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

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.

here is a list of "white guitar-based post-punk acts" drawing from black popular music between the years of 1979-1985:

- the gang of four
- pil
- the pop group
- the delta 5
- the contortions
- anything on wax trax
- the associates
- the clash
- xtc
- 23 skidoo
- cabaret voltaire
- new order
- talking heads
- any two-tone band
- a certain ratio
- liquid liquid
- blondie
- scritti politti
- section 25
- pigbag and all pop group offshoots
- magazine
- heaven 17
- culture club

and these are only the most canonized.

here is a list in 2003:

????? who? john fucking spencer?

leaving aside your own obvious, tainting grudges against ilm, "hack writers", non-indie fans, whatever...could we stop trying to derail sasha's very tightly outlined question with dull rhetoricisms like "Should people feel similar obligations to embrace classical music, polka, medieval chants, avant garde electronic composition, or traditional Chinese music?" no one has said that indie rock HAS to embrace black (or otherwise) popular music. but we're a bit curious as to why it decided it wanted to STOP embracing black (or otherwise) popular music throughout the course of the 80s and into the 90s. which, yeah, i guess could be described as "what happened to this culture that i used to identify with but now don't" for people like sasha but certainly not for people like me or you who are under 30. the notion of "class and authenticity" you bring up is a red herring because...why? you feel attacked in your heritage industry?

I disagree with this. I think it will happen, though the crossover will more likely come from the country (or, more specifically, the 'pop-country') side of the fence than it will from the r&b or rock side of the fence, and it may spread as a series of different mixes of one song (which is maybe cheating, I don't know). But is it really inconceivable that Shania Twain, say, could cross over to an r&b format AND a rock one too? (Neptunes to thread?) Also, I don't think Jerry Lee's crossover (I'd be curious to know what song it is--"You Win Again"?) was the last or even necessarily the most startling of this sort of crossover, though granted, bridging the country-r&b thing is perhaps the truest test of all far as crossover goes. I mean, I was going to bring up INXS and George Michael in the '80s, both of whom made major dents in a number of different formats (unlike Prince and Michael Jackson who should've but were denied) and crossed the black/white divide quite mightily if I recall, though maybe not with one specific track that went buzz on different charts all at once. And yeah, neither hit the country charts, though I bet today the song "Faith" WOULD. (I realize this thread is about indie and my comment is off-track. Sorry, carry on, etc.)

I have no grudge against non-indie fans at all, Jess. I just have a problem with people who are so willing to make these grand pronouncements about it, which you're definitely guilty of doing. The implication in most of these posts, and certainly in the one where you outline a canon is that there is something wrong with musicians/fans for not being extremely interested/indebted to black artists. I don't think anyone made a concious decision to stop embracing black music, and I really don't think 'indie' is nearly as monolithic as you're making it out to be.

Again: why is it so important for white indie artists to embrace black culture/pop music in the first place? Why can't they have their own thing?

If there was a kind of elitist white intellectual conservatism to white-boy indie in the '90s, there was a different kind of mainstream-bougie conservatism to a lot of mainstream hip hop/R&B. The mutual lack of interest is hardly surprising. And the indie-kid championing of Kool Keith, Black Star, etc., makes perfect sense in that context -- a recognition of a shared rejection for the dominant modes and themes (or, ahem, "narratives").

Part of the problem here is whether the question is about indie being white (in sensibility as well as demographics) or about indie being un-pop (which is a separate issue). And it seems to me, btw, that the White Stripes represent a nice challenge on all fronts -- their music is shot full of "black" influences, but in a strictly pre-disco sense; it is also pop in both word and deed (in the top 10 last time I looked), but uncompromisingly indie at the same time ("uncompromising" meaning they still sound pretty much the same as they did before -- no Butch Vig makeover). And of course, their poppishness and popularity is rapidly disqualifying them for "real" indie acceptance.

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.