a. indie hasn't totally abandoned ideas of "blackness" - just look at all the bands copping breakbeats and odd hip-hop flourishes. (i guess you could make a more tenuous argument that techno/electro fits here too, but who are we kidding?...techno hasn't been "black" - if it ever was - for 17 years.) the beta band, fer instance, are surely the late 90s version of, say, early XTC where the cod-reggae and soukous and etc etc are filtered through jittery whiteboy programming (in the psychic, not technical, sense) until they are bleached to a fine crisp. i think the feeling of indie abandoning "blackness" has more to do with the fact that there hasn't been a MOVEMENT - however obliquely linked - within white post-punk guitar music that was "appropriating" all these fancy, non-rock, "black" musics since about, oh, 1984. between 1978-1983 (best time for music ever?) you had: the contortions, the clash, pop group, pil, etc etc etfuckingcetera. what did the 90s give us: beck and rap-rock.

b. http://www.freakytrigger.co.uk/azerrad.html

(can you tell i'm avoiding an assignment?)

black music is accessible too, innit. the kind with rhythm. black music ======= stupid = accessible, so it doesn't work for all the stuff those guys were talking about about the privileging of information.....

popular culture + black music doesn't fit into the Middle-class criticism of bourgeoisie: "They don't think" ------ so get rid of that and we will play good, white, honest music and if you don't get it, you're stupid.

everything jess said is true. he is smart even though he types in lowercase letters.

------->>>> there are the indie rock guys like kid 606 and goldchains and cex and boombox 2000000 like that guy said who can sell goofy popular culture (((((do not take it seriously, u r revolutionaries who r not bad consumerists becuz u r buying popular culture from tigerbeat 6 lmao))))) i don't know what to say about them

the jack white "problem" is underdiscussed though: how much of indie rock's hands-off approach to modern black pop stems from the lyrical content? (not that it seemed to matter much in the past either...the pop group certainly didn't seem to want to rub you down the right way baby uh huh.)

hey, how does "soft like me" on the last saint etienne album fit in here? (he asks, only half joking.)

slightly less than those tracks on the last Hood album

On the other hand, indie kids want to listen to some hip hop, they don't want to be squares -- hence the market for indie rap, Def Jux, Kool Keith, Aceyalone, etc.

-- jess (dubplatestyl...), April 21st, 2003 6:37 PM." - HAHA, okay in Athens right now (or maybe not right now, last two years more like it) one of the big indiecrowd (initially at least, until the squares caught on) sensations was the Krush Girls, Dan from Great Lakes (E6) and Chris from the R.E.M. offices (I think he did the Reveal cover), wearing sunglasses and jumpsuits, DJing - not 'real DJing', which deeply offended Athens wouldbe turntablists (a good thing), but basically just wedding disc jockeying - LOTTA Bell Biv Devoe for instance - and while people might disparage it (and there were gripes amongst the indie set of 'djs supplanting real bands') it didn't change the fact that Krush Girls were REALLY successful, lines up the block (which you NEVER saw for Great Lakes, not even for Elf Power really), and people visibly enjoying themselves and dancing. It's died down somewhat now (again - the squares have caught on), but the response to the question 'why are Athens kids more enthusiastic about dancing to 'Poison' AGAIN instead of seeing my band' was 'it's the audience's fault ie. they're stupid' instead of 'it's our fault ie. we're boring/undanceable' (and I note undanceable because the one thing that supposedly united the original Athens bands - B-52s, Pylon, R.E.M., etc. - was that they were danceable, danceability was understood to be an essential).

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.

I wasn't dealing with more recent developments like Gold Chains et al, and the blackness question was a subset pretty much limited to a snap on Drag City ("spending a decade eliminating any and all African-American input") and the title of the paper, which the program director encouraged me to keep, though it became less relevant. (Meaning, Biggie could possibly have read as just the new model of youth badassness, and a different kind of popular to reject, more than representing any iteration of blackness. But it's a question--the historical moment is in there, somewhere.)

The movement I tracked was retreat. That these bands--Malkmus and Oldham being the representatives I chose because of time constraints--repeated the model of 20s UK modernism and put a hard ceiling on the number of fans they might have with distancing strategies (disdain, irony, impenetrable lyrics, laazy live shows, etc.). So, popular as in numbers and possible multipliers--keep the party unstarted. And then, second, the many manifestations of popular culture, including, but not limited to, danceable music, easily scanned lyrics, vigorous execution, etc.

And, probably unsuccessfully, I made an attempt to avoid "good" and "bad" as engines of investigation. I happen to like some of Malkmus's stuff but who cares--I still think he retreated from big, juicy world of popular culture. Don't like Oldham, and he, too, retreated from bigger, more open gestures. I wouldn't want to make too big a deal of the 80s bands engagements--signing to majors without having fucking anxiety attacks about it, covering pop tunes, working with artists outside yr peer group (SY & PE)--but it's still a significant difference between 80s and 90s even if it's small.

Sterling's answer, categorically, is on the right bus. Maybe the blip is in the wrong spot, and what felt like an energetic, fearless combination of impulses in the 80s was precisely NOT normative indie, but a deviation from a norm that Virigina Woolf established, or continued, when she snapped on James Joyce in 1922 for being "underbred and working class".

Gotta re-read this thread now.

Sterling, having reflected for a second: per your comment that indie and pop crossed paths for a moment, against indie's tendencies. Are you positing an indie aesthetic pre-80s? What would it be? I can guess, but I'd just eat up server space somewhere.

Re in the intellectualism meme--didn't indie, in the 90s, simultaneously reject the demands of popularity (give us something to move to and hum, at the very least, before you plug in yr idiosyncratic needs, Mr. Artist) AND reject larger, thornier ideas in favor of vague emotionalism, miserability, boo-hooism, etc? Like, I'm saying, retreat. And never ever forget that booming 90s economy might lurk beneath any number of paving stones. No need to come down in the street, with anybody, for any reason.

Pig Lib to thread.

It doesn't even have to be about rejection of the other - I'm sensing that some of you have a problem with white people writing music that appeals mainly to white people of the same class, as if that's a major crime against nature or something. Why is that not okay?

Why is Biggie speaking to/for black kids so different from Malkmus doing the same thing in his own way for his audience?

Some of you need to get a fucking grip. Get over your white guilt, or get over your petty fears about "ROCKISM."

Get over this idiotic feeling that every piece of art has to relate to a larger pop culture zeitgeist (I'm looking at you, Frere-Jones!), and that microcosms and subcultures are a good thing and most of them aren't for everybody. "Malkmus abandoned pop culture" - so fucking what? He's an adult, and an artist, and should do what he wants to and not try to please middlebrow music critics by approximating other more popular/blacker musicians.

I'm truly sorry that the world isn't neatly compartmentalized so that it would be easier for hack writers to write about it, but too bad. I'm also sorry that very positive empathy for other races and classes have left many of you with self-loathing white guilt, but you need to think things through and realize that you're only saying these knee-jerk things because the scope of your thinking is so narrow. You would think that people who claim to love music would realize that it's okay for there to be a lot of different music for a lot of different audiences, but most of you are clinging to these moronic narrow views of what music is. Wake the fuck up.

See, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Let's translate this: "How DARE people care about music that a) is no longer fashionable b) speaks to them c) is old??? Buy a Missy Elliot album, whitey!"

How dare people like what they like because they like it, you know? How dare someone have an invidual thought - didn't they get the memo that we're all going to feel the same about _____ this year?

Again: wake the fuck up.

This thread has made me think of the pop cultural manifestations of indie rock in the 90s -- how the mass media has dealt with a movement that's tried so hard to avoid it while simultaneously courting it. And I keep thinking about the "slacker" flicks: Reality Bites and the like. And they're totally devoid of blackness (did black people other than Gary Payton, Shawn Kemp and Jimi Hendrix's family live in Seattle in the 90s?)... I can't decide if this was a conscious reaction or if blackness just never enters into the equation. In weird monkey-brained TV logic, isn't Friends essentially a Gen X, slacker, indie sitcom? And has a black person EVER been on it?

All of this means jackshit that I can figure as of now, but of course this doesn't mean indie = racist (as Sterl so obviously pointed out), but it might mean that the stratification of music (indie, pop, whathaveyou) in the late 70s/early 80s (starting with punk/hardcore/hip-hop/disco/etc) firmed up the genre dividers to nearly insurmountable levels. (think about this: Jerry Lee Lewis once topped the Top 40, Country and R&B Billboard charts with the same song... There's absolutely ZERO chance that will ever happen again) And so everyone got more insular. Aside from rap-rock and the popification of contemporary country, where's the crossover these days? But yeah, it's worse in indie rock cuz folx is already paranoid about not getting too big, having the right kind of fans, their legacies and that kinda shit, so everyone's static and frozen in their own niche and not willing to take chances or make a move or why Superchunk has made the same album 205 times already.

Also, let's pretend that people of Asian and Latin descent do not exist, and aren't fans/musicians in the indie realm in significant numbers. It's a lot easier to make generalizations that way, and I don't want to step on anyone's toes here. I don't mean to rain on your "I got a B+ in a social theory class in college" parade.

Question: why does anyone have to embrace 'black music'? Should people feel similar obligations to embrace classical music, polka, medieval chants, avant garde electronic composition, or traditional Chinese music? Why is it so important for people to embrace contemporary black American culture other than a) you enjoy it or b) some misguided (and rather common) notions of authenticity re: race and class?

I don't deny race and class issues being involved with the shaping of social mores, but I'm certainly willing to give people the benefit of the doubt that they just don't want to hear some things, which is something I'm not getting from some of you. Is this about indie culture, pop culture, the plight of minorities in America, or is this about people you've been or have known that you no longer identify with? It seems like the latter to me.

I'm wondering whether this tendency of hip-hop elements to now surface in indie can partially be explained as a generational thing. If indie rockers weren't much interested in exploring hip-hop in the 80s and 90s, it was perhaps because it wasn't something they grew up with and thus felt no affinity towards. Indie-rock icons like Malkmus, Martsch, McCaughan, and Pollard are all at least 35 now and were already well out of college before hip-hop got mainstream. In junior high, when these guys were listening to Top 40 radio, they were listening to Cheap Trick. But Rjyan Kidwell (Cex) and Travis Morrison (Dismemberment Plan) and Ben Gibbard (Postal Service) are all young enough to have heard Bell Biv Devoe on their local Top 40 station. It just seems much more natural that people like this would be more driven to incorporate hip-hop and pop elements into indie than those grizzled elder statesmen.

here is a list of "white guitar-based post-punk acts" drawing from black popular music between the years of 1979-1985:

- the gang of four
- pil
- the pop group
- the delta 5
- the contortions
- anything on wax trax
- the associates
- the clash
- xtc
- 23 skidoo
- cabaret voltaire
- new order
- talking heads
- any two-tone band
- a certain ratio
- liquid liquid
- blondie
- scritti politti
- section 25
- pigbag and all pop group offshoots
- magazine
- heaven 17
- culture club

and these are only the most canonized.

here is a list in 2003:

????? who? john fucking spencer?

leaving aside your own obvious, tainting grudges against ilm, "hack writers", non-indie fans, whatever...could we stop trying to derail sasha's very tightly outlined question with dull rhetoricisms like "Should people feel similar obligations to embrace classical music, polka, medieval chants, avant garde electronic composition, or traditional Chinese music?" no one has said that indie rock HAS to embrace black (or otherwise) popular music. but we're a bit curious as to why it decided it wanted to STOP embracing black (or otherwise) popular music throughout the course of the 80s and into the 90s. which, yeah, i guess could be described as "what happened to this culture that i used to identify with but now don't" for people like sasha but certainly not for people like me or you who are under 30. the notion of "class and authenticity" you bring up is a red herring because...why? you feel attacked in your heritage industry?

I disagree with this. I think it will happen, though the crossover will more likely come from the country (or, more specifically, the 'pop-country') side of the fence than it will from the r&b or rock side of the fence, and it may spread as a series of different mixes of one song (which is maybe cheating, I don't know). But is it really inconceivable that Shania Twain, say, could cross over to an r&b format AND a rock one too? (Neptunes to thread?) Also, I don't think Jerry Lee's crossover (I'd be curious to know what song it is--"You Win Again"?) was the last or even necessarily the most startling of this sort of crossover, though granted, bridging the country-r&b thing is perhaps the truest test of all far as crossover goes. I mean, I was going to bring up INXS and George Michael in the '80s, both of whom made major dents in a number of different formats (unlike Prince and Michael Jackson who should've but were denied) and crossed the black/white divide quite mightily if I recall, though maybe not with one specific track that went buzz on different charts all at once. And yeah, neither hit the country charts, though I bet today the song "Faith" WOULD. (I realize this thread is about indie and my comment is off-track. Sorry, carry on, etc.)

I have no grudge against non-indie fans at all, Jess. I just have a problem with people who are so willing to make these grand pronouncements about it, which you're definitely guilty of doing. The implication in most of these posts, and certainly in the one where you outline a canon is that there is something wrong with musicians/fans for not being extremely interested/indebted to black artists. I don't think anyone made a concious decision to stop embracing black music, and I really don't think 'indie' is nearly as monolithic as you're making it out to be.

Again: why is it so important for white indie artists to embrace black culture/pop music in the first place? Why can't they have their own thing?

If there was a kind of elitist white intellectual conservatism to white-boy indie in the '90s, there was a different kind of mainstream-bougie conservatism to a lot of mainstream hip hop/R&B. The mutual lack of interest is hardly surprising. And the indie-kid championing of Kool Keith, Black Star, etc., makes perfect sense in that context -- a recognition of a shared rejection for the dominant modes and themes (or, ahem, "narratives").

Part of the problem here is whether the question is about indie being white (in sensibility as well as demographics) or about indie being un-pop (which is a separate issue). And it seems to me, btw, that the White Stripes represent a nice challenge on all fronts -- their music is shot full of "black" influences, but in a strictly pre-disco sense; it is also pop in both word and deed (in the top 10 last time I looked), but uncompromisingly indie at the same time ("uncompromising" meaning they still sound pretty much the same as they did before -- no Butch Vig makeover). And of course, their poppishness and popularity is rapidly disqualifying them for "real" indie acceptance.

I'm left chewing on the whole idea of authenticity and, on the meta-level, how it is appealed to in 99% of music criticism ("Jack White captures the real soul of rock & roll." "Gutter garage is the real thing." etc. etc.) I'm inclined to not accept it at face value, which I think jives with the critique of indie rock because the problem is that the musicians were TOO concerned with their authenticity, or more importantly their lack of therein.

My problem is that authenticity assumes some sort of idealized notion of what REAL ROCK N' ROLL (or whatever genre you're talking about) is, and tends to mystify the past while poo-poo'ing the present (unless something in the present captures that REAL blah blah blah). It's slippery though.... because what I love most about music is how it's all part of a particular stream and nothing exists in a vacuum. So maybe I can accept awareness but not authenticity as a grounds for criticism? Meh. I've just painted myself into a corner.

Matthew's sub-answer might also be read as: This is about social grouping, about people not feeling affinities any more (I am not getting the quote right but this university keyboard is wack), which is a different model of musical movement. That people react to each other socially, and music is the way they do it. This sure doesn't get enough airtime, probably because it's impossible to suss out unless you do tons of interviews or know people, but likely in many cases. "Oh, fucking Bobbo just did a dub track. Wanker. Let's do that country idea before he does." Plain old competition. Hell, eclecticism is the oldest "strength" in the book. Who doesn't know a musician with 7000 different kinds of records? Who are these straw men, these narrow-minded people who get mooted in arguments? Has anyone met somebdoy who only has 999 and Stranglers records?

kids grew up on r&b and hip-hop more than ever. electronica happened and happened big. the dj is king. the rapper is king. suddenly kids who really are authentically on hip-hop are coming up regardless of their race....

they get into their late teens, start checking out way more music, finally get up and get out... some of them may check out some indier stuff... and punk... and flesh it out... but inside, it's hip-hop that's what.

and so you get har mar superstar and gold chains and on a much larger level...nu metal...(a total page taker from nyc hardcore nearly a decade ago... can i get some biohazard love?) biohazard and it's ilk were the minority back in the 90's... but wait until kids who were born in the mid and late 80's come up....

and that's what we have now...

the underground has a lot more beats cause 3 year olds shook their booty to salt n pepa not the bay city rollers....

i have no idea what i'm talking about...
m.

and actually i think 311 is a perfect example. anything championed by grand royal might be more to the point, tho. some things are just viewed through shit colored glasses.

The problem is that indie has held onto this exclusion-of-black-input like it's some sort of code of ethics, resulting in either a) something very close to heavy meal (hardcore, grunge) or b) rock 'n' roll pointlessly devoid of rhthmic information (garage revival, alt-country). Even in the 80s, bands like the English Beat or New Order seemd kind of exceptional, rather than widely influential. (For that matter, I can remember boneheads at the time deriding Remain-in-Light-era Talking Heads for selling out.) The black-exclutionary rule worked brilliantly once but was obviously bucking the rest of the century (musical miscegenation) and turned into it's own dead-end, its own catechism quite a while ago.

Mashups = return of the repressed.

http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/record-reviews/g/gravy-train/hello-doctor.shtml

If only it didn't make me think of Survivor.

m.

[Also Arch I'm tempted to post anonymously to admit this but: I've actually always had a soft spot for 311. They seem like pleasant kids.]

Okay, but do you want to create music along the lines of theirs? (anonymous posts in the affirmative accepted--no, encouraged--if you can explain why).

Yeah, but why they won still makes for interesting conversation.

Thank you thank you Kerry. This is totally the greatest revision that went on post-Nirvana: how many untold thousands of punk-funk, goth, reggae, wimpy-synth, Brit-jangle, industrial-soul, and folk bands got cut loose from the accepted history of college radio in 1991? The biggest casualties were the M.O.R. rock bands, all of a sudden resurrected as "bland pop" in the form of Third Eye Blind or whomever: it's this dirty little indie secret that as of 1988 and even a way after that, those bands would have been all over college radio, just like Del Amitri, Ghost of an American Airman, and Trip Shakespeare -- later to feed into "bland pop" Semisonic -- were. And all the variety got cut loose. On the college radio station I was listening to at the time, Nirvana almost single-handedly wiped out Erasure, Marshall Crenshaw, 10,000 Maniacs, the Pet Shop Boys, Black Uhuru, Fishbone, and plenty of the other stuff that lent this great all-over-the-map urgency to what I then thought of as "alternative."

For the record, I've always thought "Held" by Smog to be a great example of an "undanceable" "indie" musician's stab at a "danceable" song.

shouldn't some discussion concerning the 'influence' of the (now about 5 year old i guess) file-sharing revolution intersect with q's about sub-cultures and (the near-impossibility of maintaining) genre fanaticism in 03? 'sampling' music and modes of fandom has never been easier - maybe the humanist in me hopes that the reaction of now-marginal "white kids with angular guitars/laptops" culture to being allowed to find out how they get on with the Other in safety of the same bedroom they compose their songs from would be JOY, not increased insularity. in other words, i think, yeah, things are getting better - i think there's a real possibility of p2p filesharing(/the internet in general) acting as the rosetta stone to hiphop's codes upon codes.

another thought: the writing around the (few? maybe not really) acts eager to eat up music from non-proscribed sources seems to place a lot of emphasis on 'getting it right'. any indie-centric music eager to nibble from the neptunes (majesticons?) is going to start out sounding a little clumsy - i'm not sure that clumsiness is something we should be trying to avoid. surely the eagerness with which many people toss the rappropriation of cex, har-mar [who i haven't heard so..] etc into the 'parody'/borderline-racist 'point-and-laugh' bin while applauding how roll deep crew'll rub shoulders with mike skinner says something (something worth discussing) about race relations in US as opposed to elsewhere?

Anyway, if you look at it beatwise, I'm not sure there isn't more continuity from the '80s to the '90s than discontinuity. American hardcore and alt-rock didn't have much swing except in the most abstract sense. Steve Shelley and Grant Hart, for example, are both great drummers in their own way, but there's not a lot of funk in their trunks. The Minutemen played around with jazz, but in a "cerebral" post-bop sense.

And yeah, you can dance to anything if you like it enough -- the difference is between music that identifies itself as dance music, advertises itself as such, and music that doesn't. Not much post-1980 Amerindie has really identified itself as music for dancing. Right, there was Fishbone, but the very fact that Fishbone was the de facto black band of choice for '80s college rockers tells you how relatively isolated a phenomenon they were.

is the difference that, to indiecentrics, hip hop is the other in america, while dance is the other in britain. and that techno/house/jungle clubs are not seen as exclusionary or intimidating as hip hop clubs? inclusivity and all that (though this is not necessarily the case?). but yet the state of indie music in britain is possibly even more parlous than that in america?

(erm, also, surely stereolab are a danceable indie band of the last 10 years, but again not in an american way i guess)

lowercase: c or d? easier!

free jazz is a thorny one. the thumbnail theory repeated by musicians and club owners is: free jazz = black people on stage and white people in the audience. true or not? discuss.

Not true, jess. There's plenty of "firey black nationalist" free jazz recs that Thurston's endorsed, for better or for worse. And New York Art Quartet has played with SY, y'know, the group with the man that embodies "firey black nationalist" for most people (at least in New Jersey): Amiri Baraka.

SFJ, hear hear on Minutemen. I personally can't understand why they would be classified as "non-dance." You can wiggle to that shit!

But then again, a lot of the stuff being classified on here as "non-dance" doesn't feel that way to me. I dance to it, but then again maybe I'm the exception to the rule.

from: http://www.pataphysics-lab.com/journal/archives/002146.html

rewind 10 back to 1993... spin sampler "shit this 4"... er..."spin this 4"...how has spin changed? most of these bands fell off the face of the earth. see:

a tracklisting:

Connells - Slackjawed

generic indie rock. hooky to a degree. bland.

Cords - Eat Your Heart Out

reminds me quicksand a lot. that nyc hardcore sound. loud. angry.

KMFDM - A Drug Against War

hehe... industrial hadn't fully OD'ed yet. nice noodly guitar samples. very hessian and i find that pretty funny now.

Jester - I Remember The Night

a weird mix of hip-hop, industrial, and big guitars. it's like proto nu metal. samples of horns ringing out.

Def Threat - Baby Bubba

a completely awesome hip-hop song. samples some classic soul... bob and earl perhaps? why this song didn't blow up is hard to fathom. amazing how well some hip-hop ages.

Psykosonik - Silicon Jesus

trancy hardcore house... of course at the time it probably more fit in with wax trax scene. 808 is all over. boring, yet bumping drum machine. depeche mode meets ministry feeling vocal accompaniment. again, funny.

90 North - Arkman

there's an element of this that's really good heartfelt indierock. the sound isn't the kind of thing you hear much these days. i like his voice a lot. the chorusy parts are sucky jangle groove though. (see: spin doctors)

Mazzy Star - Fade Into You

of course, a classic tune that hit. a beautifully moody western ballad.

Verve - Slide Away

verve... another band that would be. this is a lot more psychedelic. it's on that post stone roses, mbv, ride kick. walls of noise. but more accessible and poppy. one of the more tolerable tracks on this cd. whistful and explosive.

My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult - Delicate Terror

thrill kill was breaking out into a more sample dance thing. the guitar is cliche. distorted vox. seinfeld poppy bass. deviant in a very commercially viable way. industrial for gen x yuppies.

Plan B - Life's A Beat

groovy dance stuff. distorted vox lure and lurch. very world soul. close to painful. something played during the credits of a bad hollywood movie.

Boneclub - Native Son

hard rock .... kid rock with no so much hip-hop?

Engines Of Aggression - Illusion Is Real

ministry jr. same drum machine on overload. same political samples. same distorted voice. velveeta outrage.

Zappa's Universe - Jazz Discharge Party Hats

funny shit. a story about wearing the panties of some stuck up annoying college girls. song meanders in a nice formless way with zappa's story. mildy amusing.

Gavin Bryars with Tom Waits - Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet

a great tune... tom waits on a gospel tip. quite artsy to a tee.

The Cranes - Jewel

classic, beautiful folk. childlike vocals that elevate the tune. the cranes didn't exactly disappear. a little wash of guitar here and there to add to the whistle.

also...

jessefox,

I mean, name an indie band of the last 10 years with a great rhythm section

what? are you crazy?

just a few bigger names... stereolab, tortoise, shellac, june of 44/shipping news/etc, the make up, fugazi...

am i misunderstanding your intention?
m.

Tuff Titty Rap [Thurston]

we've been asked to participate
in a Ma-donna rocker that can reactivate
we're ciccone youth from new york city
get the pizza connection cos it's a tuff titty

now I know my rhyme ain't bustin' no time
cos my rap be crying like a homeboy sigh
his name's mike watt, he's gonna get cut
some knuckle head defines to the group on new alliance

fuck yeah, fuck yea

[end lyrics]

I'm not sure how they could not see it as "black". They certainly are quite vocal about their admiration for the black artists in this vein, cf. Thurston's essay on his favorite free jazz albums, posted somewhere on the Interweb. Thurston has also done numerous collaborations with black free jazz musicians. Yes, it's true that he doesn't espouse black nationalist politics, at least to my knowledge, but wouldn't it be a bit inappropriate if he did?

the thumbnail theory repeated by musicians and club owners is: free jazz = black people on stage and white people in the audience. true or not? discuss

At most free jazz concerts I've been to there is usually a mix of black and white people in the audience.

free jazz != free improv, which certainly seems to be where a large number of indie bands are taking their inspiration (the chicago duo-trio-orchestra axis notwithstanding) from, whether initially inspired by thurston's curatorship or not. (and c'mon...let's not try and deny the influence the guy's name dropping ability has had in bringing "marginalized" music to the attention of the indie massive.) free improv - with it's imagined radical "full stop" break with jazz history - is much more conducive to making your instruments make all kindsa funny noises and tossing structure out the window, while not having to wrestle with the "burden" of over a century of jazz history. (ironic that the free improv guys are keenly aware of their relation to "jazz proper" at all times, whether antagonistic or not.) the macro-view of free jazz as a "black thing (you wouldn't understand?)" - as proposed by something like as serious as your life - goes beyond the rhetoric into the way the musicians just lived as black people, so yeah that was a bit of a paper tiger. you certainly don't hear sonic youth - or many or most indie bands - referencing old spirituals or new orleans funeral marches in their music.

and, for the last time "rhythm section" != derived from a funk base!

But I remember Q101 (Chicago's "modern rock" station) when it first started broadcasting in 1992: You had R.E.M., 10,000 Maniacs, Suzanne Vega, and assorted British stuff like The Cure or Eugenius or Love Spit Love. The best example I know of "rewriting the alt-rock canon" is Q101's two broadcasts of the "Top 500 Alternative Songs of All Time" -- the first played at year-end 1996 and the second at year-end 1999. The 1996 version included loads of new-wave like B-52s and even INXS: in three short years, most of the poppier 80's stuff had been discarded in favor of more Smashing Pumpkins, more Pearl Jam, and a half-dozen Metallica (!!) songs (none of which appeared on the first list).

C'mon, Matos, that's still way too flip. Is it really so inconceivable that indie rockers might actually find something exciting in the radical vision of freedom that free jazz posits? Is there really no substance in free jazz that a musician could latch onto, or does it have to be a matter of surface and appearances?

Is the Moore-and-like-minds' injection of more chaotic free "whatever" into indie rock the reason so many retreated back towards bland Beach Boys-isms?

I dunno, but why not ask?

free jazz & free improv = abstract expressionism
"free" indie = neo-geo

hstencil that's why i made a point to distinguish that the free improv guys are keenly aware of their position to free jazz - or jazz in general - whereas the indie guys seem to have inherited derek bailey's (among others) ideas as a "get out of jail free" card.

stencil you've turned into chuck eddy! (well, i doubt chuck would admit to listening to spiderland.)

That's the retreat, so far as I'm concerned, and it's everything to do with indie, post-Nirvana, being "cool," and therefore needing protection; if you were listening to this stuff in the late 80s, most people probably thought you were a freak or queer anyway, so you could just run with whatever sounded fun without having to draw and defend ever-shifting lines between yourself and the listening-bourgeoisie. I tried to inject something about this onto Pitchfork once, and wound up getting a slightly defensive reaction from a few people: for the singles blog I did "Everyday is Halloween" -- starting with "I'm beginning to think indie kids aren't getting beaten and mocked enough these days" and ending with "Young indie fans of today: if you still have room to look down your noses at people, you might not have much to be looking down on them for."

I can't say I'm entirely happy with the way that stuff like NYC electro has resurrected the 80s-alt aesthetic (see Vice magazine), but as a music-listening ethos I think it's a much more desirable one than the current indie quagmire: all it really says is "be interesting, look interesting, act interesting, and have fun." (Note how even the most "depressed" of 80s British alt-loved acts still have so much camp and fun wrapped up in them.) I want want want that back, and while so far electro's thrown up quite a bit of it -- my two favorites of last year, Adult. and Tok Tok vs. Soffy O, deliver exactly this on a grand grand level -- there needs to be more.

;-)

A term of praise!

indie today does exist in a much more comfortably cool hip underground state.

or does it seem like that to me because i've been around and it's not this big, weird thing anymore? to be perhaps crude, has my cherry been popped?

m.

(The sense I got from the 80s-alt types I liked, by the way, was that there was no canon -- you were supposed to have heard Nevermind the Bollocks, of course, and probably some Joy Division and Bauhaus, but everything was thought of as largely contemporary, 77-87 all as this big lump. And the goal seemed to be the "slanting" thing I love so much -- to cast around this wide range and just pick out everything that seemed interesting, some folkies here, some arty pop here, some industrial grind there...)

See, I realize I'm doing my own revision here, cutting out the subgroups -- American rockers, hardcore, punks -- who were a million times more reactionary than "highbrow" indie is today. But I don't think that was the animating spirit of a lot of the listeners, precisely because that subgroup got blended in with so many others into this "college radio" phenomenon: the Communards were still likely to play on your radio station, and had to be dealt with as such.

As for jess: sterl's death-of-history style idea that somehow indie wasn't formed and formulated outta post-punk is missing my point. Sure contempo-indie draws on post-punk but could you have said that three years ago when trembling blue starts was the vogue, or hell ten years ago when it was SST post-punk and not british-angular which was the vogue or etc? indie today CLAIMS the postpunk heritage but it only rediscovered it for the most part like two years ago.

And plenty of other things have just as legit a claim if not more to the same heritage, not least certain types of techno, post-scritti "blue eyed soul", ice cube, 20 fingers, and motherfucking U2.

I mean I just keep getting the feeling that you've "discovered" this marvelous new explanation for the state of indie and that it's scientific name is "The Placebo Syndrome" y'know?

SFJ: Sterling, having reflected for a second: per your comment that indie and pop crossed paths for a moment, against indie's tendencies. Are you positing an indie aesthetic pre-80s? What would it be? I can guess, but I'd just eat up server space somewhere.

I wasn't born pre-80s so I dunno how clued in I can be here, and certainly I wouldn't want to call it an "indie" aesthetic so much as the aesthetic of the historical equiv of the "indie" demographic. Certainly yet earlier the "folkie" revival gets cited in this regard often and for good cause. Flip answer: anything not mentioned in Scott Woods' and Phil Delillo's "I Wanna Be Sedated".

What's interesting to me (although only to a point) about this thread is how it shows the pendulum swinging back and forth, if you will. That is, I don't see some of the more indie-phobic stuff on this thread as being necessarily "reactionary" or due to "the misguided youth" or anything, but it does seem pretty akin to that. So if "indie" is getting its just desserts, maybe that's some sorta poetic justice or something, I dunno. But neither perspective seems all that "accurate," then again accuracy ain't the name of the game.

I'm confused.

I agree with what you're saying nabisco and that is what in a lot of ways drove me away from 'indie' - it became a lot less inclusive and a lot more humorless and I could not muster enoogh enthusiasm to follow developments. (leaving me now pretty clueless about a lot of ppl who get discussed on thread like this)

The cherry-popping thing definitely has some validity: I can certainly imagine a kid coming across "indie" in the Pitchfork sense today and saying "wow, look at all of these different things" -- power-pop, IDM, art-rock, blah blah -- except I think all of these lines now share a certain sense of "seriousness" and a suspicion of accessibility that wasn't there as much in the past. But there's definitely some truth to this, no doubt whatsoever.

I mean, this is part of why I'm screen out the fans of American rock in my approach to this, because they were the ones most likely to have the sort of suspicious/reactionary approach to things that we see in indie today. Of course they are, because their sorts of bands -- grotty American bands -- were the ones that launched up into popular alterna-rock! It was their ethos that "won," history written by the victor (Azzerad)! So it's the worst (and best) bits of their ethos that are magnified now for us to poke at!

And in the modern sense they were the "indiest" of the period, the punks especially. When I was a 13-year-old Morrissey fan I remember this kid Greg, who dressed pretty much exclusively in Fugazi and Mudhoney t-shirts, asking my friend and I what kind of stuff we liked: we said indie / he said "haha so you two listen to Blake Babies all the time, or something?" / we said "who are Blake Babies?" / he laughed. That's modern indie. (NB Greg was a great guy and we were later good friends.)

Or check out Pitchfork's review of I think the Longwave record, which starts off with this long story about the reviewer getting into the Ocean Blue, playing it for some older person who also likes the Smiths, and receiving a patient explanation of why the Ocean Blue are lightweight unserious floofy junk. And the reviewer, despite having originally liked the Ocean Blue, says "I soon came to see what he meant!" That is modern indie ethos right there, and yeah, in the 80s you certainly got it from plenty of people. But the Ocean Blue were great; why should the gatekeeper types strangle that?

Ergo,
band on tiny independant label but sounds like NSync == "indie"
band on megalocoporate major label but sounds like Velvet Underground == "Indie"

or at least, thats how I deal with it.

I mean, if you want to say that the "indie" of the 80s -- SST, Touch and Go, Boston stuff -- is the true predecessor of current-day indie, and that this major-label post-new-wave stuff has nothing to do with that (college radio and 120 Minutes notwithstanding), then the alternative is to say that the post-new-wave spirit I like so much just died, pushed out of the light by the explosion of "indie" styled alt-rock.

Anyway, sorry, I do want to admit that my take on 80s underground stuff is way influenced by the fact that I was really young at the time and unsuspicious of major labels and perfectly content with "fluffy" things and all of that: I have no doubt that there were loads of people in their twenties sitting around at that point and saying 120 Minutes was stupid and filled with bland unserious poppy major-label crap and "faggy" British synth bands and whatever, "screw Depeche Mode and give me more Replacements and Dinosaur Jr.," etc. I just think that attitude was way easier to work with before the alt-rock boom turned it into the indie attitude. That victory wiped out a lot of other, broader ways of approaching non-mainstream music in general. As did the gradual segmentation of underground genres into their own niches, once things like the internet created a context where you didn't just have to throw your unmarketable band onto the common college-radio pile and hope for the best. I just like a particular listener-ethos that particular era created, and I think it'd be a really good corrective to certain things I perceive as problems with indie thought at present.

And personally, I don't blame Azerrad for this inaccurate portrayal of post-punk - far from it. When I said "victors", I meant a specific type of indie rock follower (usually not a musician) who only liked a certain type of band because they were afraid of creativity or "bullshit". I think I heard the words "bullshit" and "faggy" more than anything back then. There was a certain element that suffered from Europhobia, fear of electronics etc.

I wonder what role economics plays in all of this. Seems to me that it was easier and cheaper to take your chances back then.

You must've been reading a lot of Joe Carducci, then.

Seriously tho, it's kind of funny to me that the stuff that I got ridiculed for liking way back when in 1988 or something (after it was done!) like Black Flag and whatnot is the NOW! equivalent of the stuff prolly a lot of us back then (even goofy 12 year-olds like myself) thought it was replacing!

Also, for me, my disappointment with Azerrad's book isn't so much any conclusions he tries to draw as much as it didn't tell me much that I didn't already know. But I went into it knowing that, I think. I'd still rather read Our Band Could Be Your Life than a lot of the business text crap I have to read for work.

Putting skin colour on music is just pathetic. There is no other difference than the different between two types of music:

1. Good music:
Melody, harmony, complexity, precomposed, singer/songwriter-values, bands rather than solo artists, music as a value in itself, sophistication, head music, , active listening rather than dancing, artists controlling their music one hundred per cent

2. Bad music
rhythm, groove, improvisation, "body and sex" rather than strick head music, lack of melodic and harmonic qualities, solo artists rather than bands, professional songwriters delivering material to acts that are only performing other people's music, DJing, dancing rather than active listening, emphasis on image and looks, cover versions

Everybody who makes music - regardless of skin colour - should always stay in category 1 and stay away from category 2

(poops, is this a bad time to ask which one of us is making you yawn?)

These lists tell me more about the age of Pfork writers than anything. The 80s is what they listened to when growing up - the 90s is what they were "socialized" into.

The 80s list is really commercial ; the 90s one is "consensus" indie.

What's so terrible about Beck? Aside from Sea Change?

Jess had a good point about--I am paraphrasing--Jimmy Cliff as novel black music for white listeners back in the day vs. Cash Money as same for now. The relative distance between genres and populations (and sheer amount of music, radio outlets. etc.) certainly suggests that racism is not the door to go through to figure out how people end up consuming music. That is, empirical and economic and logistical factors are going to obtain long before some kid actually gets to the point of thinking "50 Cent! How black!" If anyone actually does think anything like that.

Jess/Rapture OTM.

Dieter’s terms may be overdetermined but it certainly is a relevant trope, guys dismissing Backstreet because they're "feminine". Don't know that indie rock does the distancing more than anyone else, but guys, qua guys, in some larger aggregate? Sure.

Who has a bee stripe sweater?

Sterling: When you say that indie has always been in a state of "ever-present flight from whatever's popular in a fairly hip-hop dominated landscape,” does that refer to right now, the last few years, or a longer period?

Nitsuh on a roll with point a) in the “not 20,000 words” post.

Mr. Diamond: As an American, you are free to start the “Ui sucked ass” thread. If you have a question relevant to this thread, go ahead and ask it.

Re The Geir: would this be a kosher moment to do that swans thing?

Ah nabisco, if you didn't read Azerrad's book because of your dislike, how are ya any different from "indie" kids disdaining hip-hop?

I really wanted to skip the Beat Happening chapter, btw.

As long as people keep repeating that irrelevant argument about skin colour, then I will continue to argue against them.

STOP PUTTING SKIN COLOUR ON MUSIC!

The part where it's all lax and woozy and I can never remember any of it.

Stencil: I'm happy to provide information if I can but I'm not sure what the question is, and (boilerplate alert) post-rock was something laid at our feet that we never picked up. Any good critic would say, probably rightly, "Tough shit--history will record you as post-rock." Such is life.

"Back when music was notated, the composer had full control over the product anyway" = FALSE

Apologies for poor grammar. The "ever-present flight from whatever's popular" is the long period thang and the "fairly hip-hop dominated landscape" is the past few years.

Why the need to posit that "indie rock's reject[ed] African-American musical information" when you were in a indie rock band that didn't do so, at a time when there were enough like-minded bands around to be branded (incorrectly, perhaps) a "movement?"

The other question would be "What the hell did Drag City ever do to you?"

hate to break it to ya, Geir, but Europeans didn't invent music.

Exactly. It has everything to do with psychosis.

I mean, I can think of more genres than just those!

Geir's point is
"I love music, and music is European. Music was invented in Ancient Greece. What was before that wasn't called "music" by those who created it, and thus it wasn't music"

i was wondering while reading all the posts above, how our take on contemporary indie vs. the indie of our adolescence/childhood might be revised if we were to have input from someone who is a teenager right now. or if we were perhaps more attuned to what "indie" teenagers might be listening to and how they feel about it--both on its own and in relation to the other musics available to them. i know we've had people testify to what's playing in malls, record stores, etc. but for obvious reasons not anything much more definitive than that. the racial aspects of this dynamic seem obvious to me, but as for the exclusory nature of contemporary indie, i'm not sure this is a *fact* so much as it is a perception colored by our own adult jaundice. i may be wrong in this as well, but it'd be nice if we could reconstruct the world of a indie teenager ca. 2003 with more confidence. alas.

the racial dynamics of contemporary vs. 70s/80s indie seem obvious to me (that is, a kind of retreat from engagement with contemporary black music without the shielf of irony) but as for the supposedly exclusory nature of contemporary indie as it is understood by people just forming their tastes and places in the listening universe, i'm not as confident.

(obThread, isn't this thread really just "Indie Guilt C/D" rephrased as "Indie Guilt: Classic or CLASSIC!!!" meanin' no disrespect SF-J, mainly responding to the unique degree of bile that seems to emerge whenever the question of indie rock is raised)

This indie-people-running-from-hip-hop thing is really interesting to me. It must be a younger generation thing, and maybe that explains why I don't read Pfork, because whatever "indie" was doing for me was increasingly replaced by lots of non-"indie" styles, esp. hip-hop.

If I was born in West Africa I would probably be a victim of the misconception that those traditions of making sounds like dancing had anything to do with music. Which it didn't, because if it did, then African culture would have had two different words for dancing and music even before imperialism.

Ah nabisco, if you didn't read Azerrad's book because of your dislike, how are ya any different from "indie" kids disdaining hip-hop?

I guess I don't really get this? I mean, I don't get how it works as an analogy, leave alone that I don't think I've ever really claimed to be any different from indie kids who don't like hip-hop: I don't listen to very much hip-hop at all! I just remember thinking hey, that sounds like a cool book -- and then I looked at the bands it covered, and they were mostly bands I didn't like, so I didn't read it. (???) If your point is something like "why beat up on indie kids for ignoring hip-hop when you wouldn't beat up on hip-hop kids for ignoring indie," well, point it at someone else, I tend to agree with you on that one. Sterling and Kerry could verify: my shelves are like 98% shit-that-sounds-like-Stereolab, I have no room or inclination to beat up on indie.

Except as it is you were born in Europe and are a victim of different misconceptions, which somehow the vast majority of Europeans escaped.

By the way, re: a teenage indie fan circa 2003, I can give you a couple versions of it -- in a few minutes.

Swoon!

I think indie bands knew that they couldn't do hip-hop without seeming condescending, and probably couldn't do it well at all; I think indie fans listen to and like hip-hop but reverted to the music they felt 'comfortable' boosting; I think this is the major argument against 'indie' rock.* Hell, hip-hop's been sampling more Geir-centric white-guy prog-melodic shit than indie's been imitating for 20 years.

*maybe indie hip-hop as well

And Darnielle is likely right--no dis taken. Can we skip the Geirness? Or maybe start an equally proiftable thread, like, Is torture moral? Or, Is lead heavier than cheese?

can i get a short bit on the why and/or the how?

not necessarily agreeing or disagreeing... just curious.
m.

Me too, by the looks of it. No biggie.(that was not a reference to the late, overweight rapper)

Not necessarily, but it would be smelly, considering there have been black people within most genres. Dunno if there were any black prog musicians (but there probably were, and anyway, several Miles Davis albums of the 60s/70s were pretty close to prog). There definitely have been black rock acts, such as Lenny Kravitz, Living Colour and Jimi Hendrix. There was Arthur Lee of Love doing 60s San Francisco psychedelia, there was even the drummer in Britpop band Ocean Colour Scene. There was an easy listening singer (Nat King Cole) Plus several pure melodic pop acts, such as Tasmin Archer, Seal, and also those MOR oriented ones like Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston. Stevie Wonder also did a lot of stuff during his 70s heyday that (particularly several of the ballads) was clearly more "white" than "black" musically.

The most obvious rascists, however, would be those who love RATM, Beastie Boys, Eminem and Vanilla Ice while they dislike all black hip-hop acts.

Anyway, Sasha - I think you're reading me pretty well, especially given that I was pretty angry/pressed for time when I wrote what I did in this thread this morning and didn't give it as much thought as I wish I had. The questions of this thread have been running through my head all day long though, which has been a good thing.

Re: . Where else would you get "Why can't they have their own thing?" How do we know it's *their* thing? Either these cultures are distinct or they're not. They can't have their *own* thing if we're also asserting that indie is not monolithic.

Yeah, that's the problem, isn't it? It's monolithic and not all, it's different but exactly the same as everything else. I think this is just too complex to explain away without seriously disrespecting genres, artists, races, and millions of individuals who have made/are making decisions based on a lot of different things. It's a brilliant question which is a very interesting thing to think about and consider in smaller conversations, but I'm afraid that any attempts at answering the question will be clumsy and reductive. Music is so huge, I don't think any of us should presume to understand or fully comprehend it all.

SFJ, describing the Drag City catalog as "arid, Modernist whiteboy shit" is ultra-depressing to me. Given that one of the few indie labels that doesn't release "records...chosen through a 'no blues,' 'no jazz,' 'no funk' filter" is their crosstown colleagues Thrill Jockey, and everyone bitches about them, what I think we have here is a case of severe psychological conflict....yadda yadda

I didn't say anything about Thrill Jockey, for starters. And there's no "severe psychological conflict"--just different language to describe different things. I sensed a change in behavior in musicians, from the vantage point of my ripe old age, is all. I don't, de jure, want Bardo Pond to work with Juvenile, though perhaps I do get a twinge of essentialist hope that it would be nice if they wanted to. Maybe I just play rough with my friends, some of whom I call wack whiteboy Modernists, and they call me Robbie Nevil right back and we all go home happily and watch Space Ghost.

For the 42nd time--the mapping idea wasn't about BAD and GOOD. Black != good, and white != bad, though purple does = fly. Examples: Red Krayola, whiter than Peruvian flake, are often amazing. Large Professor's First Class, a bonafide black genius! on an indie label! And it's totally boring. And so on. Liz Phair, deeply unindebted to the African-American musical continuum = kick-ass songwriter, the "now" aside. Donnie, totally and completely black guy = totally and completely derivative faux Hathaway of staggering boringness. Smog, less boring than J. Lo, more boring than Clipse. What a wonderful world!

Sidebar: Bach is dope.

The discussion seems mostly to have looked at this from one direction--from the indie-rock perspective--but would it not be instructive to turn the question around, too? Though I agree with the premise that indie rockers in the '90s were "worried about looking assed-out and detaching their engines from black music so as to not get it 'wrong'" (the evidence is certainly in the--lack of--grooves), is it off-base to suggest that at least part of the reason is because hip-hop and various dance musics in the '90s (house and jungle) also by and large didn't have the same open-door policy towards rock and (primarily white) rockers that early hip-hop and late disco did? I'm not suggesting a reverse racism or anything like that, merely suggesting that it wasn't only '90s indie rock that was different from the '79-83 model that gets held up a lot around here. I'm sure lots of indie kids in the '90s loved the Wu Tang Clan, for instance, but it was something they maybe felt they had to love from a distance (which I'd argue was not nearly so much the case with punks digging Grandmaster Flash in '81) (and I *know* that Flash got booed off stage at a Clash gig, etc.). Er, help?

And hey, I hear some grooves in early Red Krayola, as I do in a lot of psych stuff. Hell, I was just listening to Can's Tago Mago on the way home, and if someone wants to argue that the music on it isn't funky even though it was made by a buncha Germans and a Japanese guy, they can kiss my white ass.

sorry sasha.

Amateurist, count the hours, the few, the tiny hours remaining, and look out the window--SEE THOSE WINGS OF FIRE? THE JAWS OF DEADLY RESOLVE? THE GORGON HAS COME FOR THEE AND THINE...

Oh, wait, I should call the gorgon back. Sorry, Am.

American Cream Team in touchy feely racial untiy shockah!

two things pop immediately to mind here. one is a quote from a raver (and ex-rocker) friend at a party when it came time to change the music. he demanded "NO POWER CHORDS!" (my first encounter w/indie guilt!) the other is going to a rave in Minneapolis 4.9.94 and Tommie Sunshine in the chillout room around 10pm dropping "All Apologies" in the middle of his set and the room erupting, and it felt less mournful than like people paying tribute to a fellow traveler, or maybe a parallel one.

also, the mid-90s were very much a keepin'-it-real time across the board: hip-hop and indie rock and rave were all going through it big-time, as I recall, in parallel. I wonder if that has anything to do with the explosion of sheer product becoming available at the time--more and larger boutique economies than ever before, something that has obviously increased even more since the Net grew to ubiquity. I've always thought people began thinking and projecting smaller because it became more feasible to do so and still make a living at it, as well as a way of preserving sanity and/or holding onto some semblance of roots. or am I repeating stuff already said upthread? if so, I apologize--I couldn't read the whole thing, either.

witnessed from the bus today: a girl with a bonnie prince billy record and a last poets lp. now only if she forms a band.

Michaelangelo's Nirvana ephiphany reminds me also of the best review of "Teen Spirit" I've ever read (I think from '93), which was Chris Lowe calling it a "rave anthem," and singling out the video in particular as proof.

What about slam-dancing or moshing - a profoundly homosocial and EXCULSIVE style of dance?

I'll happily take the '90s over any other decade, incidentally, not least because I lived through them (I'll hold judgment on the '00s till they're further along, but so far I'm with you guys on 'em, e.g. they're grate). but Blount's point is interesting because moshing = dancing and rhythmic propulsion = urge to dance. considering the jock contingent's hostile takeover of alternarock by mid-decade (I remember seeing people mosh at a fucking Liz Phair show in 1994), you might also argue that static rhythms on the part of indie bands were also their way of discouraging it, putting a wrench in the works--not necessarily on purpose, but instinctively, as a reaction. this isn't to discount the fact that indie rock was never exactly Deney Terrio territory to begin with, but still.

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