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

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.

Amateurist, count the hours, the few, the tiny hours remaining, and look out the window--SEE THOSE WINGS OF FIRE? THE JAWS OF DEADLY RESOLVE? THE GORGON HAS COME FOR THEE AND THINE...

Oh, wait, I should call the gorgon back. Sorry, Am.

American Cream Team in touchy feely racial untiy shockah!

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.