"Would you consider punk the father of, or basically the evolution to, indie music? Any examples you could give?"
YES. Absolutely. While "indie" was never exactly = to punk, it arose directly from punk. (Given the caveat that I'm talking about the
American "independent rock movement"...)
The phrase "independent rock" came into common use in the United States in the mid-to-late 1980s, seeming at first like a variation on "college rock". But where "college rock" described a sound and an audience, "independent rock" described a unifying set of aesthetic principles. Still, both described a grassroots, independently-produced, intentionally anticommercial, often lo-fi and ramshackle brand of post-inflected rock music.
First generation "independent" rock bands usually retained punk signifiers and tended to self-identify as punk. Not to put too find a point on it, indie rock began life as an aspect of the slow-blooming, widely-varied American punk rock movement. A nonconformist, offshoot branch, but joined to and not entirely separable from the punk mainstream.
Punk in England is said to have occurred in a very brief period of time, metastasized almost instantaneously into a national pop phenomenon, and just as quickly fragmented into a million "post-punk" strains that could not be accurately labeled punk itself. In America, however, punk didn't come on as suddenly, and since it was never tied to a specific pop moment, it took much longer to ossify or mutate past the point of identification with punk-qua-punk. Viewed in this context, the independent rock movement is simply one of many forms American punk took as it spread and mutated. Independent rock music, as an ideal, arrived just after the birth of hardcore, and just as hardcore sharpened punk's formal characteristics into a killing tool, independent rock tore away the superficial structure to see what other effects a core punk intent might generate.
It’s certainly true that some of the bands associated with independent rock in 1980s America had only a tenuous connection to punk, but these were exceptions, not the rule. Most of the movement's first-generation leaders were
punk rock bands, at least in their own minds: The Minutemen, The Wipers, Husker Du, The Meat Puppets, The Replacements, Sonic Youth, the Butthole Surfers, Pussy Galore, The Flaming Lips, Big Black, Squirrel Bait, Beat Happening, the Lemonheads, the Melvins. And the line between this new "independent rock" and the orthodox punk of the era was blurry, given the fact that these bands often called themselves punks, played what sounded like punk rock music, and were on the same labels and played the same shows as their purist punk peers.
Of course, other canonical indie forefathers were post-punk, or even non-punk. Perhaps influenced to some degree by the politics, sounds and/or aestheitics of punk, but not beholden to punk as a self-definition: Mission of Burma, Pylon, the Feelies, Big Dipper, The Embarassment, the Dream Syndicate, R.E.M., Dinosaur Jr. and Sebadoh, Unrest, the Pixies, the Throwing Muses. And the independent rock bands of the era were influenced by sources distinct from England’s ’77 "punk moment": arty post-punk bands like Joy Division and the Cure, jangly dreamy pop a la Aztec Camera and Felt, C86, punk-contemporaneous retro rock and new wave on labels like Beserkley and Bomp, the New York no wave movement, oddballs like Chrome, and the punk-associated non-punk rock of bands like Television and Talking Heads.
But at the same time, many of the era’s most influential bands weren't what we now think of as "indie" at all. They were just PUNK. The Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, the Avengers, and Minor Threat were as important to the American independent rock movement as any of the bands listed above. Among the American independent labels that spearheaded indie rock as a subcultural movement were Homestead Records, SST, Touch & Go, Restless & Enigma Records, Twin/Tone and Merge. Most of them began life releasing "punk rock records". It's important to remember that first and foremost this was
independent rock music. The whole identity of the movement was tied to an inflexible set of rejectionist, anticapitalist, D.I.Y. principles. Major labels were BAD. Bands on major labels were suspect at best (exceptions made for the infallibly cool; e.g., X).
In light of this deliberate "outsider" stance, we can look at the 80s independent rock movement as the crystallization of an outsider strain that had been present in American rock music for quite some time: The Sonics and Hasil Adkins, The Stooges and the Velvet Underground, The Modern Lovers, Devo, The Electric Eels, Rocket From the Tombs, punk and no wave as movements. Punk and no wave helped identify "outsider-ness" as a distinct and desirable cultural commodity, and the independent rock movement finally made deliberate outsiderness the whole point. But once outsiderness could be identified as an end in itself, the aesthetics and principles that held it together began to unravel. Independent rock became "indie". And with that name came followers. And with the followers came a new orthodoxy of sound.
In the 90s, "indie" music became increasingly defined by the sound of a few successful bands, some of them major label acts: R.E.M. and the Smiths; English shoegaze bands; the records that Husker Du and the Replacements made as they moved away from punk; Beat Happening and the Vaselines; Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., Sebadoh and Unrest's most ear-friendly recordings. This was a commodity sound. Defined at times by an anti-commercial stance and punk spirit -- but perhaps moreso by lyrics that traded in sometimes sarcastic or ironic sentimentality, distorted yet gentle rock guitars, and buckets of bookish, nerdy charm. (After all, it's a lot easier to sell brainy, pop-inflected rock music than deliberate weirdness built around the idea that selling things is categorically evil.)
At the same time, the 90s brought us much of what we now think of as definitive indie rock: Pavement, Sugar, later records by Sebadoh and the Flaming Lips, Guided By Voices, Liz Phair, early Beck, Tortoise, Built to Spill and Modest Mouse, Elliott Smith. Bands like Fugazi, Superchunk and Sleater Kinney carried the torch for the movement's oppositional principles and punk identification, but even they presented a fairly accessible sound and image.
With a sideways glance at the way "grunge" and "alternative rock" finally stripped all traces of punk from indie by funneling it off into dead-end pop cul-de-sacs, we finally arrive at the current era: Spoon, Death Cab for Cutie, the Arcade Fire, Destroyer, Bright Eyes, Wolf Parade, Sufjan Stevens, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, and The Shins. Throw in the lingering echoes of a few non-American stalwarts like Stereolab and Belle & Sebastian, and you have today's "indie".
By now, of course, the relationship between indie and punk is pretty much nonexistent. And the experimental, outsider spirit of the "movement" has become occasional decoration on a durable pop genre's fringe (the torch has mostly passed to metalheads, “new weird” hippies and noize freaks -- less explicitly pop-oriented genres that occasionally overlap with the indie mainstream).
While indie rock is still closely associated with smaller record labels, you don't see those corny "corporate rock still sucks" bumper stickers on cars anymore. So, maybe it's easy to think of indie and punk as being wholly separate from one another. Then again, we're an awfully long way from the summer of 1985...
― Pye Poudre, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 19:01 (eighteen years ago)
thirteen years pass...