Indie-centrism outside of music criticism?

Clarke, that is nothing compared to wine fans. Step up some.

Other indiecentric rockist bullshit can be found in the Open Source Software community. Slashdot's improved but it's still got plenty of folks who respons with kneejerk hatred anytime you praise something you have to pay for.

Indie rock or hiphop may have sold some records, but they haven't got a couple of cable channels.

Gearwhores from guitars to synths to recording engineers love to speak of the inherent values of their small run, hand made equipment whether it is amps, modular synths, or analog tube compressors.

I like Too Much Joy.

"I make traditional bread; and tradition is important to me...

"On the plane yesterday I thought about why it is that food invention has become so much more highly valued than recreation of food tradition. Alain Ducasse says that everything has already been invented; we are merely rearranging the inventions. If that's so, why are chefs so ready to abandon tradition in order to create bizarre concoctions to shock us?"

Still, real ale is nice :-)

Though I grant that there's the indie rock irony associated with PBR, I tend to prefer it because its always the cheapest beer at the bar. Some of us have gotta drink on a budget. So Miller High Life and PBR it is...

I don't think I'm being particularly clever by drinking those, though.

I feel like a lot of times, when you throw yourself into appreciation of something that is unfamiliar, or when an area of interest that is not traditionally seen as being worth such interest is staking out its territory, you get that hyper-elitism/pedantic factor. 'Cause one feels defensive and has to justify one's interest, and one way of justifying any interest is to develop an extremely complex system of coding and classificiation; every specialized field has its own language. Hence the battles over rock genres. Hence statements like, it's not a COMIC BOOK, it's a GRAPHIC NOVEL.

I am all for pulling down distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow interests and culture, but in practice I suspect I am a terrible snob. I drink Hoegaarden when I can get it.. but it's good!

I bet Pierre Bourdieu's classic Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste would be very helpful in providing a point from which to construct an argument here.

pbr : indie :: yuengling : emo/jess

What was super interesting to me is the marketing guy observing how Naomi Klein's No Logo could actually be very effectively used as a marketing guide now that everyone's oversaturated with advertising!

BAHAHAHAHAHAAA

This statement is so correct it's barely a joke

Hippie culture was probably the biggest incubator of post-1970s indie-food trends. For example, the restrictions of communal living (esp. those in rural or farmland) forced a small but significant minority of people to re-learn how they got their food (U+K: growing your own, DIY), what foods they ate (U+K: ecological, health and moral concerns), and how to prepare food (U+K: how to feed lots of people cheaply and quickly).

Some indie-foodies probably came from families intimately involved in small-scale food production: the farm, the vinyard, the small brewery, the family restaurant, the neighborhood 'ethnic' specialty shop.

The whole point of 'good' food and drink is that is is created with care, using the best quality ingredients, whereas manufactured food is often made using cheap source materials and cooking methods.

In music, that which is often considered 'low' is usually created with more care and attention to detail, and using better quality 'ingedients' than schmindie music. There is no such thing as 'manufactured' in any real tangible way in pop music because each artifact is individually crafted.

sometimes a guy wants a watery domestic... [insert pavement sample here for pun fx]

i don't like it ironically. what a silly concept. "look at me, i'm drinking shit! aren't i hilarious!" nah, i like it. it's easy and not so heavy.

like tinobeat said, price is a huge factor. if 4 pbr = 2 guiness, you better believe that if i wanna get loose, i'm on the pbr. now if i'm driving later, then the guiness might be where i go. actually, i'd probably have a black and tan cause straight guiness is like gravy without potatoes.

i dunno. i just like pbr and high life.
m.

I didn't know they did those sponsorships, actually - I wish the NYT writer had investigated further - but they observed that next marketing tactic expected from the PBR guys was to sign on some celebrity endorser for $1 mil or so, and they consciously chose to do other things.

That's a really funny idea, the Campaign for Real Indie. If only more ideas tossed out here on ILM/ILX came to fruition. You should at least make some t-shirts w/that on it!

yuppie kitchen: complete sets of really nice cooking stuff, lots of jars of expensive olives and capers and stuff, wine in the cellar; higher up the income ladder, you get a cook as well [cf bigtime music studio with nice rental drums, digital shit, etc]

boho kitchen: maybe two or three really neato pieces of random equipment: check out my titanium mortar and pestle. but no complete sets. cooking indonesian curries in a scuzzy frying pan: "oh sure i love thai, but lately i've been getting into indonesian cuisines of which there are so many varieties, for example in borneo they actually make a delicious newt stew. i'm substituting sea monkeys for newts in this recipe." ie they are risk takers. investing in indonesian cos they think it will be hip. in the mean time they eat it for months without understanding it, often without enjoying it.

cf indie hipster who listens to free jazz or japanese noise for months til he starts to get it. music studio is some guy's basement; band more interested in drilling holes in guitars than polishing a nice fender. weird tunings eventuall cause cheap neck to bow. can't stand protools sounding recordings, but not dedicated enough to design his own software or click boxes, instead searches and searches for obscure software and devices to get original sounds.

Yeah, you're right. But what I'm finding interesting is my knee-jerk reaction (however wrong to my mind such parallels are) would be to equate foodie/real ale with rich, imacculate pop, whereas many people here seem to equate it with some kind of schmindie ethos.

It could be a case of blurring the art with the intent. But on the other hand Pop music is often ataining some kind of perfection, much like those involved in 'high' food. Compare this to the half-arsed indie mentality and half-arsed mass-produced food.

On a tangent to my mind it's also ironic that my mind that indie (music) folks consumption outside music seems to be crap chemically water lagers, shit burgers etc. Somewhat outside the supposed independent ethos they alledgedly follow. Shoot me down for my reductionism.

Maybe I'm just a food rockist - foodist. ;)

ouch! is that supposed to be as offensive as it sounds to me? (against gibson.)

m.

someone can be a geek of indie just as much as they are a geek of pop.

it's passion and intensity. it's being willing to go out of your way and perhaps suffer a little for your love.

?
m.

That's where I think the parallel lies and I think it holds up rather well - it's not a good or bad thing, but once you start acting stuck-up about yr "tastes" and saying that anything "mainstream" is somehow automatically inferior, then you're no better than any other moron with blinders on.

No, it's not supposed to make sense.

Who are the film parallels there? John Sayles/Jim Jarmusch?

This is perhaps where the differences lie, in that the price of food more often than not accurately reflects the increased quality of the product, whereas one CD is going to cost the same as any other regardless of the manufacturing process up to that point.

Basically there is a greater range of reasons for people who want to get a better quality of food, from increased taste, to health benefits, to, yes, cultural cache. A range that you would find hard to reproduce for modes of indie consumption.

Worst "joke" of the day

no, no, no

this is an old canard about that kind of music that's just wrong

think about it this way: whether stones in 64, or psych, or prog, funk, disco, punk, new wave, hip hop, post punk, and on and on, there have been people who hear new artists doing stuff that is way different, and they like it. sonic youth were part of post punk; they detuned their guitars and made music-industry referential lyrics, and shouted about weird stuff that made sense. their version of the velvets was mystery murder meets venus in furs or some such.

and what they did and the bands around them did with them [swans, the fall circa hex, birthday party] will always have an appeal, the same way funk will - funk was different from soul in many ways; so with that type of post punk. [i could similarly place flaming lips apart from the bands they beat in the 2001[?] pazz&jop poll]

better? of course not, except from the point of view that maybe person x or scene y or culture z has certain values which are found in abundance in sy's post punk [fractured noises; referentiality; gloom purged of romanticism, etc]. if it shares more values, it is more valuable

now, there are supposedly absolute values in music, as well. hardly any research has been conclusive on this though - what makes human monkeys want to dance - is funk, or salsa, or trance best? do chord changes and melodies really carry information, or do they just seem to? etc.

more to the point around here, some people believe that music made by independantly thinking hipsters for college kids and educated city scuzzers is of higher quality than music made by producers looking at the charts and hiring singers and keyboard programmers and synth players and then paid for with payola and mtv promotions etc.

obviously life is not so simple: because what the hipster musicians are doing is roughly the same thing when you boil it down. they gauge their audience, play to their expectations, and sell their educations instead of their singer's sex appeal - both equally shallow hooks if you ask me

you see in a strange sense i do agree with you. but your idea that it's the obscurity of sonic youth, coupled with their cultural weight, is wrong i think. i first bought indie records when i was 16, and i was glad that media such as RS could point some things out to me [husker du! x! peter gabriel! london calling!] but you buy sight unseen then decide whether you like it or not, and often you decide, no, i don't like this particular hipster music, [at age 16 couldn't get the first clash record, or lou reed's new york] i have no use for it. because there are real differences. when rem put out green, i realized they were changing drastically, but i still liked it; it had use for me, but with out of time, they lost me; apart from a couple of songs it was incomprehensible.

and so it is with food. is mcdonalds really worse than making your own baba ghanoush? knee jerk reaction = yes but there are reasons americans like eating poisons! we drink alcohol because it's a poison that muddles the mind; we eat extra value meals for similar reasons which are opaque to many. it's a thrill, it slams your face with flavors you're trained to love, it's transgressive, it's a way of treating yourself according to cultural norms, it's a kid's place, our bodies crave that cholesterol and sodium in case we are forced to fast on the african dry season veldt where homo sapiens evolved, etc.

secondly,the classification of beers upthread-
stella as a "wife-beater"/lager lout beer:in ireland its marketed as being "reassuringly expensive" and is about 50 more than a normal pint...is this an attempt to change its image or what?

also,appearently "real beer" is one made with only four ingredients,is this true?

my favourite beer to drink from a can is dutch gold,which is the cheapest beer with probably the worst reputation,but its actually really nice...

also,i think the whole idea of open source programming is really good,and surely people involved in it can be forgiven snobbery since there is an actual investment of their time in making something useful for lots of people for free?

Also, my homebrewing (read: 4-track-owning) friend just made some pot-beer which we'll be enjoying on July 4th. Not sure what the indie parallel to that would be... His beer is really delicious, though, and nothing beats the freshness of a good homebrewed beer.

When I started to get into beer (not very long ago at all actually), it kind of felt the same as it did when I got into indie. It was like I had a path from another discipline that made getting into the indie mindset w/r/t beer much simpler and smoother. The slight defensiveness of describing some random "exotic" beer to someone and hoping they don't think you're a twat (yeah, Cabaret Voltaire sound really cool I'll check them out!). The urge to participate in a discourse about this beer rather than just consuming it. The feeling of a new and unknown (to me at least) world opening up. It's the surrounding issues like these that make the parallel interesting to me. MSP makes a good point upthread about this being all just standard geek behavior, and I guess that the whole thing only starts to become slightly sinister when you let your new-found interest and passion start to color your opinions of other people based on their relation to said interest.

When I first read USENET there was a briefly fascinating group called alt.fan.mcdonalds (or similar) which had enthusiastic little reviews and details of each new McDs regional food product, and relatively small amounts of flaming.

Most populist culture works by exploiting a twin desire in consumers for reassurance and novelty. Each cultural form (music, film, food, books, etc.) sets the balance between these two desires differently. The more novelty-driven a form is the easier it is to write interestingly about. Pop is one of the most novelty-driven forms there is; food one of the least.

I don't think it's contradictory at all to think that indie means of production are a Good Thing while being fiercely critical of the end product, mostly.

If you ask people who know about indie music, open source software, organic food, fancy beer, etc. but don't buy into them - the answer is almost always along the lines of 'I don't care that much' - eg "My priorities are elsewhere," not "I think it sucks."

Whereas if you ask an Apple/Open Source/Microbrew/Indie/Organic Food fanatic why they choose what they choose, the answer is almost ALWAYS "Cuz that other shit FUCKING SUCKS!!!"

...which is, as MSP pointed out, completely standard geek behavior.

anyway millar yr. point is loaded as you only mention apple etc. fanatics. there do exist (i posit) ppl. who eat organics or listen to indie but are NOT fanatic about them and would say w/r/t hip-hop or windows or etc. "this works slightly better for my priorities" or etc.

how dijd yoou gues?