pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

the dream is happening

Everything is 10.0

yeah something is clearly happening on the backend

https://i.imgur.com/uaX0rQx.png

Yeah, the Twitter account is tweeting links to new album reviews that work, so something all futzed up. Sorry to crush your dreams Neando.

This new Longform piece ("The Secret Gay History of Indie Rock") begins:

“Is being a rock star the province of white, heterosexual males?” an interviewer asked Michael Stipe in 1992, two years before the R.E.M. frontman came out. Stipe answered evasively, nonsensically, queerly: “Look… I yam what I yam.” It’s a noncommittal attitude recognizable to anyone who minored in queer theory: the ambiguity, the absurdity, the refusal to represent oneself in policeable terms.

First, I don't think you need to have "minored in queer theory" to get where Stipe was coming from. Second, the entire piece is clearly written by someone, and for people, with a specific academic background. It's basically a few (small) steps away from a college paper. I don't know why you would write for a general readership that way.

Apart from one reference to an academic paper, it doesn't seem particularly academic to me.

Or to me.

Is it some kind of joke that everyone's minoring in queer theory now?

Might've if I coulda. Had to settle for philosophy.

it reads like a listicle disguised as an essay...

That article isn’t academic at all, and it’s also utter shit— low research listicle crap. If the umbrella of “indie” is going to be as broad as the author would like it to be, then there are many histories missing— Human Sexual Response, Kitchens of Distinction, Team Dresch and everything that was on OutpunK, the Dicks, groups like German Shepherds and Pink Section, etc etc etc. It’s as if the author came up with the premise with some more recent groups in mind and then didn’t bother to research anything other than most mainstream and obvious examples from pre-1995. Sophomoric.

(Journalists at the time generally failed to notice the inherent gayness of Morrissey’s Oscar Wilde idolatry, instead interpreting it as heterosexual sensitivity.)

shame Morrissey's sexuality wasn't more speculated on at the time

Why aren’t kitchens in distinction huge, feel like so many atmospheric “post punk” bands ride hard on their kind of style, idk miw

indie rock was a genre that took care to conceal its musical lineage, obscuring its Black, queer blues and rock’n’roll antecedents

first of all, huh? A lot of indie rock was some kind of blues homage. And second, was queer blues more of an antecedent than straight blues?

In the foremost sociological study of indie rock, professor David Hermondhalgh traced indie rock’s etymology back to the mid 1980s, arguing that the genre was defined by its institutional independence from major labels

some cracking academic discoveries here

brimstead at 3:52 5 Jul 23

Why aren’t kitchens in distinction huge, feel like so many atmospheric “post punk” bands ride hard on their kind of style, idk miw



I think the band name doesn't do em any favors

Bands of Indistinction

professor David Hermondhalgh traced indie rock’s etymology back to the mid 1980s, arguing that the genre was defined by its institutional independence from major labels

I remember this kid Zach from tenth grade making the same argument, he was pretty intense about it.

I was tripped up by the paragraph on suburbia ("While hip-hop and dance scenes developed in the States’ major cities, you’d more often find indie rock tucked into the country’s cul-de-sacs; in a place of uniformity and so-called safety"). Does this mean, like, Hoboken?

Incidentally, Arcade Fire’s 2010 album The Suburbs is a paean to post-war suburbia that sounds to me like one of the most heterosexual albums ever released.

More heterosexual than Walking With a Panther?

So many words and so little said

Ha ha, and of COURSE Hopper tweets "Loved this!" Jesus fuck.

I don’t have my copy of ‘Please Kill Me’ handy but I’m pretty sure members of the Velvet Underground used to literally jack off with each other

Don't you mean the Beatles?

sometimes indie seems pretty straight and then it turns out there's a bunch of gay stuff there all along, there's a lesson in there folks

I don't really know what this piece is saying because it's so triangulated while somehow also being scattershot and making a bunch of sweeping statements - I might agree eg that heterosexuality is fundamentally neurotic but I'm not sure if that's what they mean to be implying in the flip couple of lines they have on it

there's some real stuff in it to be drawn out but it needed a bunch more drafts with a good editor on hand which is probably not the most profitable way to run a media platform

Incidentally, Arcade Fire’s 2010 album The Suburbs is a paean to post-war suburbia that sounds to me like one of the most heterosexual albums ever released.

More heterosexual than Walking With a Panther?

― Alito Bit of Soap (President Keyes), Wednesday, 5 July 2023 22:09 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

that line has now been amended to the following:

Incidentally, Arcade Fire’s 2010 album The Suburbs—which includes string arrangements from a queer artist—is a paean to post-war suburbia that sounds to me like one of the most heterosexual albums ever released.

someone on twitter had a screenshot suggesting that it originally read "Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs—a paean to post-war suburbia—is, incidentally, one of the most heterosexual albums ever released.", in which case that was at least the third edit required.

three edits for a pointless aside, you love to see it

no one’s editing philosophies are the same but i just think if you see a sentence beginning with “incidentally” you should delete it

lmao lmao lmao

I’m going to become one of those people who mostly visit this site for news items, aren’t I?

(Across the board I just don’t read music reviews with the same avidity of old.)

i mean as with every website since time immemorial the quality of a piece is usually writer-dependent (i understand it's gotten worse since editorial budgets have been slashed but pfork has editors, they're just likely overworked and are constantly dealing with writers who turn in pieces three weeks late (like me), a condition i imagine has worsened since the pandemic turned everyone's brains into potato salad). e.g. jayson greene's occasional columns are still really good imo

but yeah i don't know how this one made it past the stage of having a very wrong and ahistorical thesis

I felt more sorry for the writer. ftr I've had terrific experiences there w/editors questioning ideas that needed tweeking and dismissing bad ones. No idea what happened.

i would not feel sorry for this writer

I'm assuming they pitched it, so it's on the editors to say, "Uhh...the B-52s aren't indie, so how are you defining indie?"

A military brat named Michael Stipe was among them; his band R.E.M.’s sound was largely indebted to Ricky and those who had inspired the B-52’s guitarist, namely the Velvet Underground.

i mean. i'm not saying that REM wasn't influenced by both bands but this seems pointedly ignoring the whole jangle tradition, big star, the byrds, mitch easter/dbs that they were a clear outgrowth of in terms of buck's guitar style

And the Byrds were Dance Music, so there's another gay forerunner

I do like that Michael Stipe used a Popeye line. Fits in with the old ILX post about seeing him buying Krazy Kat volumes.

I'm assuming they pitched it, so it's on the editors to say, "Uhh...the B-52s aren't indie, so how are you defining indie?"

_I'm assuming they pitched it, so it's on the editors to say, "Uhh...the B-52s aren't indie, so how are you defining indie?"_


well they’re british so that regional similarity in “indie” plays into it. but this writer has had an ahistorical perspective before!

combing through a bunch of interviews where stipe talks about his sexuality was my favorite part of writing about monster

xxp

I do consider the B-52's an indie band though and I think a lot of people do, I don't think that's too ahistorical

all I have to say about yesterday's controversy is that the B-52s weren't remotely "indie rock," they were signed to Warner Bros/Island from LP1, they played SNL in 1980, you can call them an "alternative" band in the Spin album guide definition but they're not like, a C86 band

— Eric Harvey (@ericdharvey) July 6, 2023

In the American sense of the term, if a group's debut is on a major label, then they are not indie

The piece kind of fudges it by saying (in the B-52s section), "Stateside indie rock – then known as “college rock” – ....)"; but yeah, this is after quoting that learned professor revealing that "indie rock" means it's on indie labels.

I mean R.E.M. really weren't indie rock, either

yeah, I always thought of them as college rock until they got big

That's the trouble: "college rock" and "indie rock" get slippery. My college station played Consolidated, Peter Murphy, and Sting.

When I studied abroad in England in the late 90s, I had to get used to the fact that what I thought of as "indie" was "alternative" in the UK and vice versa.

They drive on the wrong side of the road too