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

a. indie hasn't totally abandoned ideas of "blackness" - just look at all the bands copping breakbeats and odd hip-hop flourishes. (i guess you could make a more tenuous argument that techno/electro fits here too, but who are we kidding?...techno hasn't been "black" - if it ever was - for 17 years.) the beta band, fer instance, are surely the late 90s version of, say, early XTC where the cod-reggae and soukous and etc etc are filtered through jittery whiteboy programming (in the psychic, not technical, sense) until they are bleached to a fine crisp. i think the feeling of indie abandoning "blackness" has more to do with the fact that there hasn't been a MOVEMENT - however obliquely linked - within white post-punk guitar music that was "appropriating" all these fancy, non-rock, "black" musics since about, oh, 1984. between 1978-1983 (best time for music ever?) you had: the contortions, the clash, pop group, pil, etc etc etfuckingcetera. what did the 90s give us: beck and rap-rock.

b. http://www.freakytrigger.co.uk/azerrad.html

(can you tell i'm avoiding an assignment?)

black music is accessible too, innit. the kind with rhythm. black music ======= stupid = accessible, so it doesn't work for all the stuff those guys were talking about about the privileging of information.....

popular culture + black music doesn't fit into the Middle-class criticism of bourgeoisie: "They don't think" ------ so get rid of that and we will play good, white, honest music and if you don't get it, you're stupid.

everything jess said is true. he is smart even though he types in lowercase letters.

------->>>> there are the indie rock guys like kid 606 and goldchains and cex and boombox 2000000 like that guy said who can sell goofy popular culture (((((do not take it seriously, u r revolutionaries who r not bad consumerists becuz u r buying popular culture from tigerbeat 6 lmao))))) i don't know what to say about them

the jack white "problem" is underdiscussed though: how much of indie rock's hands-off approach to modern black pop stems from the lyrical content? (not that it seemed to matter much in the past either...the pop group certainly didn't seem to want to rub you down the right way baby uh huh.)

hey, how does "soft like me" on the last saint etienne album fit in here? (he asks, only half joking.)

slightly less than those tracks on the last Hood album

On the other hand, indie kids want to listen to some hip hop, they don't want to be squares -- hence the market for indie rap, Def Jux, Kool Keith, Aceyalone, etc.

-- jess (dubplatestyl...), April 21st, 2003 6:37 PM." - HAHA, okay in Athens right now (or maybe not right now, last two years more like it) one of the big indiecrowd (initially at least, until the squares caught on) sensations was the Krush Girls, Dan from Great Lakes (E6) and Chris from the R.E.M. offices (I think he did the Reveal cover), wearing sunglasses and jumpsuits, DJing - not 'real DJing', which deeply offended Athens wouldbe turntablists (a good thing), but basically just wedding disc jockeying - LOTTA Bell Biv Devoe for instance - and while people might disparage it (and there were gripes amongst the indie set of 'djs supplanting real bands') it didn't change the fact that Krush Girls were REALLY successful, lines up the block (which you NEVER saw for Great Lakes, not even for Elf Power really), and people visibly enjoying themselves and dancing. It's died down somewhat now (again - the squares have caught on), but the response to the question 'why are Athens kids more enthusiastic about dancing to 'Poison' AGAIN instead of seeing my band' was 'it's the audience's fault ie. they're stupid' instead of 'it's our fault ie. we're boring/undanceable' (and I note undanceable because the one thing that supposedly united the original Athens bands - B-52s, Pylon, R.E.M., etc. - was that they were danceable, danceability was understood to be an essential).

that's somehow related to jesse's post

!!???

were more segregated or at least less fiercely ethnic

!!!!!!??????

just wedding disc jockeying - LOTTA Bell Biv Devoe for instance

!!!!!!!!!!!??????????

the 180 grm ice cube reissues (okay actually just amerikkka's most wanted...cuz that's the "political" record i assume)
clipse - "when the last time?" 12"
missy - "gossip folks" 12"
atmosphere, sole, themselves, clouddead, zzzzz

they don't stock hip-hop cds. you have to go to circuit city for that.

most popular hip-hop act in thurston county, by t-shirts: insane clown posse

Fear of The Funk makes a fine trope for Undercover Brother or The New Guy or hell even How High (all fine films in increasingly FINE order) but hardly as a model for, y'know, the world. Not to mention which The Funk is avowedly integrationist in intent in *all* these films.

I think we get into these problems by taking the retroactive narrative of indie and its backwards-projected canon as good historic coin.

What about GENDER - indie rock distances itself from pop not because it is 'black' but because it is femininized - i.e. Backstreet Boys.

sterl have you read most of the thread?

Some other distinctions might be worth considering - URBAN (hip-hop, dance) versus SUBURBAN (pop, indie rock).

(haha like I was saying!)

But a lot of the best indie rock of the '90s was by women...

Indie can also = soulboys don't forget.

And also don't forget Dub Narcotic Sound System and "Step Aside" though fuck knows what they prove.

dub narcotic sound system proves that minstrelsy is alive and well in the pacific northwest

whatabout indie soul?

Also I have no idea at all what White Noise Supremacists has to do with anything (though I think it's a fine essay and remember in particular the line about shrapnel embedded over years etc. w/r/t the word "n****") because that essay deals with casual "hip" racism in a particular downtown boho crowd.

Unless yr. telling me that E6 goes around flouting swastikas for shock value I fail to see the relevance.

Or hell if we're counting Will Oldham for that matter.

For instance, there is the need to analyze and intellectualize rock, to discuss and theorize meaning. MASCULINE

Where as pop is body-music, 'stupid' and 'devoid of meaning' FEMININE.

I don't know if the universe would be better or worse if people asked themselves if they actually believed their theories before inflicting them on the world.

two things pop immediately to mind here. one is a quote from a raver (and ex-rocker) friend at a party when it came time to change the music. he demanded "NO POWER CHORDS!" (my first encounter w/indie guilt!) the other is going to a rave in Minneapolis 4.9.94 and Tommie Sunshine in the chillout room around 10pm dropping "All Apologies" in the middle of his set and the room erupting, and it felt less mournful than like people paying tribute to a fellow traveler, or maybe a parallel one.

also, the mid-90s were very much a keepin'-it-real time across the board: hip-hop and indie rock and rave were all going through it big-time, as I recall, in parallel. I wonder if that has anything to do with the explosion of sheer product becoming available at the time--more and larger boutique economies than ever before, something that has obviously increased even more since the Net grew to ubiquity. I've always thought people began thinking and projecting smaller because it became more feasible to do so and still make a living at it, as well as a way of preserving sanity and/or holding onto some semblance of roots. or am I repeating stuff already said upthread? if so, I apologize--I couldn't read the whole thing, either.

witnessed from the bus today: a girl with a bonnie prince billy record and a last poets lp. now only if she forms a band.

Michaelangelo's Nirvana ephiphany reminds me also of the best review of "Teen Spirit" I've ever read (I think from '93), which was Chris Lowe calling it a "rave anthem," and singling out the video in particular as proof.

What about slam-dancing or moshing - a profoundly homosocial and EXCULSIVE style of dance?

I'll happily take the '90s over any other decade, incidentally, not least because I lived through them (I'll hold judgment on the '00s till they're further along, but so far I'm with you guys on 'em, e.g. they're grate). but Blount's point is interesting because moshing = dancing and rhythmic propulsion = urge to dance. considering the jock contingent's hostile takeover of alternarock by mid-decade (I remember seeing people mosh at a fucking Liz Phair show in 1994), you might also argue that static rhythms on the part of indie bands were also their way of discouraging it, putting a wrench in the works--not necessarily on purpose, but instinctively, as a reaction. this isn't to discount the fact that indie rock was never exactly Deney Terrio territory to begin with, but still.

There's styles and forms of dancing in 90's indie-rock that are consistent with its masculinist overtones, and if I'm being slightly over-determinist Sasha - I'm painting in broad colours to emphasize a point too often overlooked by male rock critics...

But to clarify one last missing term from the gendered reading. Indie-rock has a conflicted relationship to CONSUMPTION - the idea of 'selling-out', being commercial, being pop. This is a re-staging of the well-documented dilemmas of masculinity and consumption, something you don't find in pop because of its feminine orientation.

The idea of the body - which has somewhat led the thread astray toward dancing - was more a comment on the focus of consumption, 'technologies of the self' (ugh, Foucault) that are more compatible with the chart, boy-bands and teen-queens etc...

And btw, this is a well-rehearsed position in popular cultural studies. Gender/Music criticism does not merely begin and end with Sreynolds guys!

not quite.

Somehow those King Kong records slipped through.

indie rock has no RIGHT to "inject danceable elements" into their music, because indie dorks can't dance for shit, nobody wants to see them dance, and because they've resigned themselves to a right of cooler-than-thou inward-looking mopiness, they are therefore not ALLOWED to dance, either.

word bond.

"Wish Fulfillment"

"If I was a sick little kid, and I could have a wish granted by the Make-A-Wish Foundation, I would make them have the Neptunes produce a song with this structure: First verse, Stephen Malkmus on vocals. Second verse, Ghostface Killah. Sung chorus by Andre 3000. Third verse, Jay-Z. Chorus by Andre. Fourth verse, Mark E. Smith. Chorus by Andre, with outro vocals by Bob Pollard. And it would be amazing. I'd want the Neptunes to make a track not entirely unlike Mystikal's "Bouncin' Back", but a bit faster and bouncier."

Man, would I be like really out of line and gauche to ask SFJ to offer up some thoughts on what prompted his own band's pretty tepid and bloodless (but not altogether uninteresting) music? I mean this could be really helpful in terms of moving towards an answer to his own initial question. I mean, SFJ was there.
-- Mr. Diamond (diamond), Sunday, April 20, 2003 11:41 PM (4 years ago)

:-0

lol, i was looking for this again when that whole new yorker thing was raging.

Sometimes it really seems as though a lot of you just want to live in a world where all of the music sounds the same, means the same thing, and is made for the same reasons.

-- Matthew Perpetua (Matthew Perpetua), Friday, 25 April 2003 14:12 (4 years ago) Bookmark Link

Sometimes it really seems as though a lot of you just want to live in a world where all of the music sounds the same, means the same thing, and is made for the same reasons.

-- Matthew Perpetua (Matthew Perpetua), Friday, 25 April 2003 14:12 (4 years ago) Bookmark Link

Sometimes it really seems as though a lot of you just want to live in a world where all of the music sounds the same, means the same thing, and is made for the same reasons.

-- Matthew Perpetua (Matthew Perpetua), Friday, 25 April 2003 14:12 (4 years ago) Bookmark Link

Sometimes it really seems as though a lot of you just want to live in a world where all of the music sounds the same, means the same thing, and is made for the same reasons.

-- Matthew Perpetua (Matthew Perpetua), Friday, 25 April 2003 14:12 (4 years ago) Bookmark Link

Sometimes it really seems as though a lot of you just want to live in a world where all of the music sounds the same, means the same thing, and is made for the same reasons.

-- Matthew Perpetua (Matthew Perpetua), Friday, 25 April 2003 14:12 (4 years ago) Bookmark Link

Sometimes it really seems as though a lot of you just want to live in a world where all of the music sounds the same, means the same thing, and is made for the same reasons.

-- Matthew Perpetua (Matthew Perpetua), Friday, 25 April 2003 14:12 (4 years ago) Bookmark Link

Sometimes it really seems as though a lot of you just want to live in a world where all of the music sounds the same, means the same thing, and is made for the same reasons.

-- Matthew Perpetua (Matthew Perpetua), Friday, 25 April 2003 14:12 (4 years ago) Bookmark Link

Sometimes it really seems as though a lot of you just want to live in a world where all of the music sounds the same, means the same thing, and is made for the same reasons.

-- Matthew Perpetua (Matthew Perpetua), Friday, 25 April 2003 14:12 (4 years ago) Bookmark Link

Sometimes it really seems as though a lot of you just want to live in a world where all of the music sounds the same, means the same thing, and is made for the same reasons.

-- Matthew Perpetua (Matthew Perpetua), Friday, 25 April 2003 14:12 (4 years ago) Bookmark Link