Empire of Dirt. Wendy Fonarow

Indie music often issues from the same wellspring of ideas that generates other aesthetic movements, and this connection can be seen in the intellectual and artistic reference points scattered across indie lyrics—surrealist films, underground books, existential philosophers, modern art, performance theory, Romantic poets, and Shakespearean plays. Indie music’s points of reference are other elite forms of artistic expression that share the same belief that artistic expression takes precedence over commercial concerns. Independent labels and bands often self-consciously apply intellectual, philosophical, and semiotic concepts. At the same time, their love of the working class means that these serious highbrow pretensions are met with a playful dismissiveness. This combination of high art and no-nonsense disregard of traditional values echoes punk’s combination of situationalist art and vulgarity (Hebdige 1979, Marcus 1990).

      Indie’s modes of assessment of artistic merit closely parallel the academic and commercial art establishments’ discourse on value in artistic production. Indie’s criteria are often applied to rock and pop in general. The result is that the music that indie enthusiasts prefer is then regarded by much of the general media as having the privileged position of art, and a small specialist community secures an extremely strong voice in the public discourse about music. While there may be just as many (or more) dance fans or mainstream chart fans, their aesthetic value systems do not dominate the public discourse on music. The indie community has been very effective in asserting the legitimacy of its critical valuation system, garnering a great deal of coverage in print, on radio, and on a significant number of television programs to boot. The extent of indie’s print coverage is quite impressive. The weekly press is devoted to indie. Select, Q, and Vox give premium coverage to indie bands.⁶¹ Additionally, the weeklies are an important training ground for music journalists and public personalities. Many journalists, radio disc jockeys, literary music writers, and television presenters who cover music have been writers for NME or Melody Maker at some point in their careers.⁶² It is little wonder, then, that the aesthetic system of the indie community is often conflated with the aesthetics of musical discourse in Britain in general.

      The weekly press plays a commanding role in establishing the discourse around any artist within British music criticism, often taking the first critical stand. For example, when Primal Scream released the album Give Out But Don’t Give Up, the follow-up to their wildly successful and critically acclaimed dance album Screamadelica, a journalist in one of weeklies called the band “dance traitors.” This description was reformulated as a question (“Are Primal Scream dance traitors?”) and discussed in subsequent reviews in monthlies and in broadsheet papers. The stance taken in the weeklies is often the defining position to which other journalists respond in their commentary on a particular artist, in part because journalists read other journalists. Moreover, press officers compile press coverage and then send an artist’s previous press clipping to different journalists to prepare for a new article or review. Thus, there is an insular recycling of commentary on early press coverage. A small incident related by a band in an early article or review can snowball and dominate a band’s interviews for years. The weekly press’s publishing timetable produces the earliest articles read by subsequent journalists.

      The voice of indie is also strong internationally. Music industry personnel and music fans in other countries read the British weekly music press. NME is available in Europe, the United States, and Japan. Most American record companies have an NME sitting on a desk somewhere. Press packs are sent to journalists in all markets. An example of weeklies setting the tone of international discourse is the characterization of the Boston band Sebadoh in Spin. Lou Barlow, a member of the band, was described in Spin as “the most sensitive man in indie music”—a moniker bestowed on him by the weeklies after a particularly stupendous display of sensitivity at the Reading festival in England.⁶³ What becomes apparent is that the specialist indie music community has a huge influence in the transnational discourse on popular music.

      It is important to understand that this discussion of critical assessment is not just about music journalism; rather, it is a discursive practice of the indie community itself. At a fundamental level, indie music fans consider themselves to be music critics. The letters pages of the indie press are filled with correspondences from indie aficionados who are outraged by reviews that contradict their own opinions. These are often followed by cogent (although most journalists might beg to differ) arguments in support of their claims. Critical analysis of music is also rampant in fanzines. British indie fanzines parallel the weeklies’ format style. Fanzine writers evaluate music, performances, and artists and assert that their own assessments have more validity than the judgments of professional journalists.

      The discourse of artistic assessment that includes the music of other traditions within the indie canon is the result of the indie members’ desire to position themselves as the true scholars of music. In the domain of artistic assessment, indie asserts to the world that its members are the true disciples of music, with their ability to ascertain true music as opposed to false idolatry, to identify the authentic and eschew the counterfeit, to embrace quality and reject worthlessness. Hence, in their discourse of aesthetic value, indie fans designate themselves as the anointed ones who can recognize, through their own system of authenticity, the truth in music.

      Perhaps nowhere else does indie’s underlying theology manifest itself more than in its self-positioning as the arbiter of taste; in this way, members designate themselves as the spiritually elect. The ability to recognize beauty and value serves as an indicator of virtue. Once again Colin Campbell’s discussion of the development of Purito-Romanticism is particularly apt as he traces the development of “taste” and ethics in the form of sensibility as a crucial moral quality. In Romantic theocracy “taste” becomes the essential indicator of spiritual merit: “The key attribute of taste became transformed into a capacity for seeing into the nature of sacred truth, relabeled ‘imagination,’ and used to link the aesthetic with the spiritual rather than the ethical. In consequence, the perception of beauty became linked to gaining of privileged insights” (Campbell 1987: 182). Later, he continues: “The middle classes, by contrast, true to their religious heritage, regarded taste as a sign of moral and spiritual worth, with an ability to take pleasure in the beautiful and to respond with tears to the pitiable, equally indicative of a man (or woman) of virtue” (Campbell 1987: 205). Correct aesthetic judgments are direct evidence of virtue. Thus “good taste” demonstrates one’s elect status. Indie has been effective in that much of the community’s musical taste has attained the privileged position of “art” in the broader cultural arena, as its successes with the Mercury Prize have shown. In defining themselves as arbiters of artistic merit, indie fans effectively portray themselves to both their own community and, less efficaciously but still influentially, to the transnational congress of musical producers and consumers, as true visionaries able to recognize music of real value.

The Mainstream Is a Centralized Hierarchy

      An identity is often forged in opposition to the contrived images of others. To demonstrate what indie is, proponents advance images of others to show what indie is not; indie creates a representation of others to conjure an image of itself. The two categories that indie invokes most frequently are the over-generalized and under-examined category of “the mainstream” and the wildly diverse category of “dance.” Indie’s representations of dance and the mainstream are not necessarily accurate, but they are a means by which indie constructs an image of itself. The characterizations I describe below are indie’s own, not ethnographic descriptions of dance or mainstream audiences or cultures.

      From its very inception, indie music was considered to have an antithetical approach to the mainstream production of music. Here, “mainstream” designates the majority of music that appears in national charts and appeals to a broad cross-section of the public. The need to differentiate indie from the mainstream, particularly mainstream rock, is crucial, since many of the stylistic elements that define the indie genre could be used to describe rock generally (four-piece combos, the emphasis on the electric guitar, etc.). It is in the nuances in the application of standard instrumentation that indie differentiates itself from the mainstream. This difference is particularly evident in indie’s production style. The DIY ethic of punk stood in stark contrast to the lavishly produced studio bands