Indie Rock Holds a Mirror to its Own "Enigma"...again.
Because that curious intersection of popular culture and actual, accepted academia is where my mind tends to wander, and because the idea of self-perception v. popular perception v. the creation of an "image" v. the odd phenomenon of celebrity-ism never seems to grow old, Pitchfork has yet again taken upon itself the challenge of determing just what is so compelling about people with instruments and varying degrees of lyrical skills who are, by all other accounts, "just like us."
Excerpt:
As the music nebulously classified as "indie" again inches toward the mainstream, a funny thing has happened to image-making. The everydude archetype established in Michael Azerrad's Our Band Could Be Your Life and later standardized by 1990s indie rockers like Pavement and Guided By Voices has remained the persona of choice. It's almost as if bands today are competing for the most authentic DIY story. A recent essay on PopMatters.com took a hard line, equating big indies like Sub Pop and Matador with major labels and bemoaning the marginalization of "truly independent music-- music written, recorded, and released independently." In certain circles, the image of not having an image carries more currency today than it has since 1991-- and even grunge lionized smelly weirdos like Kurt Cobain and Layne Staley. Today's indie rockers want to be just like you.
http://pitchforkmedia.com/features/weekly/06-02-20-self-portrait.shtml
For we veterans of the streets-of-New-York commodifying DIY culture discussion, this comes as a rather pedestrian re-hash of a rather unsurprising concept. From a macroperspective, does this blowing-up-the-everyman/reinvention of the idea of the rock star signify anything at all about American culture?
What about verisimilitude?
My OSU professor had a pet concept called the "authenticity trap", which he applied to Tupac Shakur, and to a lesser extent, the great tragic bluesmen like Robert Johnson. To what degree do we demand authenticity in our musical/literary experiences, and where, exactly, is the "plastic/pure" line drawn?
What about irony, comedy, embracing the machine?
What about (shudder) Kelly Clarkson?
I'm too busy listening to my super-authentic Bob Dylan from Hibbings, MN (see! the (un)original liar! He wasn't even alive during the Dust Bowl!) sings 1920's West Virginia mining ballads to accurately analyze. Peripheral as this discussion may be, I think that it does have the potential to deliver some fundamental truths of human nature. Whether or not it is even fruitful to dig them out is, like everything else, still up for questioning.
Happy Sunday!
Love (x 4?),
Jessi.
Excerpt:
As the music nebulously classified as "indie" again inches toward the mainstream, a funny thing has happened to image-making. The everydude archetype established in Michael Azerrad's Our Band Could Be Your Life and later standardized by 1990s indie rockers like Pavement and Guided By Voices has remained the persona of choice. It's almost as if bands today are competing for the most authentic DIY story. A recent essay on PopMatters.com took a hard line, equating big indies like Sub Pop and Matador with major labels and bemoaning the marginalization of "truly independent music-- music written, recorded, and released independently." In certain circles, the image of not having an image carries more currency today than it has since 1991-- and even grunge lionized smelly weirdos like Kurt Cobain and Layne Staley. Today's indie rockers want to be just like you.
http://pitchforkmedia.com/features/weekly/06-02-20-self-portrait.shtml
For we veterans of the streets-of-New-York commodifying DIY culture discussion, this comes as a rather pedestrian re-hash of a rather unsurprising concept. From a macroperspective, does this blowing-up-the-everyman/reinvention of the idea of the rock star signify anything at all about American culture?
What about verisimilitude?
My OSU professor had a pet concept called the "authenticity trap", which he applied to Tupac Shakur, and to a lesser extent, the great tragic bluesmen like Robert Johnson. To what degree do we demand authenticity in our musical/literary experiences, and where, exactly, is the "plastic/pure" line drawn?
What about irony, comedy, embracing the machine?
What about (shudder) Kelly Clarkson?
I'm too busy listening to my super-authentic Bob Dylan from Hibbings, MN (see! the (un)original liar! He wasn't even alive during the Dust Bowl!) sings 1920's West Virginia mining ballads to accurately analyze. Peripheral as this discussion may be, I think that it does have the potential to deliver some fundamental truths of human nature. Whether or not it is even fruitful to dig them out is, like everything else, still up for questioning.
Happy Sunday!
Love (x 4?),
Jessi.
posted by goodbye, goodbye at 9:25 AM
14 Comments:
Thank God for you Adam, or at least for the unfailingly acute critical eye which you seem to lend to all of these debates--every time that I feel I am opening a wholly objective can of proverbial worms, or attacking something from the most procedural angle possible, I come to see that I (and perhaps I am not alone in this) have been so wholly saturated in the substantive propaganda leveled at me (or, in this case, that I so willingly chase after) that I'm not really doing anything but wriggling around within the confines of the orbital that I am attempting to question.
I. As to the fallacy of the term "indie," I could and mayhaps do agree, but doesn't using the term engage in the same sense of critical irony that Foster Wallace undertakes with his, like, satirization of the syntax? I'll stop trying to cop any points in the humor department to make up for my logical retardation. But, what I am really trying to say is this--isn't it alright to deal in the same commonly accepted commodities of speech that an institution (i.e. Pitchfork...my capital P, not yours) disseminates, if one is attempting to analyze something "positively" ?
Or is that just another logical fallacy?
If so, how is it possible for the reader/viewer/democratic citizen/anyone to free themselves wholly from whatever system of false words/images/associations they are surrounded by? I want to know, because I want to do it, even if I am still struggling to understand!
II. The two factors influencing the appeal of music at large, or, particularly, music that any one listener would deem "authentic," seem incredibly valid as substantiated by my own listening experience & patterns of musical selection.
Is this coincedence of interests & experiences/ the mutual swooning of two separate hearts to the same conceptual idea made manifest in song something that makes use of the free market system, or did it arise from it?
I am saying this because my studies of the rise of the music industry as industry seem to indicate that this type of deeper, "feeling"-based musical association didn't exist in an Americans-deliver-to-Americans sense until the rise of big recording studios like Columbia & Sun. Before that, J. Philip Sousa wrote the pieces played for the local bands, churches sung the hymns and the folkies (the ones to whom that term would have had absolutely nil significance) did whatever they did in the mountains. Music seemed to serve only the basic purpose of socialization, and fulfilled a need for superficial interaction and a common ground provided by weddings, dances, hoe-downs, graduations, funerals and fourth of july parades.
However, people have been swooning to classical music for as long as it has been distributed, so it seems that this type of individualized response to music is more dependent on the means of recording & distribution than on the rise of a specific music industry within the framework of the American economy.
So it is still, at heart, an economic matter--and the difference, you say, is who is doing the supplying (corporate interest v. unpremeditated individual interest) ?
And then, if that (for lack of a more appropriate word) "magical" spark of connection exists and records sell and we listeners feel not quite so alone, something at least is working, and we shouldn't question it, as long as we are content and the music is good?
In a bout of absolute honesty (to combat all of those steathily disguised lies I have dropped on the blog since its inception), this has been partially an attempt to understand the musical economy, partially an attempt to understand the reasons that my arguments always seem to fall apart (and really! that is okay! I want to get better at these things!) and partially an attempt to create a map of the ways that Mr. Higuera always seems to see through to the bottom of things.
An outright framework, in numerical order, for how to think critically when critical thinking is needed, and how to leave things alone when nothing is there, would be muchly appreciated!
P.S.--People like people who are like them in obvious ways, and people like people who are different than them and can bring new experiences to the fore, but what people seem to like more than anything else is finding out that the people who are immensely unlike them are exactly like them in those secretive, highly personal ways communicated only through the long conversations made possible by books & albums.
But hey-hey-now, Telluride Association: I still don't understand democracy.
A Tangential Question:
Is formation of group identity and the development of subcultures a direct product of the type of individual "bonding" experience that you've described with a particular novel, artist, or song?
Is the 2ndary level of "connectedness" not as valid as the first, if it is based on loose genre affiliations and loaded things like the portrayal of oneself as "indie" by merit of listening to [insert your own] ?
The personal ownership vested in individual tastes is really very bizarre, especially when possessiveness & territoriality come into play.
Dick Hebdige did a very interesting study of the development of subcultures, musical ones, especially, that I think I have mentioned before--I would be able to quote it more specifically, but someone is hoarding my collection of pop & rock criticism.
It seems, to me, that it isn't just the Pitchfork-level players creating the image of "indie" or what-have-you, no matter how fallacious. It happens somewhere between individual self-determination (Yes, I find the idea of playing the banjo appealing, because it conforms to my sense of "luddism," "cultural conservatism," "primitivism," and "nostalgic romanticism",) and the desire for group identification.
D.H. Lawrence played around with a term called "contradistinction": I think it is appropriate. The individual is defined by contrast to others around him or her, and bulking up in numbers based on shared tastes, especially musical (which, in turn, usually seems to indicate an entire shared spectrum of life philosophies) helps the individual in the process.
I don't know if I have said anything worthwhile. Sometimes I fear that I am creating more of a muddle than anything else. But if there is anything to consider, please latch on or tug-&-tear.
P.P.S.--
Adam, sorry that I did not say it sooner, but I do miss the forum. I feel that the higher degree of order and procedure required by the board system was better serving to the principles of discussion, response & argumentation, and was alot like the syntax employed in programming--pesky, but absolutely essential to making sure things do not break down.
It is difficult to argue on the blog, to respond to multiple trains of thought, and to present new ones.
May I suggest permanent entries for the imposition of a formal Parliamentary rules system akin to our oh-so-productive House Meetings!
And now, like the Old Yeller of my youth, I will retire to the shed to be shot.
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Well, when you identify strongly enough with music, you take slights to that music as slights to yourself, and failures to experience the same "magic" as failures to recognize the validity of your subjective existence.
Lack of ostentatious sociological vocabulary aside (I cannot help it if I response favorably to that sort of thing,) this statement is remarkably true, and I agree wholeheartedly. Huzzah for feelings of extreme musical/literary identification, and boos & hisses for having the validity of one's "subjective" (ahem) existence de-nied. Hence my bristling at your dismissal of Little Boy Sufjan and his canon of banjos, beauty, and (in which she concedes to Mr. West) "complex mathematical patterns involving the layering of multiple instruments and unique or impossible time signatures."
I found your piece on the democratization of art/ the industrialization of the masses to be incredibly enlightening, especially since I am attempting to write one of my MBTA essays on the convergence of low art and high art, and was apparently missing the fundamental driving force of the cultural shifts of the 20th century: those damned wars.
I know that this is reductive, but I have a peculiar interest in modernism, or at least European/Anglocized modernism as I understand it and as a distinctive reaction to WWI. When you say that
[quote]
...modernism was still the dominant philosophy entering the postmodern condition[/quote Higuera]
do you mean to indicate that Postmodernism is just modernism hit with a good dash of gunpowder and a bit of the Luftwaffe, and not something entirely new?
I suppose that the idea would be nothing revolutionary, because most things in history--processes, patterns of thought, at least--fit somewhere on the thesis/antithesis, radical/reactionary spectrum.
But, again, I do think that the rise of popular culture has instituted a significant shift in the way that art movements, whatever they may be, react to other cultural/sociological/national happenings--again, maybe this is obvious, but the demystification of art as something lofty and sacred created a much broader spectrum of probable responses, in which Dave Eggers' response is "equally valid" to F. Wallace's response is "equally valid" to yours or my own.
From a publishing, perspective, that is.
People always retain their independent aesthetic judgment systems, which, one may hope, vacillate at least a small amount from the (fictive?) norms.
And none of the above is to say that "they" didn't publish crap in Keats' time--so much of this analysis is a result of histiography and cultural memory that I'm not sure where to stop or start, or what to question.
However--back to the Modernism/Postmodernism Shift--
I would be interested to know how you view the transformation, or, more simply, how you would define modernism in contrast to postmodernism/whatever now exists as the dominant unconscious/media-meditated philosophy of the masses.
And on one final note:
Hey, Mighty Roman,
The plebians (bar, bar, bar) would like a translation.
Merci!
P.S.: Modernism ain't dead yet.
P.P.S.: Who the hell owns Pynchon--the Po-Mo's? (The Fallacy of Canonical/Taxonomical Thought--and this applies to musical genre-adoption, as well!: "a place for everything, and everything in its place...")
P.P.P.S.: Campaign for more accurate/descriptive signifiers duly noted.
I. I believe that literary Modernism c. 1920 (Joyce, Faulkner, Eliot, Proust...) is an entirely different beast than Corbusian Modernism c. 1940-60. I was quite disappointed at TASP, because the two didn't seem to form any more of a cohesive cross-disciplinary ideological framework than the Decemberists do the Decembrists...
But all is forgiven,
Modernism.
II. I need to read more Derrida, don't I? And maybe some Foucault as well? Semiotics is crazy (and is the only Big Expansive Arch of post-modernism critical theory that I have started to crack) but so is the idea of deconstructing without a gameplan for reconstruction.
III. Haha!
Long may you (and your "gustibus") live, deconstruct & prosper!
IV. Adam, what is the recipe for human happiness?
Entropy is the cause of all human sadness?
I remember Emily mentioning something about this in our bathroom sometime in mid-July, and I had never before heard of the concept (in those glorious days before AP Chemistry), and I was quite astounded.
Adam, in your bizarre, mathematical, bookish, engineering way, I believe you have stumbled upon the most tragic and beautiful thing in the world.
Order is to the epherality of life as chaos is to the continuance of all elemental particles in different assembledges of forms?
And the universe, all the while, is dying a slow and silent heat death?
And the stars are fizzling out one by one?
Oh, god, where is Keats when we've ushered in the era of quantum mechanics?
My ordered little heart still pounds in Iambic pentameter!
But really, if you have the time, do explain--I have a feeling that there is more to this, much like there was more to those wrenching illustrations of Tommy scanning those 0's & 1's across the infinite waste lands of logical space!
(Intersections of math-science and Big Emotions may well be, for Jessi Holler, the source of all human happiness. Subjectivity lives!)
Oh, Blast Ye!
That's not High Romantic at all!
And joking should be outlawed.
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I still think one of the funniest moments of TASP was when Adam walked up to the puzzle table with a near-completed puzzle and went:
"Would you guys like me to show you postmodern deconstructionism on that puzzle?"
That was fucking hilarious!
Dear me, Jimmy, I think I missed one of the epochal moments (contradiction or confusion of terms?) in TASP History!
I was there for much of the puzzle destruction, but if only I would have been there for the philosophical ratification of my blind actions!
And you of the poetic "O", do not ascribe to human limitation! Infinity in a grain of sand and fear in a handful of dust, wotwot?
But, I do agree that nothing is quite so sad as the jarring contrast between the infinite possibilities of the human imagination and the constraints imposed by corporeal form, space/time/lack of better neural networking, and whatever religious-spiritual framework you want to penetrate: pour moi, the fragmentation of the omniscient into confused subjective entities baffled by the absolute inadequacy of any method of communication; torn by the opaqueness of all media.
Living is sorrow,
and art imitates...
art.
I MISS PUZZLES. What greater unintentional symbol of our collective intellectual strivings/anarchial tendencies?
Oh, cursed entropy!
I miss Everything!
(Because we're sort of dying already.)
Ha!
Perhaps I understand completely.
That said, whatever principles of postmodernism were flying through the air at the time, I think that Sodom & Gomorrah, Inc. (sadly bankrupt due to the decreasing affordability of mail-order natural disasters) achieved in relative quantity of puzzle pieces displaced and relative instances of Michael's annoyance what you achieved in your dictum.
However, in the Puzzlemaster's defense--
given his octogenarian perspective on life, the dates line up:
Mr. Thornton has every right to be a bonafide Modernist of the literary-social-cultural ilk!
If only I were so lucky...
Modernism & Postmodernism For Befuddled Contemporaries
Authenticated information, Everyone!
Sarah--c'est le temps pour Nietzsche!
Adam--Tell us what you know about Kierkegaard!
And since cannot really shed much light on anyone post-Hegel, I just feel vindicated knowing that I would have been absolutely at home among the aesthetic revolutionaries (read: ROMANTICISM!) of the early 19th century.
Eh. Only two-hundred years off. One cannot ask for everything.
YOUVE BEEN HIT BY THE BOOTY BUS!!!!!!!!!!! KEEP UP THE MEGA JIVES AND SWING TO THE DISCO BEAT!!!!!!!!!
@#)*($&(@*7888888^^^^@888
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