Indie Guilt: C/D

Cos it fits with Alex's conception of indie as original sin, Dare - "pop" listening in his system is a prelapsarian state of innocence, and all listening from the moment self-awareness as a listener begins is "indie". Sincerity and Irony are equal affectations because they're both fig-leaves according to Alex's model, assumed positions which conceal the same condition. The problem with his system is - what use is it, given that as he admits the "pop" listener cannot exist (i.e. we are all Fallen)?

Brilliantly put, Tom. So: "pop" is therefore "what you like without thinking about it" under this conception...which is a hopelessly romanticized vision of listening, as all response to art passes through several filters before the listener/reader/viewer responds...ain't it so? And therefore pop=the Loch Ness Monster

Oh, I can see that. Guess I was thinking too literally this morning, 'sincerity' and 'irony' in general rather than applied to music & listeners.

yes I know this is the case -- hence I wrote "I'm not sure there is such a thing as a pure unmediated reaction to music". So *pure* pop is an impossibility. Which doesn't mean pop isn't a useful term, especially since we're stuck with it. So on the model I was pondering, indie and pop become not entities ('I like pop, you like indie') but poles towards which people's consumption of music tends. I would be very wary of positing 'pop' as a natural condition of music consumption, which is why I totally disagree with Dr C.

So you can consume Destiny's Child in an indie way. eg. Simon Reynolds claiming that 'Writing on the Wall' is better than 'Survivor' even though he appears to be liking it in a pop way, since the reason is mass-produced machine pop vs. auteur theory rockism: Beyonce produces too much of 'Survivor' for his taste. At the same time we can consume Piano Magic in a pop way as well.

I think I wanted to suggest that there is a genuine tension between pop and indie ways of listening to music, since one is evaluative and tends to dismiss other music (not necessarily on genre grounds) while the other is more open and doesn't necessarily categorize at all (caring about whether something is pop or dance or metal or not = indie.)

Listening to something because it's 'good' = indie; listening to something because you like it = pop; having to think about whether you like something or not, or what kind of music it is, etc. = definitely indie

Yahoo Serious Festival.

("I know those words, but that sign doesn't make sense.")

i.e.

1) Setting up "pop" and "indie" as the two poles just doesn't make any sense to me, especially because indie is NOT at all the ultimate example of "Listening to something because it's 'good'";

2) "caring about whether something is pop or dance or metal or not = indie" -- this sentence bewilders me because it has so little to do with how I listen to/think about music, though that depends on what you mean by caring, i.e. I care if it helps me better understand the piece of music and how it relates to other pieces of music and what its primary signifiers are, inasmuch as a genre label can be handy shorthand for identifying a completely different mindset/mode of listening you need to adopt to be receptive to that which is being communicated by the work.

Anyway, in my original. statement, for "good pop and good indie" read "good music"; the terms of the equation were dictated by the topic of discussion, not by any belief on my part that those constitute poles of musical discourse.

mark s said on his le Tigre thread: 'i am sure i will enjoy it becuz i like everything'. This is what I mean by pop.

We all make decisions about what we listen to and what we don't. The distinction I'm attempting to play with is between a) consuming music in a pop fashion; b) consuming it in an indie fashion. In each case the kinds of criteria for the decision are different:

a) 'because I hear it'

b) 'because it's good'

Are these different enough to make the point?

NB I'm not trying to have a go at *anyone*. I'm only playing with the conceptual distinction to see if I can make something useful out of it. But this doesn't seem that far from the issue raised by the original poster, however, insofar as his problem was: what are your criteria for choosing what you listen to (or claim to listen to): honest liking vs. ironic posturing.

"And once again what the hell is wrong with that? I mean, why wouldn't people who like indie like music from other genres that has affinities with indie?"

The beef I've had for a while with the indie press (and due to their efforts to be like them, some indie fans) is that it takes its liking of other genres as an indication of the universality and objectivity of its gaze. Perhaps part of the problem is caused by the vagueness of the term "indie", which in many people's minds is a qualitative tag as much as a stylistic one.

That's one way in which Pitchfork or NME's music coverage differs from, say, The Source or Mixmag or Boomkat - there's a heavy connotation that what's been covered is "the good stuff" rather than any particular style. So when they branch outside indie-proper, it's always to the other "good stuff" - but what that quality is exactly is left largely undefined, so the perhaps unintended implication is that the non-indie music being covered is the best stuff on its own genre's terms, as well as on indie's terms.

The "indie = the center" image works well here: rather than simply exploring the borders of adjacent styles (whose very proximity causes their characteristics to blur with indie's) as per N*tsuh's formulation, the indie press imagine indie as a sun around which other styles orbit, lit up only when their faces are turned towards indie, and cold and dark when facing away. Without indie, these styles are shapeless forms of rock, and it is only indie's energy (or, rather, its values and qualities) which gives them life, growth, meaning. Some stylistic planets are further away than others and thus receive less light overall ("chart-pop" = Pluto), but nonetheless each planet receives light on a portion of its face, and therefore its artists can be rated from one to ten in terms of indiefication (eg. Missy beats nu-Shakira; Basement Jaxx beats Todd Terry).

On a related note, the only time I've been really, genuinely pissed off with Pitchfork is when I read its "The Best Records of 2000" list - which made no effort whatsoever to admit either a) its subjectivity or b) the fact that 95% of the records were indie. Whereas while dance magazine album lists are invariably shitty, at least there's acknowledgement that, yes, it's a list of dance albums.

Of course you could very well make a parallel and equally damning "pop = the center" formulation. I haven't come up with a good reason why doing it with indie is worse. Someone come to my rescue.

There isn't really a good answer, Tim. I am probably a pop = the center person. It depends whether "indie" is something you notice musically or something you notice socially - this is what the Indiephilia thread was meant to be about, an attempt to define what's good about indie beyond the fact of its independence.

**So on the model I was pondering, indie and pop become not entities ('I like pop, you like indie') but poles towards which people's consumption of music tends**

Yes, that's clear. But..

** would be very wary of positing 'pop' as a natural condition of music consumption, which is why I totally disagree with Dr C**

Then, I'm not sure I understand why you disagree. (I'm prob. being fick)

Unless.... you mean that the 'general public' that I described cannot be considered as *fans*. But surely they listen in a 'pop' or 'close to pop' way?

I only disagreed because I thought you meant that 9 yr olds and the 5CD/yr buyers were 'true' pop fans.

If you meant 'close to pop' then probably we agree (but I think the difference between 'true' and 'close to' is vital which => over- reaction, poss.).

The problem I'm caught in here is that I'm not happy with any of the terms: I was playing with them to try to find out what I thought they meant, or if they could be made more useful. In a piece I wrote for the last FT birthday collection, I argued for a way of thinking about music which I called 'pop' and defined 'against the logic of the record collector, the Mojo reader and the indie-kid, the connoisseur.' So clearly indie is an arbitrary target, determined by the context we're in -- 'ie why does ILM pretend not to like indie'.

Example: In a couple of places in _The Differend_ Lyotard proclaims himself to be pro 'philosophy' and against 'intellectuals'. By intellectuals he means those who assert the hegemony of one phrase regime (roughly: way of thinking about the world) over all the others. Philosophy would be finding ways of thinking which don't do this. Lyotard does not claim to be a philosopher, though the implication may be that his book is an attempt at philosophy. Elsewhere he compares the way of thinking he's looking for with a child's way of looking at the world. He doesn't mean let's do away with adult thought etc., but take on what we (adults) think of as children's responses, even though they may bear little relation to how a child actually responds. (I'm elaborating slightly uncertainly at this point.)

I'm not attacking indie ways of listening -- and certainly not claiming to be anything other than an indie listener myself -- but wondering if there are other ways we can think about, by pushing the terms beyond the way they seem to have been being used so far on the thread. Whatever kind of way of thinking about music leads to the original post, I can do without

This thread sucks. How can so many people say so little?

That's what's so great about it. All style and no substance hurrah.

What, no "ILM? More like IL-LAME!"? 'Cause considering some of the comments here and on that other bored that's what I keep expecting to see.

i've decided the reason i like pop music is because it's free. huzzah radio!

(also, if they played indie on the radio, it would likely make me sad and not listen to it. although i could just turn it off, which is another joy of pop, hurrah!)

nicole, you might also be interested to know that rap is just crap, minus a c.

The only time I really preferred, or tried to prefer, music because it was not commercially oriented, was during a period in junior high and high school. I still have respect for artists who works independently, outside of the more capital intensive music world, but I feel under no obligation to support them, to like their music, or to not prefer more commercial music. If I do like the music, then I may offer them extra support.

I don't think listening to music because it's good should be equated with indie. This word is really being stretched unmercifully.

DeRayMi, hope you weren't offended by me using you as an example upthread. the idea was to pick someone who very clearly enjoys types of music outside of 'indie' (whatever that is), the idea of people pretending to like other types of music over indie was bizarre in the extreme, and your music interests made this even more clear. my post was a bit clumsy, partly because this entire thread is an exercise in clumsyness (particularly my own posts)

we should contract it, like jess's pronunciation key: to "ND"

because, as all know, i am ilx's epitome of pith.

I haven't come up with a good reason why doing it with indie is worse

Err okay this is the only thing I was trying to get at above. Not that the complaints aren't worth discussing -- it's just that I don't see these complaints applying to indie any more than they do to any other genres. In fact I see them applying less to indie. In fact I think two things are in operation: (a) we're all just more annoyed with it coming from indie, because talking-about-music-online means exposure to lots of indie-kid posturing, and (b) indie is the primary genre that rhetorically tries or even just pretends to look out to other genres, so it's the only hand reaching out to be slapped back and criticized for doing it wrong.

What's being criticized is what Tim points out above: the indie rhetorical stance that indie fans are critical and discerning listeners who "like what's good," as opposed to just people who happen to like indie. Obviously that's not true. But I don't see anyone offering a very good argument that it's not closer to true of indie -- which in my U.S. conceptions of it, in terms of what the full-on "indie kids"* around me actually listen to, is a wide and stylistically varied territory -- than most other genres.

My point is that the discernment stuff - cherrypicking each genre - isn't very important compared to just listening to lots of different stuff (since people disagree on 'what's best' anyway). And so I still think my cousin-Leila-and-the-NOW-album argument holds perfectly well.

* Full-on meaning not the normalish twentysomethings who quite like Wilco and the Flaming Lips, but people who actually self-identify as indie and "care" about indie: these people will talk mercilessly on and on about Kelly Hogan for as long as they will about Aphex Twin, Os Mutantes as much as Fugazi, and I don't see as wide of a net being cast by fans of many other genres. The only difference here is that the indie pickings from any given genre are united by a particular Quality, which as I'm saying above: does that not actually reinforce the "I like what's good" indie rhetoric that the listening is pulling from a relatively wide net of genres in its search for this Quality? This indie Quality that's really what the indie kids mean when they say "good," even if they don't always realize that?

Granted, Tom, chart-pop does basically the same thing -- it draws from different genres things that are usually connected by a "pop" Quality. (Although I might nitpick that things tend to converge as they hit the charts: songwise things get more and more reduced to a particular type of pop ballad, only with the arrangements and the intensity of the beats varying.)

indie discourse = bad, because it is defined by what it leaves out rather than what it includes.

pop discourse = bad, because it is defined by what it leaves out rather than what it includes.

avant discourse = dad.

I think it converges more on the US charts - my point was only that listening to lots of different things is dead easy. I can't remember why this point needed to be made really, this thread is getting a bit unwieldy now.

"the arrangements and the intensity of the beats" - in other words we're back to songwriting vs production hooray! (Actually N///tsuh I listened to a Death Cab For Cutie song for the first time today and was reminded of how indie songwriting's seemingly-arbitrary tempo changes were one of the things that really put me off it in the first place.)

To answer Tim's query: I think that the real point here is 1st that not everybody does this. Some people say "I like this, here are my reasons for doing so, I understand other people like other things for other reasons" (viz in the extreme, Ned) and therefore might have a particular band of tastes for particular reasons but don't pretend otherwise.

2nd choice of genre is choice of attitude/worldview/ethos and sometimes choice to INVESTIGATE a particular a/w/e. There needs to be some recognition that the charts aren't everything, but are an inescapable natural center of social consensus and contentestation.

I think that both my Hannah Marcus and Tiffany articles for f/t were attempts to grapple with this, and that my Tweet article was by way of dealing with associated concerns of "authenticity" in art.

Wait, dad?

No one gets by him folx!

Wait, folx?

DeRayMi, hope you weren't offended by me using you as an example upthread.

No, not at all.

my post was a bit clumsy, partly because this entire thread is an exercise in clumsyness (particularly my own posts)

Apparently my post was clumsy too, if it left you thinking I might have been offended. (And you are right about the thread in general.) I guess I was just trying to sort through to what extent I am or have ever been an "indie" listener. At one point I kind of was in an eltitist sense (though my listening wasn't particularly focused on rock), and at another point I listened to a lot of indie, though I was open to other things. Now I hardly listen to any indie. That's all. If anything, at times I have fallen back on the indie stuff I've listened to in order to justify the pop things I've listened to. ("It's okay for me to listen to Dionne Warwick, I also listen to Coil.") I think I'm finally arriving at a place where I almost never think that way. Still, something similar creeps in: it's okay that I like some salsa romantica, since I also like salsa dura out of Colombia. But in a way I would worry if I only listened to soft/easy listening music and not anything with an edge to it. But that's a different issue. I just hope I don't feel that listening to Sun Ra's "Other Planes of There" somehow atones (a/tones) for listening to Frankie Ruiz.

I think it converges more on the US charts -- This is dead true. And possibly non-coincidentally indie diverges a lot more in the US sense; to the point, really, where "pop" things off of the UK charts often fall under the "indie" umbrella here.

in other words we're back to songwriting vs production hooray - - I suppose this is sort of true, but what I was trying to get at is the North-American chart phenomenon where the same sort of power- ballad mode is at the heart of big singles from any genre: a "country" Shania Twain hit is a "Latin" Shakira hit is a "rock" Incubus hit is an "r&b" Ginuwine ballad. Possibly bad examples, but in a whole lot of cases I don't think of it as "production" so much as ... well, something like artists covering one another in different genres. The same cake, different frosting: thankfully this only applies to a certain type of hit, and the new modes of actual production for hip-hop and r&b have cut through it pretty drastically.

Actually N///tsuh I listened to a Death Cab For Cutie song for the first time today and was reminded of how indie songwriting's seemingly-arbitrary tempo changes were one of the things that really put me off it in the first place. -- Err Death Cab for Cutie do do that quite a bit (although I've always liked to think well, as they are apparently the last and most conventional indie band in my head to surpass their own conventionality by executing the conventions really, really, really effectively). It's the (post) post- rock thing: they want to be all loose and mercurial. Actually Tom if you are still up for "comfort-indie" We Have the Facts... should be where it's at.

"I haven't come up with a good reason why doing it with indie is worse

Err okay this is the only thing I was trying to get at above."

No I don't think it is, N*tsuh. You were comparing liking indie as a style to liking other styles. I'm comparing using indie as a framework to listen to all types of music versus using pop - where indie and pop are basically the *only* frameworks. I have consciously and unconsciously tried v. hard to use dance music as a framework to listen to all types of music but it's a) very hard and b) very rare, not least because there's less of a sense of universality to dance's qualities and values. In that sense we're talking about pop and indie as modes of reception vs pop and indie as styles. It would be cool if we *could* talk about dance music and heavy metal and country as modes of reception, quite apart from the value of breaking the binary opposition (Sterling is this sort of thing what you're referring to?).

My question, N*tsuh, was more: is there a concrete reason why trying to listen for "pop" values in anything is better than trying to listen for "indie" values. I think there *is*. I just can't articulate it yet (i know i know, no approval before delivery).

"The only difference here is that the indie pickings from any given genre are united by a particular Quality, which as I'm saying above: does that not actually reinforce the "I like what's good" indie rhetoric that the listening is pulling from a relatively wide net of genres in its search for this Quality? This indie Quality that's really what the indie kids mean when they say "good," even if they don't always realize that?"

Yes, but I don't think listening for one Quality, or a v. small jumble of connected Qualities, is a good thing. Perhaps the reason why a POP mode of reception is better is that it's open to a multiplicity of Qualities, open even to inventing new ones on the spot.

nabisco: you are so very very dead wrong about Shakira & shania & ginuwine having much in common. I see ginuwine as modern r&b at its most dissolute and textural (not to mention which his 1st two were timbaland productions and rhyhthmically their own thang anyway -- I mean.. "Pony" as prototypical of anything?).

Everytime I hear the Shakira single I first think its a celine production, but shania has what I'd consider the closest to tight conventional pop of any of the artists, all hook and chorus and mechanical precision of delivery, and at the same time maintains her own image & character as an authentic performer -- in the great American tradition its all show.

On Tim's point, I think ppl do turn metal and country into centers, viz Rock and the Pop Narcotic for exmple but its probably just a much harder mentality for those of this board to connect to.

"On Tim's point, I think ppl do turn metal and country into centers, viz Rock and the Pop Narcotic for exmple but its probably just a much harder mentality for those of this board to connect to."

Could we get away with expanding "those of this board" to "the broader critical dialogue"? I think you're right, but I also think that Carducci is quite a ways from the front-and-center critically for a very clear reason.

Which critics? Have you read CMW (country music weekly)? I have.

Of course not Sterling I am not a mentalist remember.

tim in calling anthony a mentalist shockah!

Is there a concrete reason why trying to listen for "pop" values in anything is better than trying to listen for "indie" values? I think there *is*.

But the only "pop values" anyone's suggested on the receptive end are that you're not "trying" or "listening" for anything at all. Also I completely reject the assertion that "pop" listening isn't searching for a set of particular Qualities just as much as "indie" listening is, either in reception or in style. In fact I might even reject the idea that there is any difference between pop listening and indie listening -- difference in the rhetoric used to talk about it, and differences in the flows of the two cultures that lead people to value different things at different times, but not differences in the listening itself.

The differences between the way most people listen to pop and the way they listen to indie is MUCH MUCH SMALLER than the way they'd listen to pop vs. classical, or indie vs. straight-ahead jazz, etc., etc. Even if we talk about the lowest-common-denominator listener, I think this is still true.

And what's with this "using [x] as a framework to view all music"? I simply don't buy the things that are being said about "indie listening". Most people I know who are deeply into classical music have most of the traits ascribed to the mythical indie listener in far larger quantities. (If anything, my initial experiences with indie gave me the impression that it seemed less discriminating and more omnivorous.)

I don't think listening to music because it's good should be equated with indie. This word is really being stretched unmercifully.

Yep, pretty much.

Re: stretching the meaning of 'indie'

On the one hand, yes, I agree that 'indie' is an arbitrary label for these -- fetishistic? rockist? -- tendencies.

But it is also as good a label as any other.

And it certainly carries some of the associations in question: ie. implied set of valued traits including authenticity, innovation, experimentation, reverence for tradition, artistic expression, resistance to the hegemony of the mainstream, etc.

And please don't anyone feel defensive. I for one am not trying to attribute the 'indie' tendency to each and every person who listens to indie music. I'm interested in it as a phenomenon in music as such, which could be ascribed to classical fans, hip-hop fans, metalheads etc... We could switch the terms and talk about indie kids listening to their music in a hip-hop purist kind of way and it would make no difference to the argument.

But the use of the term was prescribed in advance by the original post which implies that people on ILM are ashamed to be into indie and therefore pretent to like other forms of music.

Yeah the words "indie" and "pop" have become labels for what Alex and Tim are talking about, rather than the things theyre talking about being actual descriptions of "indie" and "pop". This is why all these big spectacular ILM theory threads wear me out in the end - because the actual experiences of people listening to indie and not-indie music get lost in the fog.

I didn't get the impression that the original poster was using "indie" in this broad sense. I kind of give up though.

god how did this thread get so BORING

have you noticed its always about 370 posts in when threads begin to lose their zest

It's only boring because you haven't used the wigga tag for quite some time now. That'll get things going again.