The Social Economics of Indie Rock (Part Deux)
I know I’m going to get in trouble with the rock cognoscenti for saying this, but so be it: The appeal of Broken Social Scene’s You Forgot It In People was completely lost on me.
I bought it in 2003 at Sam The Record Man in Toronto. I popped it into the car CD player to give it a spin during the long drive back to Montreal – my wife being the driver.
After skipping through at least six songs that seemed like extended experimental intros, her reaction was “turnitoffturnitoff turn it OFF!” She was actually afraid she’d fall asleep and drive us into the ditch.
So my marketing antennae were shooting straight up. This sort of disconnect doesn’t happen very often.
Why were we expecting memorable, punchy singles with hooks, harmonies and choruses, when in fact YFIIP is a longish collection of mostly post-rock, experimental-ambient songs? Or to put it more succinctly, why was I expecting a New Pornographers album, to bring up another “indie supergroup?”
Was it the rock critics who put it into every best-of-2003 top 10 list - all of which used the word “pop,” including an influential Pitchfork.com review that called it “endlessly replayable, perfect pop?” Quite certainly.
But by 2005, even those who’d heaped plaudits on the albums admitted they’d been a little hasty. Stylus Magazine, which had given the album an A-minus on its release, recently recanted with this column entitled On Second Thought:
This is it? This is the great revolution? This is what topped the critics’ charts, inspired a million rapturous articles and blog posts and personal testimonies? […] I realize that one cannot actually hold Broken Social Scene accountable for the comments of others, but anyone who referred to this as some sort of pop masterpiece has hopefully listened to the radio in the interim. You Forgot It In People is yet more proof that the band-as-committee will probably never work […] It also, tellingly, doesn’t avoid being what it is, which is the very indiest of indie. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with indie music, and if that’s all you listen to then yes, this or the Arcade Fire probably sounds as catchy as all get out – but to the average person out there who doesn’t (for example) read Stylus, this still sounds like every other hotly tipped mess that most people don’t like, not because we privileged few have “better” “taste” or something equally smug, but just because most people are bored by this sort of music.
(Emphasis mine.) In part 1, I mentioned the “social economy” underpinning indie rock, one that trades in cool as its currency - that is, cool as a positional good as described by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter in The Rebel Sell. So when scenes become overheated, hype becomes hyperbole, and signing frenzies abate, is this “death of a party” something akin to a market correction?
OK, computer, let’s back up a bit. I want to draw a distinction between indie the genre and independent music, the business model.
Indie the genre is best described by what it isn’t: mainstream, commercial, manufactured, “corporate” (whatever that means), and - most tellingly - popular. There is a wide streak of experimentalism in it, but also a rather wilful contrariness and obscurantism, as seen in movements like the C86 scene, shoegazing, lo-fi, twee pop, and so on. Its members eschew the trappings of fame, cultivating their own sort of ascetic, thrift-store anti-glamour* (mostly composed of bad haircuts and horizontally-striped shirts, apparently).
Terms like “indie supergroup,” bandied about with abandon by lazy music writers, are on their face oxymoronic. After all, aren’t supergroups made of musicians from widely acclaimed, popular and successful bands who’ve had hits?
I don’t think anyone can argue that, maybe Metric aside, any band in the Broken Social Scene extended family have had anything like a “hit” as defined as a mainstream, top 40 record. Maybe they might have had “hits” as defined by the narrow terms of subgenre charts, but really - even cumulatively, have they broken 10,000 record sales worldwide?
Looking at many of the component bands, many of them are none-more-indie, that is to say very obscure and experimental, and correspondingly are known only to very small circles of chin-stroking scenesters in the Greater Toronto Area.
So maybe this is an interesting play on words; they’re less an indie supergroup than a group that are super at being indie. Or maybe this is an example of the Canadian trend towards “collective solutions” at work - succeeding together where individually they couldn’t. But I digress.
In the current issue of Spin, senior writer and genuine hit author Chuck Klosterman writes about the other currency at work in indie/alternative music today — being first to hear something:
There are many people — in fact, you may be one of them — who devote much of their daily energy toward hearing about things first, even if those specific things don’t particularly matter. This has been exacerbated by technology; the degree to which a rock song is new has become nearly as important as how interesting it sounds, even though there’s no inherent advantage to hearing a song today as opposed to five weeks from now (when it will still sound exactly the same.)
I know a lot of people like this; I suspect you do too. For some, their personal/professional reputation hinges on knowing about bands first, about being the first to play them at a club, on radio or on their podcast, and the first to interview them, or the first to sign them.
I fear that in this great rush for firstness - staking a federal land claim to a seam of coolness-as-positional-good - the real gold is quickly mined out, and the rest of the rock ore is a lot of stuff that frankly is not very good. It’s sold to us as the best thing since sliced bread, on the basis of its freshness, newness, controversial content, provocative politics, or postmodernist posing — anything except the quality of the music.
Have we have reached the era where the interesting bio and the good press release trump notions of songwriting ability (verses? choruses? things people can hum in the shower?), musicianship, stagecraft, and charisma**? In the rush to be “not mainstream,” have all these things become anathema to the contemporary indie scene? If so, does this sort of self-marginalization really strike a blow against anything, if we believe in those sorts of romantic notions?
To return to the idea that this is indeed a form of economics, what an overhyped indie scene resembles is an overheated stock market, a “paper boom” that attracts a lot of attention and investment, only to have its value collapse when the companies either fail to produce long-term growth, or deliver short-term profits. In a sense, paralleling the current trend for corporations to focus on quarterly earnings instead of thinking in generational timeframes, the modern indie (and to some extent, alternative pop in general) scene isn’t really concerned about long-term artist development, not the way they used to, anyway.
What stops a runaway market? At the retail level, it’s sensible financial advisers who can slow the buy/sell rollercoaster, and at the production end, the cost of money can be tweaked through adjustments of the prime lending rate. The financial press also have a role to play in managing demand, with various experts, prognosticators and pundits offering advice to the punters on where to invest their pounds.
In indie music, there are fewer controls of this nature. It’s art, after all, and it’s become politically incorrect to criticize someone else’s work - unless they are “mainstream” and therefore ripe for a “takedown.” There’s no Alan Greenspan that everyone listens to to determine what the next great trend is, no Warren Buffett to tip which bands are “long-term keepers.” There are no wise heads appointed to their ‘boards of directors’ to oversee their development.
There are critics everwhere - witness Metafilter - but to what extent do these outlets fuel or dampen the fire? As we’ve seen above, the tendency to promote something you like, or “go with the flow” and review something on its genre-tasticness, playing to the choir, or peripheral rather than musical merits, often outweighs the willingness to point out its flaws. More cowbell? More Cowell, I’d say.
The consolidation and agglomeration of major record labels into five global companies has worsened this trend, in my opinion. Over the last few years we’ve seen labels like A&M - originally founded by recording artists themselves - vanish, or be turned into hollow brands by their parent conglomerates. The legendary producers and A&R people - again, often former performing artists themselves - are all dead or retired, their legacy but a memory today. What remains is an industry run by fast-moving-consumer-goods people, who see the indie scene as a kind of style laboratory, from which to pluck the next new sound, but with very little insight about how to create enduring art, or how to develop mature, long-term recording artists.
I thought it was just more Boomer nostalgia-wank when the Gazette published a piece on “who is the new Dylan?” but the question is a valid one. Since the 1990s, really, can we point to anyone and say they’ve been truly culturally influential - touching film, music, television, figures of speech even?
Is the indie scene complicit in this? From the Rebel Sell point of view, yes. When indie takes the pose of being anti-mainstream it’s done with a knowing wink and a nod. We’re all anti-mainstream until we have a hit record, right? And as noted in Part One, the other option is to pursue the line towards complete unlistenability - or further, to not participate in music at all.
But in encouraging the kill-yr-idols aesthetic, have we left music cut off from its roots, its history, and frankly, its sense of humor?
On that note, I have at least a few conversation-starters and suggestions for today’s indie groups.
- If your band has someone named Ben in it, have him change his name to
. - Shave the beards (that goes for you too, Peaches)
- Stop dressing like children or gas station attendants. You’re all nearly 40!
- This is a verse. This is a chorus. This is a middle 8. These are good things.
- Essay topic: The Yamaha Motif is a much better synth than the Minimoog.
- The Darkness are much more exciting to watch than Yo La Tengo. Discuss.
Footnotes
* Note that Pulp and Suede took thrift-store clothes and made them look really good; let’s say when Bryan Ferry is your fashion idol and not J. Mascis, things happen.
** Exception that proves the rule: Har Mar Superstar. If radio still ruled, he’d be the new Prince.
March 5, 2006 2:24 AM
Comments
“anything except the quality of the music.”
The fact that you don’t personally like a particular style of music or particular band really fails to reflect on its quality. Maybe the ‘complete unlistenability’ you refer to reflects a generation gap more than the inherrant weakness you seem to find in indie rock?
wrote david on March 6, 2006 8:32 PM
Shawn, er — thanks!
David, I believe you’re conflating two separate things I’m saying, and misreading something else.
First, there certainly isn’t any generation gap - I’m the same age (or younger) than everyone in BSS if that gives you any indication.
There’s certainly a place in the musical spectrum for every kind of music, and an audience for every band. I’m not saying experimental-indie-rock (whatever that means) is bad per se, I’m pointing out the underlying social economy and overt marketing that goes on.
That said, from my point of view, I’m not going to equivocate and say that all songs or bands are equally good or of equal quality. Most pointedly, if a band or album doesn’t live up to its self-billing or hype, then it has failed, and it is possible to compare artists or records within the same genre and say some are better (or at least, more successful in their ambitions) than others.
It’s probably not BSS’s fault that critics described YFIIP as “perfect pop” but they certainly didn’t write strongly-worded letters to complain about that description, either.
If they call something perfect pop I’m going to judge its merits compared to the pantheon of popular songwriting: Cole Porter, Gershwin, Lerner and Loeb, Holland-Dozier-Holland, Goffin-King, Motown, the Brill Building, the Beatles, Blondie, B-52s, Blur, and Beyoncé.
To say, then, that YFIIP is a pop record stretches the bounds of credulity.
When I talk about bands becoming unlistenable, it’s from Part One, a reference to bands that attempt to make “new,” uncommercial, un-co-optable music, going down the slippery slope and making music no-one particularly likes, the ultimate example of which being noise bands.
While the musicians may have many motives for doing that, some arguably artistic, for at least some fans, professing to like a group like this is a declaration that they have better tastes, more sensitive cultural radar, and are thus “cooler” than the rest of us.
Even the more mainstream Canadian indie “pop” groups self-sabotage hit potential in their songwriting.
Read any interview with Stars, and they seem full of swagger, like the Smiths in their prime. But musically, you get lots of nice, pretty chamber-pop, nothing life-changing, oddly serious and humourless (comparing apples to apples, The Divine Comedy are more satisfying on all those fronts). Certainly nothing you’d put on to dance to on a Saturday night.
For every ‘Lost In The Plot’ the Dears write - and keep in mind, I *really* like the Dears - there’s 8 other 11-minute songs of operatic, melancholic misery that I can only imagine prompt non-fans to press the skip button.
These bands certainly have the talent in them; is it just wilfulness? The romance of the starving artist? Tall poppies syndrome (don’t sell out, maaaan), lack of pop ambition, or even some sort of misplaced sense of importance — “I won’t lower myself to something so vulgar.”
This sort of self-marginalizing helps bands keep their street cred, I guess, and the pointless “innovation” of experimental indie satisfies the need for exclusivity (a positional good) that underpins indie’s social economy.
Which is all well and good, there’s always going to be scenes and cliques and avant-gardes. But it’s a bit disingenous to then complain that the Canadian music scene is all Nickelback and Avril Lavigne, because obviously The Kids are buying that and not them.
wrote AJ Kandy on March 7, 2006 11:18 AM
sorry, man…visceral was all you could get at that point. :)
i’m totally excited about reading rebel sell…or, rather, ‘nation of rebels’. I hate that stupid title.
wrote shawn on March 8, 2006 10:36 AM
No worries :)
It’s a great book. Now that it’s out in paperback more people should have access to it, and from what I hear, it’s being translated into dozens of languages.
You might also want to pick up The Efficient Society, Joseph Heath’s earlier book - mostly talking about why Canada doesn’t go in for privatized everything like the US (or post-Thatcher Britain), and in a similar vein, Environics pollster Michael Adams’ book Fire and Ice.
on the rebel-sell front, I highly recommend Thomas Frank’s Commodify Your Dissent, The Conquest of Cool and What’s The Matter With Kansas - the first two definitely influenced the authors of The Rebel Sell when they were writing it.
I didn’t understand the name change either!
wrote AJ Kandy on March 8, 2006 11:43 AM
Hey,
Interesting article. To respond to your last comments first, it’s worth noting that both authors appear to have issues with the “Fire and Ice” approach to values. In fact, Andrew on the Blog recently linked to Joe’s article here which more or less attempts to show that values aren’t shared and moreover shouldn’t be, and shouldn’t be the basis of legislation.
It’s an excellent essay actually, although I think it relies on a fairly specific definition of “values” and undersells the value of “majoritarian semi-shared values” - eg, if homosexual rights are not a matter of our values on that issue, than isn’t it rather coincidental that our majoritarian semi-value and the corresponding American majoritarian semi-value happen to coincide with our respective interpretations of their value free ‘rights?’ In short, I’m not ready to discard Adams, even if Heath has a point.
Anyway, to return to your point somewhat, I’ve always been a bit hesitant about taking the full Rebel Sell line on musical tastes. Clearly this is an area where there is positional-good hunting and people listening to records of machine-noises and so forth. But do we really contend that the difference between JS Bach and Christina Aguilera is musical snobbery? I don’t know how to escape some unwanted declaration of absolute value, but a wholly positional attitude is a bridge too far for me.
And finally, on that note: I began listening to BSS a month or two back, after having it for a while and giving it an indifferent first listen: I love yfiip. Now, clearly, having waited this long to start liking them, I can’t possibly be cool-hunting; I am so distantly behind the pack on this one that I’m positively gauche.
It’s ludicrous to call it pop, but there are some other things it isn’t:
It isn’t, most fundamentally, an “emperor has no clothes” case, a random mess agreed to be cool. (Metal Machine Music?)
It isn’t just a mediocre arrangement of post rock with a few essays towards originality that has been draped in buzz or critical plaudits. (Examples here could be contentious, but this is clearly something that happens.)
I’m not sure how one could demonstrate the validity of my judgement about yfiip; I simply contend that, familiar with the logic of positional goods in the appreciation of music and aware that there are a lot of naked emperors shuffling around in indie music, I find it a rich and aesthetically pleasing collection of music and have done so for a month or two of listening.
wrote Jason Townsend on March 11, 2006 2:49 AM
Jason, thanks for the well-thought-out response and the Heath link. I don’t think you can refute Adams’ polling data; they do show a marked split in responses to the same questions. To avoid confusion, maybe it’s easier to avoid fuzzy terms like “values.” I think Heath and Adams might agree that Canadians do seem more committed to neutral principles of “good” than on using personal or political power to enforce specific morality, etc. on others.
In choosing YFIIP, I thought it was an interesting example of several things happening at once, firstly (given the nature of our work here at KMA+C) as a case study in niche marketing gone a little astray, and to point out that cool-hunting / positional-good-staking is an entire ecosystem, from A&R people to journalists to DJs to the punters who buy the T-shirt.
Indie’s concern with cool is just the most noticeable one, most likely because it’s the thin end of the (MuchMusic) Wedge called “mainstream.” I could equally point out Christina Aguilera fans who’d look down on Kelly Clarkson or Ashlee Simpson, or Sublime fans who look at the generation of MTV “punk” bands that ripped them off with disdain, preferring to support local unsigned or independent-label acts.
In the end, I didn’t say YFIIP was a bad album, even, my own views on weedy indie beards notwithstanding. Just that the buildup around it didn’t match the contents. Imagine if Campbell’s launched a new soup that got reviewed by, I dunno, PitchSpoon.com as ‘the best cream of tomato ever’ but was actually minestrone?
wrote AJ Kandy on March 12, 2006 1:09 AM
AJ: I agree with the Heath-Potter idea of cool as a positional good in large measure, it’s one of the reasons I’m always foisting the book on people.
But I think with music and the arts there are two considerable factors besides coolness that should probably be considered also to avoid determinism.
First, there seems to be something of an “intrinsic quality” to the best music or art which has nothing to do with coolness; say, Beethoven for example. I tread carefully with this, but does anyone really think that Beethoven’s status as a sort of artistic demigod is merely an agreed-upon fiction?
Second, there are considerations of taste which extend beyond social positioning and our view of those who appreciate such art. For example, I like Chopin and JS Bach but don’t like Rachmaninoff or Brahms. It’s not especially cool to like Chopin - it’s a bit like liking impressionist art, vaguely bourgeois - but I just like the way they sound. This isn’t intrinsic to the artist, but I think that “coolness” is less of a factor in my taste in this matter than other influences.
wrote Jason Townsend on March 12, 2006 6:07 PM
Of course personal taste is involved. As that Klosterman piece I quoted goes on to say, he thinks it’s better to just wait a couple of years, wait for the hype about any particular record to die down, then listen to it on its own merits…
The idea that there is art and communication of ideas happening in music, and its psychological and physical effects on us, is what lends it its nearly sacred status in most cultures. I don’t deny that happens. I think that may lead to some hesitation to criticize ‘someone else’s art’, and that’s a dangerous conflation of art and the artist. Sometimes the art, well, sucks, but the artist goes on to do better work. That said, we live in an era where the kind of popular entertainment you enjoy is, for better or worse, a kind of class signifier, and people like nothing better than to construct little classifications and hierarchies around that. Plus, if there wasn’t a genuine emotion in fans that ‘this is MY band, and i don’t want to share them with the rest of the world,’ the idea of cool-as-positional-good would have no currency. I know you’re mentioning it jokingly, but the fact is there are people who’ll dismiss Beethoven and Bach for 12-tone and musique concrète, and sniff at you if you claim to like Saint-Saens or Satie. God knows I’ve encountered enough jazz fascists in my time who take what would be an enjoyable pastime, and turn it into a bullying game of was-Eric-Dolphy-better-than-Coltrane, or how can you like Miles Davis post Bitches Brew, ad infinitum…
wrote AJ Kandy on March 12, 2006 8:05 PM
I think that the whole so-called “Indie” scene has still not come to terms with REM and the Cure getting really freaking popular. 20 years later and massive changes in the music industry later and people STILL have a huge complex about the fact that some indie band might be the next HUGE thing.
And many would try to prevent that from happening.
wrote Michael on March 20, 2006 9:32 AM
exxxxcellent, smithers. exxxxcellent.
love it…love it love it love it.
my brain is dancing. or orgasming. or something, but i know it’s good.
wrote shawn on March 6, 2006 1:45 PM