Indie Rock Cannot Die

A little over three years ago I fondly remember sitting down to write my thesis paper for Prof. Chris Smit’s CAS 395 Critical Approaches to Popular Music. My work focused on indie music. I hoped to apply more stringent conditions for music, all kinds of music, to be classified indie or not. Even in 2010, this seemed to be a outdated and stale task. And so my poorly researched, disjointed, vicissitudinous conclusion made the sentimental claim that indie music, hardly a genre or a subculture anymore, was thoroughly dead. With that wistful nostalgia tucked under my arm, I can say that my position on indie music has softened and evolved. Evolved because, even after Arcade Fire’s groundbreaking Grammy win in 2011, nothing has changed and the redundant indie music conversation continues.

A couple of weeks ago, music critic Steve Hyden published an article via Grantland called the Indie Rock’s Tuneful Death Rattle. Reviewing the playfully timeless new release Days Are Gone by Haim, Hyden makes the claim that indie rock is now driven by “assimilation, not alienation.” In a follow up post of his ever insightful Deconstruction series on Stereogum, Chris DeVille highlights the rise of Lorde and the development of what he calls the monogenre in context of Hyden’s work and alludes back to his own work on indie gentrification. Using Chris DeVille’s Deconstruction series as a diving board, similar to the limp death trap board at my old swimming hole in North Carolina, we can cut deeper and deeper into a pool of indie rock criticism and never touch the bottom. A majority of these critics seem to lament that their beloved late 90s and 00s bands have either been left behind or worse, made popular.

Ultimately palming the murky cement is just out of reach because of the limitations of indie rock’s amorphous definition. Indie is no longer, if it ever was or should have been, an abbreviation of independent, no longer signifies ownership by an independent band or independent label. I would argue that an “Independent Label” or “Independent Band” is a misnomer in any case. There is no delineation of size—money, employees or otherwise—between record label peers that is not subjective. DeVille is right that indie’s definition is belabored at best, yet he still concedes that, “you know indie rock when you hear it, whether in classicist forms like Parquet Courts and Cloud Nothings or modernized festival tentpoles like TV On The Radio and Spoon and Yeah Yeah Yeahs.” Given the sonic variety of TV on the Radio, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Spoon and Parquet Courts as well as the dependance on murky self-aware and intuitive premises, we’ve ended up with a definition of indie that is ultimately unconvincing.

Though every new article written about indie music is exceedingly frustrating, a unifying theory of indie seems close at hand. In his post, The O.C. and the Indie Rock Gentrification, DeVille mentions that “The O.C. was capitalizing on ‘indie’ as the currency of cool even as it opened the very floodgates that diluted the genre beyond repair or recognition.” Hyden in turn describes posturing as the one of the strongest divergences between a band like Pearl Jam (if alternative is the 90s buzzword equivalent to indie) and a band like Metallica. An artist or label’s posturing can not be far removed from a currency of cool. Marketers and record labels have the most to gain by classifying a track as indie. Gatekeepers and critics have reputation at stake in a similar manner. After all, the audience makes judgements based on exceedingly varied criteria, literally and figuratively buying into the music et al.

Therefore, allow me to offer a new definition for indie so perhaps we can better understand TV on the Radio, Spoon, Lorde and Haim: indie is not so much a sonic template as it is a word to describe a cultural economy. In other words, indie music can only exist where two or more people have gathered to talk about music in the shape of any sonic template from jazz to pop, from shoegaze to calypso. It would take a weathered psychologist to dive deep enough into the process of human interaction regarding music. Perhaps there already has been a psychologist bold enough to trace the history of indie through alternative to new wave and further back still. If a reader out there knows of a resource for me to dive into, please don’t hesitate to write me a note. To get back to my spectacular and crystal clear pool metaphor, the bottom of my ten foot pool is transformed into a dark, bottomless abyss with the introduction of a cultural economy.

Music critics are mostly musicologists as far as I can tell, tracing a sound by its roots in history judging its merits by the instrument its produced on or its perceived inspiration in past sounds or so on and so forth. This is why DeVille’s monogenre is an insightful term to describe the hyper-melting pot of music. It judges Haim, Lorde and Vampire Weekend based on their musical merits and place in history. Indie, by my definition, is aloof of the development of the monogenre. Indie would better serve to describe the investment one might make in the discussion surrounding monogenre. By discussing monogenre’s popularity we accumulate cultural funds in the form of cutting-edge music lingo and critique. Indie as a word can lose it’s meaning, but as a concept it will be reborn. New Wave, once Alternative, now Indie will in the future be some other word used as leverage in a cultural economy.

To round out my take on indie on a personal, anecdotal note, I recently received a text message from a college friend of mine, Stephanie, that read: “The song ‘Royals’ by Lorde reminds me of you. It sounds like a song that you would love and know before it got big and then be really disappointed when it was on the radio.” In the cultural economy of buying and selling, this text feels like acknowledgement of my upper middle class wealth of music knowledge and exposes a complex value system furthered in my relationships. In kind, I responded with a weak and standoffish response claiming to like Lorde when she was known as Marina and the Diamonds. The comment is less poptimist, more ambivalent. I could have just as easily said that I appreciate her feminine swagger, rich beats, minimal, intricate synths, thick harmonies… but right now I’m more interested in bands with an unpolished sound.