not authenticity as a grounds for criticism? Meh. I've just painted myself into a corner.

Matthew's sub-answer might also be read as: This is about social grouping, about people not feeling affinities any more (I am not getting the quote right but this university keyboard is wack), which is a different model of musical movement. That people react to each other socially, and music is the way they do it. This sure doesn't get enough airtime, probably because it's impossible to suss out unless you do tons of interviews or know people, but likely in many cases. "Oh, fucking Bobbo just did a dub track. Wanker. Let's do that country idea before he does." Plain old competition. Hell, eclecticism is the oldest "strength" in the book. Who doesn't know a musician with 7000 different kinds of records? Who are these straw men, these narrow-minded people who get mooted in arguments? Has anyone met somebdoy who only has 999 and Stranglers records?

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.