Article Response: Ned Vs Indie

Preach on, Brother Ned. I'm feeling pretty much every aspect of this article, even down to the bands mentioned. I mean, I'm willing to give Stephen Merrit a chance (and the stuff I've heard has been nice), but it hasn't even come close to being the rapturous, revelatory experience that most of the music press paints it to be. And don't get me STARTED on Belle & frickin' Sebastian. I haven't wanted to slap a group of musicians this hard since the Spice Girls released "Wannabe" while claiming that their main focus was Girl Power.

Right now, I'm listening to a mix CD of hard house done by Joey Beltram. This is doing more to uplift my spirit than Elliot Smith ever could.

Hmmm. I found it a bit baffling to be honest. I mean, you can completely *ignore* those publications mentioned, you know. It's not remotely difficult. So, there was a surge to acclaim, I dunno, Mercury Rev 2 years ago... now it's Merritt (who's been putting records out for a decade, some terrific, some merely OK, and who I heard of through a friend's recommendation in '94 or something)... so what? A few high-profile writers pen a few rave features, giving the aura of a critical consensus; some folks were there first, some folks are genuinely enthusiastic, some folks just tag along. You investigate, you like or you don't like. End of story.

"Why should I be into everything I'm 'supposed' to be into? Don't I get a say in the matter?" I think I must be missing the point or something. Are you talking about wanting to kick against demographic pigeon-holing here? Last time I checked, you were allowed to like/dislike anything.

"Stop you DJs and label heads and alternative media constructs, get out of my head and let me make my own decisions". I can understand your frustration at the same names popping up again and again, but it's all just fluff, isn't it? When was it ever any different?

"REVELATION IS INDIVIDUAL AND NOT COLLECTIVE". "I construct my own pantheon, I name it only for myself and nobody else, and you can't break into it." For someone so sure of your abilities to autonomously develop a personal pop canon, you seem awfully concerned with prevailing media opinion. Just ignore it.

Already I'm getting answers. ;-) I should say that I'm rather unsatisfied with my article -- I rewrote it a couple of times and I don't think it entirely works. But I couldn't see any other way around it in the end, so up it goes. ;-)

To Michael -- true enough, we can indeed like/dislike anything we damn well please, but conformity in any milieu is an annoying thing, and that was my main kick against. Right now Merritt can (mostly) do no wrong, or so it is told -- and I'm getting tired of it, like I was with the implication that Sebadoh/Superchunk/Elliott Smith etc. were here to save my pathetic butt from, well, something. Has anyone ever noticed how most of these bands are vaunted as some sort of 'solution to the shallowness of modern life' or something like that? The antithesis to the Britney-led new world capitalist order or some other such hogwash? Like the critics are one to talk, I don't see them living in a tub like Diogenes -- and even *he* had to stick close to the polis in order to live. ;-)

You won't see metal talked about this way, for instance. Or techno or the like. And hip-hop is constrained in most discourse to focus on 'gritty reality' as a construct for those who live away from it to fantasize. No, supposedly only indie provides our salvation, but frankly, I'm not interested in being saved. I'm as interested in exposing what I think is good but not widely heard music as anyone else, but I don't intend to fantasize its creators into something we *all* have to worship or else.

At the Drive-In looks like it'll be the next one, and I'm already sick of them without even having *heard* them -- typical enough for anything on Grand Royal these days. ;-)

As a long-term advocate of the "personal pantheon", I find myself agreeing with Ned's article, for the most part. This is the main thing I love about the internet, compared to the traditional media - the idea that you can shape what you love *for yourself*, and you can avoid the pressure of being *told* who you should love.

I've only recently discovered Stephin Merritt's work. I love what I've heard, but if anyone tries to develop a consensus around him, I'd be pretty uncertain about the company I was then keeping :).

i'd say modest mouse is the new 'it' thing definitely more than at the drive in, though i have never heard atdi so i am a bit ignorant here. i, however, am a bit puzzled at the new devotion to stephin merrit, as mentioned earlier he has been around ten years now and all of a sudden he is not just everyone's darling but at the san francisco show for 69 love songs it was nearly fanatical cult-like worship. i am very fond of his music and i have been since hearing about distant plastic trees on prodigy years ago. i even find the new sixths record to be lovely unlike most of the prevailing opinion. yet other than likely being far more clever than most other musicians i wouldn't say that his music stands leagues above the competition, momentum is built up and most people are more than happy to be carried along with the tide. have you seen a poor review of the new modest mouse record? no. because it is an intensely briliant record? no, because most people think there must be more than there is because everyone else seems to find so much to love. i don't think this is a problem, it probably is exciting for people to feel part of a movement at least up to a point and then probably more exciting for that same group to then turn on the band when they decide they have sold out or left their 'real' fans behind. i tend to be narrowly focused on indie music, more in the indie-pop realm, i don't feel this is for the benefit of achieving salvation but the idea that some things feel more special because an intimacy is achieved or at least imagined if you are part of a small group that has discovered this particular brand of joy and that probably makes me an elitist. oh well, so many labels. now i am making no sense, apologies.

I just can't indentify, ned, but I'm too young to remember "indie" meaning anything to anyone who didn't know all about it. As a term it does indicate a certain perception of certain music, but that's all hazy to me too, very shifty. So I don't blame you if it feels like a codeword to you. But I don't like to use it. I'm too afraid that the exclusivity I might decry might become more concrete that way, leading to more people embracing it, more people getting outraged about it, more people drowning out the music. I'm going to see Weezer on Friday, their first tour in *four years*, and my music world is looking totally great. I didn't arrive at that contentment through any kind of forced tunnelvision, either.

I can't just say that "there is no cabal," because . . . well, what the hell, sometimes there is. But in a basic way, I just can't indentify. I'm a very alienated person in general, but I feel less so at shows than anywhere else-- no matter how cultish the following, whether it's Phish or Sleater-Kinney, *as long as it's about actually caring*.

I don't understand why you need the music press so much, to rage against them like that. I don't understand a lot of your essay, particularily in the (I think) 12 paragraph (beginning with "stop, you village voice!") where to demand that they "let you make your own decisions." They won't, and no one can in this situation. I don't even see where the pressure is. At times it seems like you couldn't possibly be writing this is your own voice, though on the whole I know of *course* you are. But why should anyone have to let you make your own decisions in this realm? I can't just say it's that one phrase that puts me off, and move past it, because the core of the thing seems to be in there. That's where I can't make the leap. If you'd explain why you in particular feel so oppressed, I think I'll understand. But you're *not* talking about a universal phenomenon here. Nor are you about to be a revolutionary or muckraker which means you aren't exempt from the business of being a critic.

To Ben -- keep in mind that I'm clearly being utterly hyperbolic. I mean, heavens, I talk in the first paragraph about Stephin Merritt nailed to a damn cross. ;-)

The music media, to be truly all-encompassing, cannot of course be changed or altered by one simple rant from an oddball like myself. At this point in my life and in the history of what we can call modern music criticism, however defined, I am thoroughly sick of cliques, canons, old and new, however formed. To kick against them in part defines myself, to wax perhaps foolishly individualistic. Calling myself oppressed in any way would be grossly inaccurate -- *depressed* is much more the case! I'm not so much mad at them sitting on my head as they are wanting to pretend they found their own golden plates to interpret that explain it all. I don't think so!

As it happens, the current sainthood seems to have revolved over these past years around a series of artists either seen to preserve a 'true' sense of musical passion or to imbue 'bad' stuff -- let's say Merritt's obvious love of eighties synth, the most critically despised music of the time in Western pop discourse -- with 'real' talent. Such distinctions are bad enough in and of themselves -- condescending at best and completely insulting at worse. It smacks of the eternal whine, "Why that fluff in the Top 40 and not this?" Pah. That said series of bands happens to leave me overwhelmed by their middling appeal adds to it all. ;-)

Pop is almost always the 'guilty pleasure,' the 'mindless fun.' Then there's the Serious Music. Yeah, right. Give me the world, not just some pre-marketed stuff cloaked in signifiers that's supposed to be 'good' for me if I've tried that particular flavor and found it horribly wanting! ;-)

I get the feeling you're taking on strawmen here...who in the world actually admits to being part of the "indie scene"? As with all carefully marketed iconoclasts, Stephen Merrit is liable to be worshiped for a moment and discarded once the new icon is discovered, but this is how pop music/pop criticism/pop culture WORKS and has worked forever. In fact, this is how the free market works, look at the stock market, look at politics. If you can't constuctively handle fads you can't constuctively handle popular culture. This is nothing specific to the "indie community", whatever that is. Believe me, no "indie darling" is so ubiquitous that you can't avoid them. Actually, your article reminds me of the countless editorials in Maximum Rock n' Roll bitching about some aspect or another of the "scene". Complaining about it makes you a part of it, otherwise you wouldn't care, would you?

Plus, you really should watch more television, it's good for you.

Y'all raise a good point, Kris, and here's the weird rub -- when it comes to general pop culture fads, if we want to look at the system that way, I actually don't mind that as much in comparison. Which is interesting, and I don't entirely know what that should be the case. F'r instance, I can't say I'm a fan of Christina Aguilera at all, yet of course she was everywhere/anywhere recently. Same with the Santana comeback, which even more of an omnipresent 'this is hip and this is now' situation. The attendant 'you are valid, here is your Grammy' phenomenon was more amusing than annoying. So why I should be so wrought up about something far more smaller in scope is a fair question -- maybe I'm just annoyed at the replication of idiocy in a scene supposed to transcend it, but which fails. *shrug* Can't claim that's the exact reason, but anyway.

Also, keep in mind my note earlier about this whole thing being intentional hyperbole in many ways. If I really spent every waking minute thinking about it, I wouldn't get out of bed. ;-) Essentially the whole thing happened because I couldn't sleep one night and had to write something, which no doubt explains the fever dream quality it has here and there. ;-)

As for nobody admitting they're indie -- I dunno, I've met a few characters in my time who were insanely proud of the fact! ;-) One of my favorites was an ex-music director at KUCI who eventually devolved into a second rate promo hack somewhere in the netherworld of servicing smooth jam/'Quiet Storm' stations with their latest Luther Vandross clones. His music tastes openly changed as he went. His lack of irony about it all was the best part.

It just seemed a bit odd to me. I suppose it's because I never read the music press as I used to or really hang out w/indie scenesters, but asides from Tom and a couple of others I never hear anyone mention Mr. Merritt, let alone get the kind of consensus praise that Ned mentioned.