Pitchfork's P2k: The Decade in Music

Just read that ... it was definitely a synopsis of what I already know. He acknowledges Oakland at the end, which made me happy.

the noise -> songs thing is only one part of the narrative. The thing that I noticed most about the article was that it focused on acts and developments that would be most of interest to the Pitchfork readership. It definitely privileged more "popular" or "crossover" acts.

yeah, it kinda raises the whole "noise" vs. "noisy _____" debate (i.e. "Noisy rock", "noisy jazz", "noisy rhythms", "noisy pop", etc.) discussion that we had on ILX once. There was a time when power electronics and hard Japanese noise had turned noise into a genre name, but it's just as functional as a kind of freefloating modifier for all sorts of genre-entangled formats and scenes that are not "noise" per se, and Pitchfork readers care more about the latter than the former, but all along it's been a fuzzy boundary. Spacerock and psychrock and kraut was hiding in the background of the aesthetic of a lot of the old guard in Japan (Hijokaidan, Masonna, Merzbow) and jazz is one context through to locate European and US folks like Voice Crack and Borbetomagus, so it may be that the myth of noise purity was always overstated.

were hiding, obv

I've only made it through the first two pages so far, but it seemed like the narrative was more about regional scenes bringing noise back out of the woodwork than bands developing cleaner sounds.

(xpost)

There was a time when power electronics and hard Japanese noise had turned noise into a genre name, but it's just as functional as a kind of freefloating modifier for all sorts of genre-entangled formats and scenes that are not "noise" per se

I think if I were to try and summarize the developments in noise in one sentence, this would be the thesis.

Good overview for sure. I think one of the big things it leaves out is the role labels like Troubleman/Load/5RC had in pushing this stuff out to indie rock kids. Pretty amazing in these economic times to think of the money spent on noize just five years ago

You forgot Skin Graft.

Even 31G to a big extent

I guess the question is, how much did those labels come out of regional scenes? Marc does mention Load and a few others in the article, but mostly in the context of regional scenes and artist-run/community enterprises.

What do you guys make of Nabisco's 'Decade in Indie' piece?

nabisco otm

very good article

great piece - well done nabsico

And he wrote it all from a fishing trawler in Hawaii.

nah, i done heard that piece was ghosted by the fish.

Ha, the decision taken on the boat, based on radio play vs ichthyological behavior, was that fish love Bachman-Turner Overdrive (leading to much singing of "Taking Care of Fishes").

Thanks: it's all true: I do think something's poised to shift. The previous discussion about "noise" as a floating modifier was making me wonder about something funny -- you know how in the 90s the category of "alternative" was sorta given up to the mainstream, and more people clustered around "indie?" I keep wondering this week if the category of "indie" could be given up to the mainstream that way (as in the UK, I guess), and what might spring up under it. (The problem with this thought is that there's not so much of a clearly defined "mainstream" anymore for it to be given up to.)

it's real good. it's nice when an article like that takes everything in on such a wide perspective, as if he were standing from really far away and looking at this jumble of shit happening and picking out archetypes and patterns, yet does it all with an air of optimistic, wink-and-a-pat-on-the-back-approval.

In the UK, nothing ever really replaced "indie" as a catch-all term for alternative/underground musics.

I keep wondering this week if the category of "indie" could be given up to the mainstream that way (as in the UK, I guess), and what might spring up under it.

A new dawn in terror- Brokencyde are surpassed by Attack Attack!'s "Stick Stickly" and the emergence of CRABCORE

hmm, why hasn't that happened yet?

In the UK, nothing ever really replaced "indie" as a catch-all term for alternative/underground musics.

^^ yeah, this is always really interesting to me! and I think possibly quite meaningful in terms of how certain types of things are made and received there.

great job nabs--you really captured a lot of sentiments that seem to just be "around" but had not nec. been explained accurately and concisely.

Actually, crabcore is exactly what I thought Nabisco was getting at when he said, "Maybe something game-changing will crawl out of a Hot Topic somewhere; I don't know if you follow these things, but there are weirdnesses and genre collisions coming out of those scenes that make indie look kinda square."

Iwrestledabearonce

Stephenie Meyer, author of Twilight, not often accused of lacking insight into the hearts of America's young, just told the world what her favorite records were this summer-- Grizzly Bear and Animal Collective among them. (Do you think that's awesome, or does it make you want to listen to nothing but rap mixtapes and noise?)

I know this wasn't written about me but I'm pretty sure I listen to rap mixtapes and noise as a reaction to the music made by bands like grizzly bear and animal collective

And yes, excellent article, btw. I've been waiting for someone to write an article just like that; so many people try to do these "what's the deal with indie" thinkpieces, and they invariably wind up either not quite getting it or just seeming kind of myopic. Nabisco's one of the only people I know who could do such an assignment justice.

There were things about the songs that were comfortable and traditional, which was how consensus got built around them: They were easy to like. But there were also things about them that, in the context of their time, seemed rare and special and worth getting behind.

This really nails a certain feeling I had but maybe not about the particular acts you mention wrt indie a few years ago.

One thing, and I kindof feel like maybe ILX exaggerates this a bit, but indie as a gateway to other music definitely feels like a hallmark of this decade, something that is definitely encouraged by indie itself being such a general pilferer and re-framer of other musical ideas and poses and something which kindof contradicts the accusations so often leveled at indie scenes of insularity (I can't really imagine anyone investigating disco, house, dubstep AND country just off the back of mentions in Hip-Hop or Techno blogs/reviews at least to the same extent). The other side of the coin of this is the feeling that I get about indie fans that an indie appreciation of an act from another genre somehow validates that act moreso than the appreciation of the extant fanbase, but that could just be my own hangup base on years of ILM "*insert genre name here* for indie fans" dismissals.

It's a very nice article, nabisco. One thing that stuck out to me as a question after reading it comes from the following sentence: "Suddenly the big rap on indie was that it was po-faced and insular and lacking in passion, a self-congratulatory system of people in plaid shirts playing to audiences with their arms crossed." My question: why "suddenly"? What happened to bring this about? I think that you're right that something happened, and I'd like to hear more about what explains this (well, besides something like "9/11 duh").

My question is more, was it really so sudden?

i really don't get this fixation with and deprecation of arm-folding at shows.

What happened to bring this about?

the crossover success of pop tracks "Crazy in Love" and "Hey Ya!" in 2003 (and "Toxic" in 2004) that were so undeniable in their appeal that it forced the po-faced indie kids to realise they were neglecting something.

See, I don't buy that. There were lots of pop songs just as good or better 2 or 3 or 5 years earlier, and if those had more indie kid crossover we'd be talking about how undeniably appealing those were instead.

Wrt the undeniable appeal of "Crazy In Love" etc.: nabisco goes on to say: "Because the more some people wanted to dig down toward something fresher and rowdier... the more they left that other indie sensibility, the allegedly polite and earnest and po-faced one, to sail its course." The sudden rise of this "big rap" on indie leads, on nabisco's account, to indie being increasingly separated from the mainstream.

xp yes

I thought it was a good article and it provoked some good questions.

What I'm wondering is, regarding the future of indie, is that, since indie is always groping for novelty and trying to differentiate itself from the mainstream or the masses, how can it separate itself when a) the idea of the mainstream is eroding (as Nabisco just said) and b) the omnipresent online communities can track and potentially blow-up your little scene before it has time to become anything bigger?

David Reisman covered this a bit in his "listening to popular music" essay in the 1950s (a must-read btw). He noted the attitude of a high school senior who loved "hot jazz" (read this as indie) and used his love of it to differentiate himself from all the other kids that liked the more "poplar" music of the day. Reisman wondered what will happen to this boy and the way he used music as a social marker when he got to college and, presumably, a plethora of kids loved the things that previously made him - and only him - special.

The story of that boy is kind of like the story of indie this decade. Thanks to the internet it's become much easier for anybody with broadband and some time on their hands to follow the scene and become an insider, but what becomes of the insider when he feels his special little world is being diluted? What becomes of an underground or indie movement when everybody is trying to touch the hem of its garment?

David Reisman covered this a bit in his "listening to popular music" essay in the 1950s (a must-read btw).

! I've been trying to find that essay again for years! I know it was anthologized, where did you find it? (Everyone who ever posted on this board and/or talked about music anywhere kinda needs to read it immediately.)

I got it in a collection called "Individualism Reconsidered," which I bought from Biblio.com dirt cheap.

http://www.biblio.com/search.php?stage=1&title=individualism+reconsidered

xxxp Well, Nabisco does say that it happened "around the turn of the millennium." So I think that maybe takes into account Destiny's Child and Jay-Z and OutKast and Neptunes/Timbaland productions and not just the huge crossover hits of 2003. If you look at P&J singles lists in the late '90s, it's full of stuff like Hanson and Smashmouth; I do think there was a turning point, probably heralded by "Are You Gonna Be That Somebody" in 1998 but not really picked up on for a year or two, where pop music started to become "interesting" to the indie scene because people could say not just "oh, it's a really catchy pop song" but "this is actually really sonically innovative." Which is always something that indie has prized.

some of the essay is here

http://books.google.com/books?id=WNubD3WKKDYC&pg=PA4&lpg=PA4&dq=%22listening+to+popular+music%22+david+reisman&source=bl&ots=SsvYS3XzUM&sig=TFbGk41dCEo1JbJN7NKNsja3B3U&hl=en&ei=1EuxSs_uJ9C3tweGx7ysCA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2#v=onepage&q=&f=false

real indy rock: http://eis-blog.ucsc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/indiana_boulder.jpg

A+

well Tom Ewing has been mentioning a lot lately how his way of getting indie ppl into pop is pointing out the production and stuff and with Timbaland and then the Neptunes, it really was a point in time where pop production was really showy and when the lionisation of the producer finally made a kind of authenticity for manufactured pop.

terrific piece. one question, tho: "white-belt metal"??? what it is???

metal bands from america's "white belt" (kansas, iowa, north dakota)

To be honest, I don't think that "big rap on indie" necessarily had a ton to do with pop at first. Imagine a person who spent the 1990s listening entirely to indie/rock and ignoring pop: toward the end of the decade, it'd be completely plausible to start feeling like the popular indie stuff was drifting in the direction of the quaint and "nice" and ambitious, etc. Plenty of the earlier complaints seemed to come from people who just enjoyed their indie a bit more rock, more noisy or thrashy or trashy. (I also remember feeling, toward the end of the 90s, that things like garage-rock felt sort of ghettoized and marginal, both in the "indie" world and on the punk side.) Consider the reaction that greeted bands like the Strokes, Hives, even like Black Rebel Motorcycle club -- even from deep within the ranks of people who mostly listened to indie, there was a reaction to these bands that was sort of like "oh right, rock stuff." And it seems really telling that those bands were not super-rocking, or anything!

In any case, the "big rap on indie" seemed to come from all different sorts of discontents -- there was the pop thing, yes; also the broadening and eye-opening that came with people getting out and talking on the internet (especially since I think "indie" types have traditionally, by necessity, sorta been big find-a-space-to-talk-about-music types); there were people who'd been in those garagier "ghettos" or listening to Estrus records or who'd always been repping for old skronky-guitar indie the whole time; I can't speak with much authority about punk stuff but I think there were certain fragmentations going on over there that pushed some listeners more over toward the "indie" category (that whole era of very indie-type "emo" has a role here, I think) .... like with any hegemony, I think the popular-indie "status quo" at that point had discontents of all different sorts, for all sorts of different reasons.

My only quibble, nabisco, is with your point of emphasis. In my experience it wasn't so much "Crazy in Love, "Hey Ya," etc that caused the shift in sensibilities as the Internet and its democratizing effect (which you pointed out). I'm pretty sure that "One Sweet Day," "Bedtime Stories," "Un-break My Heart," or any other huge pop hit of the nineties would have penetrated the indie carapace had blogs and websites promoted them.

- sarahel, I agree with you about arm-folding, but the idea was somehow so often used back then that it seemed an appropriate shorthand for that complaint
- sorry for being opaque about belts: white metal-studded belts, once popular in the "emo" constellation, used here to refer generally and vaguely to "emocore" and/or metal from within what they call the "scene," etc.

xpost - yeah Alfred, I totally agree, as above -- I do think the "big rap on indie" was really an issue of self-definition, not that pop got so great it penetrated. (though it certainly helped that pop was, at the time, doing really good stuff in ways that would appeal to indie listeners -- e.g. that point about interesting and auterish electronic production.)

I don't think that's true for the reason I said above, that the producer getting pushed forward and becoming a visible creative entity at the same moment that US pop productions were getting really showy and futuristic made a kind of narrative that indie fans could latch onto that the big pop of the 90's didn't really provide because it didn't break from the "they don't even play their own instruments" narratives

xp to alfred

Really, Alfred? "Unbreak My Heart"? I mean, that's a pretty standard-issue Diane Warren/David Foster pop ballad. No one in indie-world is repping for stuff like that even now. What got indie kids into a song like "Are You That Somebody" is that a) the beat was not straight-forward (like whatever IDM acts they were then listening to) and b) dude sampled a baby crying (like Beck or Cornelius or Cibo Matto).