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

that's somehow related to jesse's post

!!???

were more segregated or at least less fiercely ethnic

!!!!!!??????

just wedding disc jockeying - LOTTA Bell Biv Devoe for instance

!!!!!!!!!!!??????????

the 180 grm ice cube reissues (okay actually just amerikkka's most wanted...cuz that's the "political" record i assume)
clipse - "when the last time?" 12"
missy - "gossip folks" 12"
atmosphere, sole, themselves, clouddead, zzzzz

they don't stock hip-hop cds. you have to go to circuit city for that.

most popular hip-hop act in thurston county, by t-shirts: insane clown posse

Fear of The Funk makes a fine trope for Undercover Brother or The New Guy or hell even How High (all fine films in increasingly FINE order) but hardly as a model for, y'know, the world. Not to mention which The Funk is avowedly integrationist in intent in *all* these films.

I think we get into these problems by taking the retroactive narrative of indie and its backwards-projected canon as good historic coin.

What about GENDER - indie rock distances itself from pop not because it is 'black' but because it is femininized - i.e. Backstreet Boys.

sterl have you read most of the thread?

Some other distinctions might be worth considering - URBAN (hip-hop, dance) versus SUBURBAN (pop, indie rock).

(haha like I was saying!)

But a lot of the best indie rock of the '90s was by women...

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.

There's styles and forms of dancing in 90's indie-rock that are consistent with its masculinist overtones, and if I'm being slightly over-determinist Sasha - I'm painting in broad colours to emphasize a point too often overlooked by male rock critics...

But to clarify one last missing term from the gendered reading. Indie-rock has a conflicted relationship to CONSUMPTION - the idea of 'selling-out', being commercial, being pop. This is a re-staging of the well-documented dilemmas of masculinity and consumption, something you don't find in pop because of its feminine orientation.

The idea of the body - which has somewhat led the thread astray toward dancing - was more a comment on the focus of consumption, 'technologies of the self' (ugh, Foucault) that are more compatible with the chart, boy-bands and teen-queens etc...

And btw, this is a well-rehearsed position in popular cultural studies. Gender/Music criticism does not merely begin and end with Sreynolds guys!

not quite.

Somehow those King Kong records slipped through.

indie rock has no RIGHT to "inject danceable elements" into their music, because indie dorks can't dance for shit, nobody wants to see them dance, and because they've resigned themselves to a right of cooler-than-thou inward-looking mopiness, they are therefore not ALLOWED to dance, either.

word bond.

"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