There was a very good article on Pitchfork this past week on the changing definition of what it means to be indie. The argument is a bit involved, so though I will blockquote it's hard to get a sense of the whole argument from a part:
"Indie" got ever more widely adopted as pop music for the "thoughtful" person-- the sophisticated boom-boom. And be honest: Why wouldn't loads of everyday non-music-geek people hear a good Iron & Wine song and think not just "hey, that's really pleasant," but also "hey, that's kinda different and interesting?" Why not, if you put it in front of them? The sheer fact that it was available made a huge difference. I'll spare you a long, old-mannish digression about the things I had to do, pre-Internet, to engage with the music I wanted to hear; it was a constant and hilariously archaic scramble. But these days, these things float past you everywhere, and I'm hard-pressed to think of many acts I'd recommend that you couldn't very casually, within two minutes of web-searching, check out right on your computer. More and more, we define ourselves-- or pride ourselves, or at least "express" ourselves-- via our skills in picking interesting things out of that cloud of options. We probably shouldn't be surprised that somewhere in this process, "indie" completed its trip from being the province of freaks and geeks to something with cachet-- something that appeals to people's sense of themselves as discerning. Something that is, in some quarters, enough of a staple of "cool" that people begin to feel oppressed by it, to the point where some people's defense of liking it is no longer a defense against being weird, but a defense against being trendy.
Well. There are major issues and tensions involved in one variety of indie being that popular. Big ones. This website experiences some of them. Pitchfork has spent most of its existence covering both categories: both mainstream, populist indie records and weirder, rowdier sounds. Most of the time, those things have gone together really well; the sense has been that the average "indie" listener would like a bit of both, some pop records to sing along to and some stranger ones to be wowed by, plus plenty in between. That's probably still true of most of you! But now, more than ever, there's also this tension between the two, and a feeling of sides-taking.
And this gets to a lot of what I don't like about indie these days. I'm not sure it's more popular than ever--don't think many indie bands are going gold or platinum, though I could be wrong--so much as everything else is significantly less popular. But I do still carry the punk sensibility that if lots of people like it, there must be something wrong with it. Indie is too easy. There's a song on the Decemberists' latest album that I quite like--"Calamity Song"--because I love R.E.M. rip-offs and nonsense lyrics and good melodies, and the song has all three.* But there's no fight in it--it's just another pop song with guitars. It presents no real challenges and congratulates you for recognizing the things it references (R.E.M., Infinite Jest). Somewhere in one of the old British rock magazines I used to read, there was a scathing reference to most of the big British albums of the late 90s as manufactured experiences: listen to Urban Hymns over coffee and cigarettes, put OK Computer on when driving home from work. Those are deservedly legendary albums, but the critique hits its mark in a way that indicates their weakness--they're a bit too easily assimilated.
So it's something of a blessing, I think, that the bands I most liked growing up, or the ones that make my sensibility ever so slightly different than your average former indie kid, are bands where something was obviously wrong with them: the Sex Pistols too retrograde in their politics, the New York Dolls too weird as 50s cross-dressing glam rockers, the MC5 too juvenile, Patti Smith too self-consciously cerebral (e.g. "Rock 'n' Roll N*****," a great song whose genesis makes complete sense and remains (unintentionally) offensive and a little embarrassing), Television too convinced that punk and the Grateful Dead could be united.
The three big Wire albums--Pink Flag, Chairs Missing and 154 fall into that category as well. A punk band that became a new wave band via some weird experimentation, they set the gold standard for guitar-pop songs that don't quite work like they should (not surprisingly, they were a huge influence on Guided By Voices). "The 15th" is just guitars and a synth line in a straightforward rhythm, except the hook and the guitars play ever-so-slightly with dissonance. But the poppiness of it is earned, in a sense, by the weirdness that precedes and follows. If only there were more of that.
Along the same lines: when getting ready for the big Halloween to-do this weekend, someone had their Pandora Halloween station on, and it played "Rock Lobster" by the B-52s. Not really a Halloween song. But gloriously weird and clearly a dance song, so I love it. And my love for it was shared by at least one of those present, which is always a nice feeling, though she did not believe me that the song was from 1979. Behold the weirdness of Athens, Georgia, way back when:
And sadly two minutes shorter than the album version.
No comments:
Post a Comment