The Adorno Thread: it takes a big man to turn that thing off.

oh yeah -- his classic 1978 article on the emerging sheffield scene. my bad.

plenty of people think that indie fans are stuck-up music snobs, especially with all this hipster nonsense going on... i don't know exactly why, maybe it's the hatred of anything popular that some people frequently voice.

'Is there any politics to indie music anymore?'

If I listen to some of my albums of the year -- 'The Lemon of Pink' by The Books (Tomlab), for instance -- I'm tempted to say that there's nothing in the way of overt, rabble-rousing politics in it. But there's a certain subtle politics of texture going on. The Books create a microworld where banjos are mixed with Japanese vocal samples, where language is subtly remixed, rendering fresh meanings and half-meanings. It's political in the same way a poet like Paul Celan might be. The condemnation of brutality is in there, but oblique. And I've never accepted Adorno's thing about poetry not being permissible after Auschwitz.

But much radical art is not populist. And Britney's triumph could be seen as a mere shallow diversion from the larger issues in the world: we must be free, if Britney can do what she does. Who can argue that we live in a repressive culture when Britney is up there doing her thing and Hot Topic can sell chains, spikes, and blue hair dye in popular malls?

and adorno hated fun.

and i think that many people would argue that the profit motive is the most repressive of all.

he's an entry point because he really defines the sort of extreme pessimism that is possible. He's an entry point because he's the place to leave, not the place to arrive.

hell no, uphold the values of Britney or Madonna. But it's a bit of a nuanced problem. i'm not trying to assert monochromatic ideas.

exactly why it's pessimistic: it leaves us no where to go.

so then, moving on, is there a politics in indie music anymore? :)

ppl not being locked up in a gulag, natch.

i guess i'm just wondering, hoping, that i'm wrong, that there are still politics in the indie scene -- and not the sort of shallow politics that dictate exactly what you have to wear of who you have to be in order to be 'truly' political.

profit motive: so kill me, i can't help but agree with those antiquated thinkers who believe that power becomes more dangerous and manipulative when it is dispersed and not easily recognized. It's a ridiculous idea because surely, we all saw that the US was entering into global domination during the cold war, not only by locking people up in jail.

If thought is to be an attempt to sound the unknown, then it can only take place when there is 'nowhere to go' in this sense: if we thought we we knew where we were going, or even that there was somewhere for us to go, we would already be attempting to predict the present into the future, and thereby simply reinventing and repeating the past.

If having somewhere to go means choosing one of the current options on display on the cultural shop-counter, then Adorno definitely thinks we should resist the pressure to make such a choice as hard as possible. We could think of his dispute with Marcuse in the 60s in these terms: Marcuse says, look we've got to choose, and I'm choosing the youth of today, not choosing is equivalent to siding with the old order; Adorno's response is that to choose one side is already to have given in, so a) how can we resist the pressure to make that choice; b) how do we think differently about the choices on offer?

If by 'indie' you mean independent (but from what?) I would say that there really can't be any such thing in a meaningful way -- i.e. there is a promise of some kind of autonomous space or creativity or release associated with the idea of being independent of commerce? the market? exchange? major labels? popular music? which is no longer anything but a cruel joke on those who still believe in it.

But that's not a directly political issue. I'm not a big believer in using 'politics' in a vague, 'cultural' sense: but certainly indie in my experience has only ever been deeply conservative (in terms of artistic forms, gender politics, perpetuating an us vs them (implicitly elitist) ideology ).

sure, yeah, i was being polemical, though i'd rather have lived in the US than in the soviet union: but power is not more dangerous for being dispersed, surely.

i would look at indie as a whole culture and is function, and there's nothing 'deeply conservative' about it, surely? maybe conservative, but more likely just liberal -- it's what the kids of boomers listen to, get drunk to. and the music isn't always conservative, is it? i don't think new order were conservative musically. i wouldn't say that 'us vs them' is elitist either if the aim is to gte rid of the distinction 'us vs them'.

i don't follow the logic here. if politics is about the abolition of classes then how does 'us vs them' = 'recreation of elitist hierarchies'. society is elitist; expressing this knowledge does not mean 'reproducing' this elitism; and if it does it doesn't do it 'simply'.

In the sense that the inversion of structures for evaluating artistic productions is not historically new, it does it simply

i am a mere child and this needs explaining with diagrams -- or at least some reference to y'know, actual processes/examples.

what are the politics you're thinking of, anyway? -- i do see you point here, to be fair.

I think that the way to reconcile this issue might be to argue that the movement is covertly political. This seems to be the case with many musical subcultures. Further, the style cues taken by members of the subculture are interpreted by each other as another form of subversion. They entail a form of communication. This is all elucidated (often via Adorno) by later cultural studies folks like Stuart Hall and Dick Hebdige.

Of course the question of the political isn't all contained in interrogating the nature of the musicians or listeners (but that communication does seem important at some point along the way.) Momus points out the stylistic cues of some parts of "indie" that are contained in the music. This seems to be an act of subversion within the actual cultural product. A conscious decision by the artist to create works of a different calibre than what is seen or expected. The analogy to Paul Celan where it is not the language content of his works so much as the jarring syntax and structure that make them political is apt. Of course this type of analysis might all rest on "finding the political" in a deconstructive text. I guess we can bracket that for another thread.

sorry, what i was saying before is that, basically, some people value things by their relationship to the mainstream. if it's mainstream, we devalue it, if it's not, we value it. that's nothing new, the idea of art for arts sake has frequently judged quality by this relationship to the mainstream -- as well as by the relationships within the subfield itself. Like, many definitely hate interpol now that they've exploded. many didn't like them to begin with because they were said to be too derivative -- that they sounded like Joy Division. So in the first sense, it's the relationship to the mainstream that determines the evaluation, and in the second, it's the relaitonship within the subfield. i'm sure that i'm leaving out a ton. Bourdieu actually does have diagrams, and i hated reading his book, and i can't believe that i'm actually referencing it. I mean, i'm not just on here for some sort of mental masturbation. i really care about the politics of indie music, i'm not ready to fall completely into cynicism yet. i just don't know if anyone really thinks it's even anything political anymore. did the hipsters destroy this? or the anti-hipsters?

Maybe I shouldn't just yank this out of context, but I don't really understand this. There are so many things to respond to in the world that could lead to some sorts of politics. (I don't really understand a lot of the language on this thread, so I might be missing what you mean.)

Which makes it natural to suggest that you give up the entire idea that music has to be "groundbreaking", and that being "derivative" is a bad thing. Because, that is generally Adorno's idea, and Adorno never accepted anything more recent than Arnold Schönberg and Alban Berg anyway.

well, in the uk, indie/postpunk coincided with the rise of thatcher and thatcherism, and peaked in about 1986-7, which marked the high tide of thatcherism. indie was associated with CND, with the miner's strike, and some indie bands went as far as working with the labour party on an initiative called 'red wedge' -- a kind of party-political 'rock the vote'. indie was conservative in alext's sense i'm guessing because it rejected the thatcherite attack on the social democratic consensus that ruled the uk from the war to the late seventies. the smiths especially seemed nostalgic about the early sixties/fifties -- before total US cultural domination. in normative terms indie enabled bands who would otherwise never have recorded to do some great work.

Are aesthetics political anymore? I understand that aesthetics and representation are political problems of enormous importance in other communities, but a music community has an entirely different, intangible, aural binding point... can it mean anything?

The idea of aesthetics is linked with politics in an almost wholly negative way as far as I'm concerned. The idea of aesthetics develops in the eighteenth century as a way of disciplining or streamlining the inherently varied reactions to 'art' or 'beauty' (see Hume). Hence adding a discourse of artistic value onto what was originally a concept describing the nature of sensation more widely. The romantic inversion of aesthetic value -- it becomes something to oppose to the mechanical / political world in the name of some kind of revolutionary transformation (see Schiller) -- is a mistake from the start because its models of full aesthetic / political community are literally fantastic, projected back onto Greece for example (see Winkelmann and the whole German tradition to Heidegger). So we're faced with a choice between the mechanical, depoliticised world and some transcendent but inaccessible world of value which can only be actualised in some other time. The entire revolutionary / avant-gardiste political/aesthetic model revolves within these poles and it's about time we began to think around it.

So I'm much more interested in the radicalism of certain modes of liberal politics (as demanding 'abstract' equality rather than 'concrete' historical or cultural communities). Aesthetics still seems attached to the idea of a common response to beauty which presumes an innate or naturalised connection between some people and not others. The legacy to indie politics is the celebration of little, inward-looking groups which seek to shut out the rest of the world, but by that action are limited from the amount of 'political' impact they can have on the rest of the world.

My idea is that the aesthetics of indie music is in its human qualities: the sound of it, its production. If the new digital productions (with ProTools and whatnot) can erase all the 'imperfections' of music, then I can appreciate even more the human, imperfect quality left in much indie music. There are spaces, rough edges, even abrasive qualities that, for me, enhance an emotional impact. And the fact that this aesthetic developed (partly) due to the fact that the recording equipment was always old, not 'quality' stuff, and then came to be willingly embraced is interesting. I was told that using the digital recording is now cheaper than some of the recording studios that have older equipment -- I mean, with a computer, bands can have the digital buffing done at home. It then becomes a decision not to use it, and I think it's a damn good one. The quality to the sound is so intense to me: for instance, Iron&Wine is an album that completely floored me. But is this just an inversion of aesthetic value? I'm not sure. I don't consider it to be reactionary, at least not entirely.

but then is this a politics? My theory is that if there can be a politics in the asethetics, it needs to be articulated.

But at this point in the technological game, leaving in the 'imperfections' or choosing to record using technology that insures these, is an aesthetic choice. It's not like digital recording is only for the elite. In fact, it can be even cheaper and all of that original analog and electric equipment is now only affordable to dilettantes and bourgie indie types.

Also, there are plenty of "organic" "mistakes" that get created and left in when using pro-tools or cubase or whatever. I feel like it's the late nineties when I say: have you ever heard the term "glitch"?

yes i have. I am, of all things, a student of Cultural Studies. i'm no expert(as seems quite apparent), i've simply ingested an insane amount of stuff lately; and i happen to love music but have not been satisfied with any of the writings i've read. Adorno seems to get dragged in some way or another in these debates over consumption, consumers, and the use of cultural products. I really only wanted him as a quick entry point: here he is, he pointed to something important, now what's beyond that?

But at this point in the technological game, leaving in the 'imperfections' or choosing to record using technology that insures these, is an aesthetic choice.

yes, exactly. from that point, can that aesthetic be politics? can any aesthetic still be politics? certainly, aesthetics at one time were considered political, but now, here in the US, i'm not quite so sure. Besides, maybe being political still won't mean that it's anything like the politics it used to have. I give up.

I can be a bit of a hole at times, I know, and apologies to mandinina. If you've come to the board to gather material for an academic paper, this might not be the right place after all. A quick glance at the thread shows me that you've been bullshitted by at least three people now. Stay aboard; serious thought may be uncommon on ILM, but that makes it an even more valuable contribution.

So why call a thread after Adorno if you're going to discuss the politics of indie? It's a topic that doesn't even enter the frame there, and if you're going to debate his concepts of identity, well, best forget about pop musics altogether, at least in the general sweeping way that allows us to speak of "indie" (by which you mean youthful caucasians with electric guitars, if I understand you correctly). Adorno's name is occasionally tossed about as a reference mark for an anti-consumerist stance where Postman or Packard might sound too pedestrian. The problem is: most serious philosophical writing after Hegel defies being summed up, and Adorno's thoroughly dialectical works are an extreme manifestation thereof. Perhaps a single statement might have been an adequate starting point--at the risk of it being merely an entrance point to Adorno (whom we don't want to discuss here, do we?) rather than consumerism/identity politics.

Still, there are insights to be gained from Adorno's aesthetical works, most of which happen to be largely ignored. Many refer to the usual chapters in "Dialectics of Enlightenment" where an early attempt is made to outline a critique of mass culture. However, a more thorough investigation on these grounds never appeared. Instead, I'll recommend the book on Mahler. Don't let the seemingly remote topic fool you, though of course it requires a certain willingness to accept the European tradition as a reference frame and to process detailed musicological observations (not analysis--you'd have to pick up the scores there). I can promise this much: after having read it, you will understand why Adorno "hated jazz" (which is also untrue, but it's another tag that can be used to cut off an argument), and first of all, it unfolds a model of aesthetic and cultural independence that might be useful to judge what is called "independent" in pop musics. For instance, it helped me to see why, say, Autechre have some merit in expanding the envelope of artistic means for electronic dance music where more academic ventures in recent glitchtronica failed (namly, the Mille Plateaux school). Then, of course, there's the "Aesthetic Theory" which, although unfinished, is crammed with starting points.

Mmmmmmm! so how how might we discuss this writing (assuming hegel to be 'serious', natch).

No, it's okay, you can sum up all you like, but there's always going to be somebody who'll point out that this is not what it says in the text/just a moment in the processual flow/something (s)he renounced later (in Adorno's case eg. the dreaded Auschwitz, no poems quote whose renunciation is problematic enough to spawn a bit of a debate). This is a major intrinsic problem of philosophical terminology: no statement and no concept has a definitive grasp of its signified (basic sign theory, but can't be restated often enough); that's why a responsible thinker will never give the impression that any major question can be solved. This can lead to annoying consequences, as is the case with Heidegger, who readily embraced self-parody. A more literary, suggestive, and metaphorical use of concepts has been introduced by post- and anti-Hegelians like Schopenhauer, Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, and after them, it took an academic scholar to believe that philosophers just have a flowery way to express what you can see in this here exhaustive diagram (fig.12).

This year has seen quite a few retrospectives on Adorno, and frankly, I've felt somewhat pestered by the long row of celebs who have been asked to whip out their opinions on the man and his works. Yes, damn it, he hated jazz. Yes, of course, there is a right living in the wrong. Right, he didn't get laid enough. Okay, back to indie. How about Berry Gordy jr as an entrance point?

If what you say about all post-Hegelian writings is true, then that could mean that Adorno as an entry point is slippery, because he could be anywhere; if we're not careful, we may not really leave him at the door. That might just be okay.

I know he didn't hate jazz. If i was informed correctly, he hated the white, co-opted forms of music that were being called 'jazz' and played on the mainstream radio stations. The easy-listening jazz. Hey, I never thought about the idea of 'easy listening', wow, i would have expected that to refer to classical music, not John Denver and Michael Buble.

Now what led me to begin with Adorno: I suppose the cynic in me was touched by a particular understanding of his research at Princeton on radio listeners. Adorno didn't really think that actions such as changing the station or turning off the radio represented a 'power of choice' (as consumers believed), but he realized that the consumers themselves believed this. So then, the problem is not so much that people are mindless vessels for the culture industry as it the fact that people still thought they had individual choice (maybe even individuality), only they expressed this in ways which were symbolic but not effective. He thought that if people knew how 'unfree' they really were then they might possibly be led to assert their power in more effective ways. People "are transformed into objects which willingly allow themselves to be manipulated" and if we will it, then we can still change our minds, and decide not to be manipulated.

People "are transformed into objects which willingly allow themselves to be manipulated"

Yes, and that's exactly where their power goes. It's as valid today as it was in the 40s: for many, there is only one way to assert themselves--to give in and agree with the powers that be. Nice if you have a few options there. "Indie" is one of them, join a crowd that's as lonely as you feel.

and if we will it, then we can still change our minds, and decide not to be manipulated.

Not so sure. This is hardly possible as a conscious choice; you'd have to renounce the consumption of musical goods altogether. It's somewhat bleak, but the only decision you can make is to watch attentively what is being done to you while you are identified and classified, thereby turned into an object, by the transmission of goods. This is the point at which many turn around, saying, to hell with it, I'm going to be pop-friendly. You?

but i wonder if there isn't something in a particular aesthetic that can draw us out of that loop. I know that i've heard songs and musical styles that are not easy to listen to and yet seductively manage to rip out my heart: where have I been all this time?

you'd have to renounce the consumption of musical goods altogether.

i'm not sure that i agree with this. In some sense, there is no 'outside' of manipulation, there is no outside of culture. Yet maybe we can use 'manipulation' on some other level, something more specific? But then we would enter notions of innocent/guilty, or maybe authentic/inauthentic -- else how to distinguish between what counts as manipulation.

So maybe we need to renounce all desires. Or maybe we can see that despite the market need for heterogeneity, there is still an overwhelming force that compels us to conform. there are many questions involved in this.....

But i like the idea of aesthetics. Now here's where i get cheesy: I like the rawness, the politics of leaving a humanity in a sound, an imperfection, something not clean, not sanitary. I like the idea of an emotionally affective sound, and i like the idea that maybe this could be a politics. The alternative that indie music offers becomes less and less distinguished from the mainstream with every passing day. what i'm suggesting isn't a radical way out of the system: it's simply curious about how sound can be community, how sound can be politics. At a time when the illusion of independence has been shown false and authenticity a hollow, limiting conception, I think it could be useful to articulate a new politics.

as for the Adorno question, i forgot about this essay Dialectical Theory of Consumer Culture. it explores some of the assumptions about consumerism that Adorno had... and looks at the postmodern theories of consumerism and looks at the new consumer movements. It's an interesting read, as it falls somewhere in between the creative consumption analysis that argues for the power in consumerism and the adorno sort of manipulation by the market theories.