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

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.

Hello, Wilco/Sonic Youth double-bill ("each playing a full set!").

For instance, a classic point of comparison - photos of pop stars it will inevitably involve full-boy pin-ups, rock stars may be cropped or holding an guitar... etc.

and for fcuck's sake michael its a stupid theory not least coz its circular (why are these traits "feminine"? coz we've observed how they're grouped together. why are they grouped together? coz indie is fleeing the "feminine") and more importantly the idea that there's nothing "intellectual" about pop-dance music is more a fantasy of the indie-world than any sort of actual truth. i.e. debbie deb or Shanice or Trick Daddy have as much to say on any given track as St. Etienne usually, and probably more than plenty of other indie-disco fare.

I mean okay I think its important to sort out why indie is considered more "intellectual" than pop (which, duh, it is) but throwing gender in the mix in yr. fashion (then arguing its not really gender) is a fairly useless way to go about it I think. And similarly accepting that it actually IS more intellectual is also a bridge and a step too far.

There's also for example plenty of pop music you CAN'T dance to like half at least of Pink's second album or plenty of R&B (which you can fuck to though -- just try *that* with pavement, altho the fall actually work pretty okay...) and I dunno maybe in Jr. High dances they played "Shape of My Heart" as a slow song but I can't imagine it getting played to any crowd which understands slowdancing means more than sorta just hugging and swaying. I Want It That Way too for that matter. And also like most new york hip-hop.

Plus, I think that you're getting confused about pop being fascinated with the body and this idea of dancing. Pop does not always demand a dancefloor - more like it needs a shopping mall!

Ouch. Speaking of class issues...

That's not all true, anyway. True of Tupelo, sure, (not the "retarded" part, but I'll buy the relationship), and of roots reaching back through Social Distortion and Long Ryders to X, etc. But that's just one vein of what ended up being called alt.country, and not necessarily the most interesting one. There's the whole Texas school, there's the Bloodshot thing (which is indie, but of a different stripe), there's Lucinda Williams, Kasey Chambers, a lot of other people who end up as "alt.country" because there's nowhere else to put them who don't know or care much about indie rock.

Not that that has much to do with miscegenation and indie rock. I just don't like reflexive trashing of "alt.country" (even though I don't like the term, hence my own reflexive quotation marks).

But they are! Seperation by geography/language/taste/style etc is still the affirmation of white superiority.You are all just afraid to admit how racist we all are black and white. Its not class its race. Theres a reason we call one black music but dont call the other white music. The white is just MUSIC obv superior

(a) I think Jess was onto something that got sort of dropped about the mechanics of things -- if you want to look for one so-simple-it-just-might-work explanation for why indie "distanced" itself from black music, instruments are an obvious answer. Rock music in general has always been a "play yr instrument" field. The black music lineage stepped gradually away from that from the late 70s onward, and even when live instrumentation was present it was very screened-back and sessiony. What got foregrounded was the voice, obviously, especially in hip-hop, and I think that's where Sasha's "white kids don't want to get it wrong" thing kicks in: white kids who still subscribe to the "play yr instrument" thing can always pick up a guitar and play it the way some black people might, but it's a lot bigger of a leap to try and capture the voice. Especially now, for two reasons: (i) unlike in the 50s and 60s, it's now considered embarrassing and mildly offensive for white people to seem like they're doing bad imitations of black people; and (ii) in hip-hop, there's so much of an emphasis on the actual life and culture of certain black communities coming through that your average middle-class white kid wouldn't even dream of trying to hop into to. Like someone said: you can live in the suburbs and love love love Jay-Z or Cash Money or whatever, but you know you can't make it, not you -- so you wind up making records that sound like Prefuse or El-P or something, like "yes, I'm listening and enjoying, but I wouldn't dream of pretending to be this." You can say that's partly the fault of the white kid, but really it's mostly because hip-hop has tied making the music with living a certain experience in a way that's difficult to work around.

(b) Master P Gurl has me sort of wrong on the criticism of bourgeoisie thing: the straw-man bourgeoisie's listening isn't hip-hop, not entirely, not yet -- at the ultimate straw-man end it's Celine Dion or Michael Bolton, on a more realistic level it's Britney or Matchbox 20. My take on the direction of indie post-Nirvana is something like this. Before Nirvana "alternative" was safely underground and perceived as terrifically odd and could therefore be loads of things: it encompassed all of these different sounds, it could be "cerebral" in the way indie tries to be now or it could be just plain dumb-as-rocks for the kids sneaking cigarettes behind the gym to listen to. Nirvana's popularity brought this massive portion of the listening "bourgeoisie" -- in high school terms, your jocks and popular kids and whatever -- into listening to alt-rock in some of the same ways they'd been listening to Guns'n'Roses or whatever (see Pearl Jam especially here).

I think one indie impulse is that modernist anti-bourgeoisie impulse: post-Nirvana, the route everyone took to maintaining that -- the only route that wouldn't involve turning around and going "oh hahaha actually we do like C&C Music Factory now" -- was to forsake the Nirvana "rock" elements of alternative and to seize on another one. If the jocks were getting into Nirvana because oh my god it's such fiery "real" rock -- and sloppy and not coincidentally MASCULINE -- the solution was suddenly to hop over into all this slow meditative knob-twiddling stuff, into indie's pop experiments, into the precise, polite, nerd ethos we saw flower into stuff like post-rock by the late 90s.

I honestly think that's the source of the "indie is intelligent and cerebral" attitude, and that's the flight that was going on. I mean, in the late 80s, no one listening to alt-rock and related genres would have made any claims that, like, Westerberg, Rollins, Mascis, Jourgenson, or fucking Lux Interior were SMARTER than the people making pop -- just cooler. (They'd have said the Brits were smarter -- Morrissey and Robert Smith and Peter Murphy -- but only because those guys were glossed-up and feminine, and the kids behind the gym didn't really like those guys anyway.) When the bulk of the people alt-fans saw themselves as opposed to -- you know, the normal kids -- started getting into alt-rock as rock, as Nirvana and Pearl Jam and etc., they moved over to defend that thinky bit instead. And what you got was a race, with more and more people being turned on to listening to and talking about more music by alt-rock bands, and everyone trying to stay a step ahead of the kid who only just started caring about music when he bought Nevermind. Starting, incidentally, with dropping the term "alternative" -- leaving it as the embarrassing term to mark out the newbies -- and switching to "indie," since hahaha all those alt-rock bands you like are on major labels, newbie!

Which was the point where alt-indie started getting less fun: suddenly it had eyes on it and was always trying to prove itself. It got more interesting for a couple years -- 3 million rock bands getting signed, some of them actually bands that were doing weird weird stuff (I sort of want to talk about the Sugarplastic) -- and then it got very mellow and beautiful for a lot of years, and I love-loved that stuff too. But but at this point we're seeing another flight: suddenly teen-pop reared its head and wowee zowee look, that stuff's all about high-techy knob-twiddling productions too, plus it has the lure of being sort of upbeat and exciting, so indie circles around and comes up with bands that look like they're from the 70s and play lots of grotty guitars. Look at that, kids who grew up on Hootie and the Spice Girls: a guitar-band that sounds all old! This is a little indie position-taking trick that I just can't get with.

Interesting here, though I don't quite know how to place it: my friend who loves _Wanna Buy a Bridge_ but always took it off when she got to "At Last I Am Free" because she thought it was just stupid to do a Chic cover. Then she got & loved the _Super Disco_ compilation, and now she's checking out anything Nile Rodgers plays guitar on.

I wasn't dealing with more recent developments like Gold Chains et al, and the blackness question was a subset pretty much limited to a snap on Drag City ("spending a decade eliminating any and all African-American input") and the title of the paper, which the program director encouraged me to keep, though it became less relevant. (Meaning, Biggie could possibly have read as just the new model of youth badassness, and a different kind of popular to reject, more than representing any iteration of blackness. But it's a question--the historical moment is in there, somewhere.)

The movement I tracked was retreat. That these bands--Malkmus and Oldham being the representatives I chose because of time constraints--repeated the model of 20s UK modernism and put a hard ceiling on the number of fans they might have with distancing strategies (disdain, irony, impenetrable lyrics, laazy live shows, etc.). So, popular as in numbers and possible multipliers--keep the party unstarted. And then, second, the many manifestations of popular culture, including, but not limited to, danceable music, easily scanned lyrics, vigorous execution, etc.

And, probably unsuccessfully, I made an attempt to avoid "good" and "bad" as engines of investigation. I happen to like some of Malkmus's stuff but who cares--I still think he retreated from big, juicy world of popular culture. Don't like Oldham, and he, too, retreated from bigger, more open gestures. I wouldn't want to make too big a deal of the 80s bands engagements--signing to majors without having fucking anxiety attacks about it, covering pop tunes, working with artists outside yr peer group (SY & PE)--but it's still a significant difference between 80s and 90s even if it's small.

Sterling's answer, categorically, is on the right bus. Maybe the blip is in the wrong spot, and what felt like an energetic, fearless combination of impulses in the 80s was precisely NOT normative indie, but a deviation from a norm that Virigina Woolf established, or continued, when she snapped on James Joyce in 1922 for being "underbred and working class".

Gotta re-read this thread now.

Sterling, having reflected for a second: per your comment that indie and pop crossed paths for a moment, against indie's tendencies. Are you positing an indie aesthetic pre-80s? What would it be? I can guess, but I'd just eat up server space somewhere.

Re in the intellectualism meme--didn't indie, in the 90s, simultaneously reject the demands of popularity (give us something to move to and hum, at the very least, before you plug in yr idiosyncratic needs, Mr. Artist) AND reject larger, thornier ideas in favor of vague emotionalism, miserability, boo-hooism, etc? Like, I'm saying, retreat. And never ever forget that booming 90s economy might lurk beneath any number of paving stones. No need to come down in the street, with anybody, for any reason.

Pig Lib to thread.

It doesn't even have to be about rejection of the other - I'm sensing that some of you have a problem with white people writing music that appeals mainly to white people of the same class, as if that's a major crime against nature or something. Why is that not okay?

Why is Biggie speaking to/for black kids so different from Malkmus doing the same thing in his own way for his audience?

Some of you need to get a fucking grip. Get over your white guilt, or get over your petty fears about "ROCKISM."

Get over this idiotic feeling that every piece of art has to relate to a larger pop culture zeitgeist (I'm looking at you, Frere-Jones!), and that microcosms and subcultures are a good thing and most of them aren't for everybody. "Malkmus abandoned pop culture" - so fucking what? He's an adult, and an artist, and should do what he wants to and not try to please middlebrow music critics by approximating other more popular/blacker musicians.

I'm truly sorry that the world isn't neatly compartmentalized so that it would be easier for hack writers to write about it, but too bad. I'm also sorry that very positive empathy for other races and classes have left many of you with self-loathing white guilt, but you need to think things through and realize that you're only saying these knee-jerk things because the scope of your thinking is so narrow. You would think that people who claim to love music would realize that it's okay for there to be a lot of different music for a lot of different audiences, but most of you are clinging to these moronic narrow views of what music is. Wake the fuck up.

See, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Let's translate this: "How DARE people care about music that a) is no longer fashionable b) speaks to them c) is old??? Buy a Missy Elliot album, whitey!"

How dare people like what they like because they like it, you know? How dare someone have an invidual thought - didn't they get the memo that we're all going to feel the same about _____ this year?

Again: wake the fuck up.

This thread has made me think of the pop cultural manifestations of indie rock in the 90s -- how the mass media has dealt with a movement that's tried so hard to avoid it while simultaneously courting it. And I keep thinking about the "slacker" flicks: Reality Bites and the like. And they're totally devoid of blackness (did black people other than Gary Payton, Shawn Kemp and Jimi Hendrix's family live in Seattle in the 90s?)... I can't decide if this was a conscious reaction or if blackness just never enters into the equation. In weird monkey-brained TV logic, isn't Friends essentially a Gen X, slacker, indie sitcom? And has a black person EVER been on it?

All of this means jackshit that I can figure as of now, but of course this doesn't mean indie = racist (as Sterl so obviously pointed out), but it might mean that the stratification of music (indie, pop, whathaveyou) in the late 70s/early 80s (starting with punk/hardcore/hip-hop/disco/etc) firmed up the genre dividers to nearly insurmountable levels. (think about this: Jerry Lee Lewis once topped the Top 40, Country and R&B Billboard charts with the same song... There's absolutely ZERO chance that will ever happen again) And so everyone got more insular. Aside from rap-rock and the popification of contemporary country, where's the crossover these days? But yeah, it's worse in indie rock cuz folx is already paranoid about not getting too big, having the right kind of fans, their legacies and that kinda shit, so everyone's static and frozen in their own niche and not willing to take chances or make a move or why Superchunk has made the same album 205 times already.

Also, let's pretend that people of Asian and Latin descent do not exist, and aren't fans/musicians in the indie realm in significant numbers. It's a lot easier to make generalizations that way, and I don't want to step on anyone's toes here. I don't mean to rain on your "I got a B+ in a social theory class in college" parade.

Question: why does anyone have to embrace 'black music'? Should people feel similar obligations to embrace classical music, polka, medieval chants, avant garde electronic composition, or traditional Chinese music? Why is it so important for people to embrace contemporary black American culture other than a) you enjoy it or b) some misguided (and rather common) notions of authenticity re: race and class?

I don't deny race and class issues being involved with the shaping of social mores, but I'm certainly willing to give people the benefit of the doubt that they just don't want to hear some things, which is something I'm not getting from some of you. Is this about indie culture, pop culture, the plight of minorities in America, or is this about people you've been or have known that you no longer identify with? It seems like the latter to me.

I'm wondering whether this tendency of hip-hop elements to now surface in indie can partially be explained as a generational thing. If indie rockers weren't much interested in exploring hip-hop in the 80s and 90s, it was perhaps because it wasn't something they grew up with and thus felt no affinity towards. Indie-rock icons like Malkmus, Martsch, McCaughan, and Pollard are all at least 35 now and were already well out of college before hip-hop got mainstream. In junior high, when these guys were listening to Top 40 radio, they were listening to Cheap Trick. But Rjyan Kidwell (Cex) and Travis Morrison (Dismemberment Plan) and Ben Gibbard (Postal Service) are all young enough to have heard Bell Biv Devoe on their local Top 40 station. It just seems much more natural that people like this would be more driven to incorporate hip-hop and pop elements into indie than those grizzled elder statesmen.

"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