Gimme (More) Indie Rock (Questions)

“That’s very simple. ‘Indie’ is short for ‘independent.’ Independently released music is not directly financially dependent on any of the four major labels (WMG, Sony BMG, EMI and Universal). ‘Indie’ does not refer to a style of music; it refers to the financial circumstances of its distribution. Anybody who tells you otherwise is lying to you, and should be viewed with suspicion.”

Love Douglas Wolk’s definition (which he earlier offered at Moistworks–great stuff all around on that post), and all discussion should stop here, really.

But it never will, will it?  Which is why it’s good that Carrie Brownstein’s tackling The Big Issues over at her NPR blog, and not doing the “OMG rock lyrics are quite crazy when you think about it, right?” stuff anymore (hopefully).  This is the epitome of pub chatter, but it’s a lot of fun.  Al Shipley’s take, for instance, is a nice step outward:

“‘Indie’ was already well on its way to primarily describing an aesthetic criteria, more than a business model, ten years ago. The main difference since then is that where it once was used colloquially as an abbreviation for ‘indie rock,’ the rock is gone and indie is just indie now. Indie pop, indie dance, indie hip hop, every genre has its own variant filtered through the indie sensibility, and what little rock still exists in indie doesn’t rock very hard anymore.”

It’s tough for some folks to think of music genres as anything other than the folkloric/musicological ideal of “co-occurrent formal features,” but it’s necessary.  American indie used to be linked to post-punk, hardcore, white-dude guitar rock because that’s who was making the most out of independent music–from a numbers perspective perhaps, but mainly from a discursive angle, i.e., using the term as a badge of honor.  It’s a historical coincidence of music and market, really: indie started to show some market mettle at the same point it was dominated by a particular strain of style.  Done, and done.

Over the past 10 or so years, of course, independently-released music has become “the majority of worthwhile music,” with a few notable exceptions (hip-hop primary amongst them, but probably not for long).  I think one of the important future-predicting questions to ask, especially as more labels get savvier with distribution and promotion: When will “indie” cease to really mean anything even in economic-distinction terms?  When will we (will we ever?) stop thinking of “the majors” as anything resembling a force in musical culture?  When will thinking about “major labels” as a creative force be dismissed out of hand as residual longing?  Are we almost there?  I think we’re almost there.

Filed under: Carrie Brownstein  Douglas Wolk  genre  indie rock  major labels  selling culture