"indie listening"

not listening to indie obviously, but listening -through- indie, listening "slanted" as nitsuh would have it, processing all music by looking for its essential "indie-ness." (i.e. you listen to chic, you listen to daft punk, you listen to reggae...is it impossible to hear it without "indie ears," trying to fit the round peg of pop or classical or jazz in the square hole of zines and limited edition 7"s.) if it does exist (and i'm inclined to believe it does as i'm "guilty" of it myself), does it have any positives? or is it forever a hinderance?

(i'm coming off a very long work day, so doubtless this theory - which seemed so clear in the car on the ride home - is now muddled beyond comprehension. apologies.)

Stop listening to songs through "indie ears" and you can realise how great pop is. Seriously. 2-step, even if you loved indie 2 or 3 or 5 years ago, works at its apogee when you divorce yourself from such constrictions and allow yourself to ascend to its brilliance. That's in terms of dancing in a club to "Flow" and "GGTT" and B15 Project, anyway.

let us not take this as any sort of "confession" of my "problem" either. i think most people round these parts know my stance on pop.

It does exist. It's a listening strategy, one of many, and it has a lot of advantages (you're more likely to get hired by music mags ha ha). It forces you to put a premium on originality and individuality, perhaps, while 'pop listening' forces you to put a premium on immediacy and social impact, and 'dance listening' forces you to put a premium on communality and the physical impact of music, and 'classical listening' forces you to put a premium on technical understanding and no doubt reggae listening and hip-hop listening force you to do certain things too. Perhaps the ideal enlightened listener is a master of all modes and able to swirch between each at will or employ them simultaneously.

Re-reading that I suspect I'm talking complete bollocks but then it is 3 AM so I will let it lie.

let us not take this as any sort of "confession" of my "problem" either. i think most people round these parts know my stance on pop.

No, it's too late, Jess. Admit it: You sit on the bus pretending to read Smash Hits, but you're really caught up in the Badaboom Gramophone tucked inside.

Seriously though, I don't know about filtering listening through fetishist Indie culture and paraphenalia, but there is indie listening, fa shizzle, and it's limiting and smug. (This is going to turn into another US/UK schism over the definition of indie, isn't it?)

Re-reading my nonsensical post I am filled with a HORRID vision of listener-types as a kind of D&D character class hierarchy - "You are a level 2 indie listener and can deploy only the Get Up Kids in your argument's favour. I am a level 5 multi-classed dance/pop listener and smite you with my Jaxx and Bextor, P433R ME!"

go to bed you mentalist.

I've been to bed already. That's the problem. Mind you I think going and reading a book is probably the best solution at this point.

right after i posted this i realized that there's a fair amount of crossover to be had with the "why do you like indie?" and the thread on listening to music "outside your own spectrum of experience" (i forget what it was called...we all got into fights about whether or not it was important to listen "outside the box" and try to identify with "alien musical cultures" or some nonsense. wow...quote overload.) but: (This is going to turn into another US/UK schism over the definition of indie, isn't it?) probably, yes. my critical thinking faculties are shot to shit lately, so i'm -not- explaining this right, but it's less listening through the trappings of indie than through the paradigm (blech blech blech) of indie. nitsuh to thread to save my muddy logic?

No, it's too late, Jess. Admit it: You sit on the bus pretending to read Smash Hits, but you're really caught up in the Badaboom Gramophone tucked inside.

why does everyone think i'm such a rockist these days? and of course, knowing what badaboom gramophone is = you are indie. so hah! ;)

What Tom said up there makes sense to me.

I'm a little confused as to how one could listen to music in a smug manner. The indie backlash is just as tedious as indie snobs.

I'm a little confused as to how one could listen to music in a smug manner.

perhaps it = less "smug' than defensive? i.e. you listen to chic best of happily, cute indie person of opposite sex walks in listenin space, you begin to fret that she doesn't understand "why" you're listening to chic? how you "mean it"?

(a problematic metaphor/scenario, but the best i can do. i need sleep myself.)

i thought the term 'indie listening' referred to the level of discrimination one approached any particular music with.

Hey, I've got a great idea. Why don't we listen to music we enjoy and care the fuck less about prejudices, smugness, snobbery and what anyone else thinks?

Jesus. Here I was thinking that people listened to music for pleasure.

This wasn't directed at anyone in particular. I'm just a bit over hearing about music snobbery in general.

Snobbery = tools of the devil. But he has many followers and ex- followers. ;-)

I wouldn't have said that at all, Jess! In my dumb ILM vocabulary, "slanting" was the thing that indie tries to do with commonly-held conventions, whereas "indie listening" is the broad swath of stuff that "indie" folk listen to, including indie but also lots of other stuff.

You're right, of course, that there is listening-for-indieness, just as there are prized qualities for lovers of pretty much any genre (per Tom). Now: why the constant attacks on indie listeners being "smug" about it, which never gets thrown at country listeners or hip-hop listeners even if they vehemently dismiss every other type of listening as horrid worthless abominations? Well, clearly the hypocrisy of the indie aesthetic sort of claiming to be broad and open-minded and experimental. But then again, "indie" listeners really do tend to be broader and open-mindeder about this than devotees of a lot of other genres, don't they? And there's a lot more various-genre influence within what "indie" listeners listen to than within most other genres, isn't there? Thus I stand by my previous claim that people find indie types smug because they themselves think indie types are cooler than they are, and don't criticize the exact same behaviour among metalheads because they're not worried about losing out to metalheads on the perception-of-coolness scale.

But you're right, it's gotten completely out of hand and could stand to be deflated for a half-decade at the very least.

Nitsuh is correct. And 'smugness' isn't always bad. Sometimes you've just heard too much shit and everything starts to sound the same.

Actually what I said makes a certain amount of sense. The reason for the accusations of snobbery might be that a percentage of people who listen to indie music aren't 'indie listeners', maybe? Nitsuh's coolness argument doesn't quite work for me but I'm reluctant to unleash the 'indie debate' again. And I think almost everyone, deep down, is a bit smug about what they listen to- or at least everyone who bothers to advertise it.

yes it exists, its a question of context (yes, that again) isn't it?. nitsuh brought up (in another thread) the fact daft punks audience in america are likely to be an indie audience, while in the uk this doesn't hold true. so, its often a question of presentation and, as noted above, personal experience and context.

if daft punk is received differently in america (as, the other?), doesn't that mean it is listened to differently also? in this example, that surely would be indie listening? all music is approached with different perspectives. i think the reason people get defensive is that it seems as though identifying 'indie listening' is somehow inherently an attack. i don't see this myself, it is just another way that music is listened to

...only since 'indie' became a style. I long for the diversity of the early '80s, when indie actually referred to independent labels producing original home-grown music which the majors wouldn't touch.

But then again, "indie" listeners really do tend to be broader and open-mindeder about this than devotees of a lot of other genres, don't they?
No. I don't really agree. Most stay within certain genres. I sort of see this happening in Northern Soul as well. Though they tend to be more extreme. I don't see anything wrong with it though. Every person who listens to music makes choices. They might seem ridiculous to another, but for the person itself it makes perfect sense.

I'm reminded of this thread: Why claim indie as the centerpiece?

Tom: Please note that the "coolness" argument is basically a joke. At least, I originally made it as a joke, in some other thread.

On the other hand, my current flatmate has a "these indie-rocker jerks think they're so damned cool" attitude, despite not actually knowing or talking to any indie-rockers, which makes me wonder. On some level I do think it's just assumed that indie types "think they're cool," despite the massive cloud of neuroses, underconfidence, and self-loathing hanging over that particular community. And I do think people sometimes assume indie listeners think they're cool for the same reason a 14-year-old avant fan will get accusations of "you don't really like that, you're just listening to it to be weird."

But yeah, I was basically just razzing you evil indie-bashers.

I really should choose my words more carefully. Don't get me wrong: I am a longtime indie listener, one of the "recovering indie kids" here and I still certainly believe that democratization of sounds in U.S. indie = good. The us v. them indie/mainstream approach to making music encourages exploration -- anything that is not popular is potentially fair game (Nitsuh has correctly banged about this in the past, too, I believe in reference to Tropicalia, Krautrock, and such informing indie, being willingly accepted and unearthed as anti-canonical approaches to making contemporary sounds.) But listening to something and asking: Is it Indie? = bad, and yes that can be defensive and I don't see how this question can be asked without having to talk about snobbery. The cache of "cool" is inherent in the blanket dismissal of all that is ubiquitous, accessible and corporate, which is why unwavering indie kids are so unsufferable. ;)

― scott p., Wednesday, 16 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

"The cache of 'cool' is inherent in the blanket dismissal of all that is ubiquitous, accessible and corporate, which is why unwavering indie kids are so unsufferable." ..... "the latest teeshirts, footwear, haircut, even stance are paramount"

But what I'm asking is: how is this necessarily that much worse than the cache of "(whatever else)" inherent in country fans' blanket dismissal of all that is tuneless and noisy, or g-funk fans' blanket dismissal of all that is wimpy and whiny? How can this supposed importance of fashion to indie possibly compete with the importance of fashion to hip-hop, where all the stars have fashion lines as opposed to just Kim Gordon?

Isn't is just that in the world of people listening to a lot of records and talking about them -- the world of places like ILM -- the "indie" prejudices are the ones that have always been overrepresented, so they're the ones that need to be conquered right now? I'm not trying to defend those prejudices so much as to say that they're not worse than any other genre's set -- they just happen to be the ones crowding out the view of everything else at this point.

Oh, and my joke about everyone else thinking indie is cool stems from the sort of comment Scott made: that the "cache of cool" or hip is the root of the dismissal, as opposed to Christian country's cache of wholesomeness or bluegrass's cache of authenticity. If "cool" is a socially agreed-upon thing, why assign "cool" as the indie cache, unless the culture at large really does sort of see indie-ness as cool?

And in America, post 1991, they do, sort of. In a pre-1991 American high school, listening to "indie" might get you called strange or gay or crazy; in a post-1991 American high school, listening to "indie" will get you called pretentious or snobbish or elitist. Clearly this has more to do with other people's perceptions of indie than indie itself.

Unless something within indie changed post-1991, in response to its experiences of success, of course.

Nitsuh, I did give a little wink!

But what I'm asking is: how is this necessarily that much worse than the cache of "(whatever else)" inherent in country fans' blanket dismissal of all that is tuneless and noisy, or g-funk fans' blanket dismissal of all that is wimpy and whiny?

Because those are dismissal's of how a record sounds, not how it was made or, to an extent, by whom.

*dismissals*

If "cool" is a socially agreed-upon thing, why assign "cool" as the indie cache, unless the culture at large really does sort of see indie-ness as cool?

I imagine if the culture saw it as cool, NMH or whomever would sell a few more records. The label is self-assigned, that is my problem with it and part of my disenchantment with approaching music with "indie ears."

(I really should be on Nitsuh's "side" here, I feel -- damn indie guilt -- but authenticity > all else is one aspect of indiedom that I can't defend.)

I imagine if the culture saw it as cool, NMH or whomever would sell a few more records.

Not true at all! Crazy European designer shoes are seen as "cool" whereas plain department-store loafers are not. But even at the same price, the loafers would sell more, because most people don't really want the sort of hipster-cool they're perceiving as an alternative; in both cases they will say something like "I guess they're interesting, but I'm not one of those people who would actually wear (or listen to) them."

Tom is right about indie changing too, actually, and basically living up to this role -- by essentially sounding like something that people would feel lame for not "getting." This has gotten more than a little boring. Note that this is why I'm so hot on a return of new-wave ideals lately, on looseness and pop-weirdness and variety: because indie was pretty spectacular during those pre-91 years when it was assumed that everyone found it weird and stupid and would probably think you were weird and stupid for listening to it.

Ack, no wonder indie is grinding toward stuck-ness right now: it's spent the last decade trying to do something new but simultaneously trying to make it clear that it is trying something New and Serious and Studious and Important and if you don't Like it you Clearly Understand Nothing. This sort of play-it-safe-ing is a fast elevator to tedium -- more indie bands need to make the sorts of bold steps that could get them branded as idiot weirdos, which brings us to the point where I make an obligatory mention of the Sugarcubes.

more indie bands need to make the sorts of bold steps that could get them branded as idiot weirdos

I couldn't agree more.

Not true at all! Crazy European designer shoes are seen as "cool" whereas plain department-store loafers are not.

Touché. Damn you, Nitsuh, the one time I'm disagreeing with you, in a sense, and you're still pretty much spot-on.

When are you going to start your own blog? ;)

But Scott, isn't it enough that I basically treat ILM as my blog, clogging up threads with constant analysis of giant unnecessary diversions that I'm sure a whole lot of people would do without?

(I say this without irony and basically as an apology, too: I feel like I get caught up on arguing out little points and then wind up ruining perfectly-good threads with my devotion to some idea I just had.)

You haven't ruined a thread yet. You've saved a few.

Well, I know some of you think that -- which is great -- but I think I should try to be less long-winded and less minor-point- chasing for the sake of what I'm sure are plenty of ILM folks who don't really care about the sorts of things I have to say or the way that I say them, folks I don't blame in the least for that.

Case in point: here's me on this indie thread posting twice about how I post too much to ILM. This is the sort of thing I have to quit.

You're just saying "aw shucks" and staring at your feet rather than face of all of this praise. That's so indie! Nitsuh is the new Stuart Murdoch! Now go and record a solo album already.

If I were Stuart Murdoch, I would never have let "Beyond the Sunrise" onto any of my records. Even if Isobel cried, struck out her lower lip, and called me big meanie.

If I were Stuart Murdoch and making a solo album, I write it on acoustic guitar and recruit members of Boards of Canada, Lali Puna, and Basement Jaxx as my band, thus combining comfort-indie with indie- tronica and ensuring rave Freakytrigger reviews from Tom.

If Nitsuh were Stuart Murdoch, he would be waking up in a cold sweat right now going "What the *hell* have I been doing for the last seven years of my life?" and telling the assembled multitudes to relax and enjoy life. At least, so is my dream.

Nitsuh = goodness. Let him do what he chooses.

"Comfortronicindica," is what we'd call this genre, even though it wouldn't need a genre tag cause it really wouldn't be that much of a stretch. I think I might actually try to record something like this tonight.

Just make sure that if you do, you:
- make it sound better than dntel (fairly easy, just don't get that horrible singer or her melodica in; I actually mostly like the rest of it)
- let the people of IL* hear it...

Although having been wishing I could do that kind of thing for ages I did feel a pang of guilt at your earlier post, because you're bang on about indie needing more people prepared to look dumb and weird instead of making coffee-table beard-strokey music, and I fear my dabblings with this kind of thing have been far closer to the latter. But this is probably because I don't have enough talent or inspiration and not because of any faults of the concept.

Nitsuh: Re Beyond The Sunrise - I usually put this album on when I wash up - a force of habit - & am sick of having to skip that execrable track with wet, soapy hands. In addition to the dire vocal,I find the lyrics somehow smug/smarmy. Is that Isobel on the two other (quite wonderful) double-tracked female-led tracks? Much as I adore Alison Statton's contribtuion to Young Marble Giants/Weekend, & Amelia Fletcher was perfect in Talulah Gosh & beyond, the copyists are so darn' irritating!!!

I like Beyond The Sunrise. Family Tree is the one I can't bear, and The Wrong Girl.

You like it? I get the titles mixed; are you sure you don't mean 'Waiting For The Moon To Rise'? Anyway, on a positive note, I think their music works great on Teachers...

No I like Waiting For The Moon To Rise too. When I say I "like" BTS it's not in any really active way - I just think it's OK. It's a bit naff I suppose.