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- Ask the indie professor: Why the 'best' indie is depressing, local and unpopular
Next time you hear a band singing about 'this town', simply tell you friends that this embodiment of the local is merely an expression of the puritan and romantic philosophies integral to indie music. That should shut them up ...
I define an indie band as anyone who sings about "my town", "your town" or "this town". What are your thoughts?
TandinoThis is a more insightful definition than you might think. When I first broached the topic of defining indie, I discussed five areas of contestation (independent label/distribution, independent ethos, genre, aesthetic judgment, and not being mainstream). What these arguments all have in common is that they (and indie) express the interconnection of two primary western philosophies: puritanism and romanticism. Puritanism is based on autonomy of local congregations, simplicity of worship, asceticism, egalitarianism, and a call to the past with restoration of original values through purification.
Within puritanism, there is a distrust of centralised authority in the guise of the Catholic church. Catholicism was protested against for being corrupt, hierarchical, distancing and disinterested in the needs and specificity of local communities. Does this sound at all like how the mainstream music industry is portrayed? It should. Romanticism cultivates emotions, the natural, the past, and the ordinary. Even the root for romanticism is "enromancier" meaning vernacular. The focus on "my town" reveals both of these impulses. "My town" is not the distanced centralised authority of London or Rome. It is the ultimate embodiment of the local, ordinary and parochial and therefore, expresses both the puritan and romantic foundations of this aesthetic movement.
I'm quite into Radiohead and realise that their music is quite depressing or melancholy which gives it a bit more of an edge. Why is depression so often linked to good music?
Richard Minkley via emailAs Poe wrote in his exposition on The Raven, "Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariable excites the sensitive soul to tears. Melancholy is thus the most legitimate of all poetic tones." This sentiment is not an aesthetic universal, but the product of the same ideologies discussed above. In melancholy, the puritan distrust of sensual pleasures meets the romantic value of extreme emotions.
Puritanism rejects indulgence and if you can't indulge yourself, what better way to experience emotional intensity than to gather pleasure from pain? The more acute the emotional experience, the more validating it is. This is why much of the music that is the heartland of indie culture is melancholic, disconsolate and miserable. The taste and sensitivity to experience pathos shows that one is a member of the aesthetically elect. The intersection of puritan/romanticism takes unrequited longing as superior to physical satisfaction. Physical satisfaction is seen as the dominion of other music genres; hence the uneasy relationship between indie and dance.
Now a more overt manifestation of the value of melancholia can be found amongst the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea. In the Gisaro ceremony, recounted in The Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of the Dancers, visiting dancers and chorus perform songs designed to bring their hosts to tears. The chorus sings of the places on their host's land and eventually about the places where loved ones have died.
Upon the experience of intense sadness, the hosts become enraged and descend upon the dancers, grabbing lit torches to burn them to avenge the suffering and pain the hosts have been made to feel. As Schieffelin puts it, "It is the very beauty and sadness that he (the dancer) projects that cause people to burn him." Sadness, here, is not an inward experience of depression, it is the encounter of grief, nostalgia, and sorrow in a public spectacle that requires violent retribution.
My question relates to "music snobbery" – for example, people who are very particular about the music they listen to, will only listen to obscure artists and reject mainstream or "top 40" music. Do you think "music snobbery" exists? If so, do you think that music snobbery is more prevalent within indie music?
Kate Bradbury ManchesterMusic snobbery is a cornerstone of indie music. It is even part of the joke cycle regarding indie, "How many indie fans does it take to screw in a light bulb?" Answer: "You mean, you don't know?" Fundamental to indie is the discursive practice of the connoisseur. Indie music fans consider themselves to be music critics with the ability to recognise music artistry. They co-opt the language of high art which marginalises the legitimacy of popular music in the first place. Some find popularity and artistic worthiness to be opposites and therefore, reject bands that become successful.
Indie fans and publications present the discourse of quality, not genre. This is why indie fans nominally embrace music from other genres. Considering other forms of music instantiates to indie music critics that they really have considered all music. Therefore, the music they like the most, indie, must be best. Indie fans designate themselves as the anointed ones, who, applying their puritan principles of authenticity, can recognise true music in contrast to false idolatry.
Thanks to the internet, indie music fans can now express their critical acumen without the fuss of making a fanzine. Within puritan/romantic theocracy "good taste" is a crucial moral quality and indicator of spiritual merit (Campbell). The more refined and exclusive the taste, the more one demonstrates one's elect status. Elitist discrimination in taste is a fundamental tenet of the ideology producing indie's music and culture. To be bothered by it, is like being bothered that Puritans are too Puritanical.
How well this fits with the contemporary fixation with the "curator," to the point the word is now used as a verb. Festivals are "curated". Music selections on web pages are "curated." DJs have starting calling themselves curators.
With so much music available, the curator chooses from the vast array to share their discerning good taste with the masses or their 286 followers on Twitter. Elitism is alive and, well, it's flourishing. Thus, the pronouncements of indie's demise are indeed greatly exaggerated.
Please post questions for the indie professor below, or email her at theindieprofessor@gmail.com
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Переслать - The Pop Group: still blazing a trail that makes rock look conservative
More than 30 years ago, the Pop Group ransacked free jazz, dub reggae, noise and funk. But I never imagined they'd still sound so vital in 2010
I saw the Pop Group just a couple of times back in the day, once in broad daylight at an outdoor festival in east London around about the summer of 1978. I've never forgotten that performance. It was the shock of the new writ large.
As far as I can remember, one member was wearing a skirt of some kind, another was sporting a Mohawk haircut. The lead singer sang though a kerchief and, later, though a megaphone. Every song seemed like a statement of wild intent, an unholy noise that merged funk, dub and avant-garde noise.
Back then, the Pop Group were almost too much to take in: pretentious, arrogant, noisy, chaotic, violent to the point of implosive. For me, they signalled the moment that punk mutated into something new and infinitely more ambitious, a chaotic merging of dub, funk, avant-garde noise with paranoid, often politically charged, lyrics. Their music spoke of a future free from the few already exhausted chords that rock'n'roll was built on.
I was reminded of all this on Saturday night at the Garage in north London, when the Pop Group, reformed with all but one of their original members, tore into We Are All Prostitutes, a song that sounds as tumultuous and deranged now as it did 30-odd years ago. I had gone to the gig with mixed feelings. When a beloved group reforms after years of silence, the heart sinks. What price memories if they are trampled on for nostalgic or economic reasons? The original Pop Group burned, and burnt out, in a few years. Now, 30 years on, older, portlier, unable to draw on the untramelled energy and optimism of youth, they were back. Would they still burn?
The answer, against all the odds, is yes. Nick Cave, once described the Pop Group's music as "unholy, manic, violent, paranoid and painful". To a great degree, that remains the case. They still sound like nothing before or since. And Gareth Sager still rushes on stage like a gleeful maniac and grabs whatever instrument is to hand – in this case, a keyboard – and unleashes a salvo of atonal noise to set things rolling. Then, a short silence broken by a familiar crash and what Cave once described as one "of the greatest ever openings of a song"; the bestial howl that begins We Are All Prostitutes.
The song rumbles and clatters along in its barely cohesive way, just about grounded by Bruce Smith's extraordinary drumming and a taut bassline that shakes the floor. I was reminded immediately of Sager's singular – and often overlooked – brilliance as a rhythmic lead guitarist of fierce intensity, a blur of movement chopping out dissonant shards of sound that punctuate the songs and undercut Mark Stewart's anguished vocals. "Our children shall rise up against us," Stewart chants, half-warning, half-hoping, still raging against those Babylonian forces of oppression.
How to describe the sound of the Pop Group? It is, more than anything else, a rhythmic noise, fractious and uneasy, dense and chaotic, but imbued with its own inner logic. It does not welcome you in, but instead provokes a reaction of some kind: fewer people leave the room tonight than used to. The vocals seem to emerge from another space than the music, a deeper, darker, even stranger, realm of the imagination. At times, it's like Franz Kafka fronting Funkadelic; at others, like a madman with a megaphone ranting at the world over some strange collision of Ornette Coleman and Lee Perry.
Unsurprisingly, things often threaten to fall apart but the sheer propulsion of the rhythm section pulls it all back from the brink. It's the exhilaration of watching a tightrope walker. The familiar thrust of We Are Time is as close as they get to a riff-based song but it careers off at warp factor 10 within seconds. The bass rumbles like an earthquake, one drumbeat echoes across another, dubbed-up, ghostly. Thief of Fire begins with an even more primal howl than We Are All Prostitutes, then stutters and judders along, frenetic, impatient.
Sonically, things can get strange when there is this much abrasiveness and distortion. You hear noises within noises: strange echoes, floating dismembered vocals, reverberations that seem to emerge from underneath your feet. And then there's the lyrics. Mark Stewart has a post-Pop Group reputation as one of the great conspiracy theorists of the British music underground, but he is a singular songwriter all the same. She Is Beyond Good and Evil remains utterly unique, utterly spellbinding: an existential love song that posits a Nietzscheian worldview over a dub-funk maelstrom that perfectly echoes the lyric's fraught articulation of all-consuming desire. Here, love is a unified front against a hostile and threatening world:
"Our only defence is together as an army/ I'll hold you like a gun."
No one has written lyrics this strange and startling since the Beats except maybe for the aforementioned Mr Cave when he was rooting though the southern swamplands with the Birthday Party. (An old Gareth Sager quote from 1978: "We are the beatniks of tomorrow".)
Back in 1979, She Is Beyond Good and Evil, produced by British dub wizard, Dennis Bovell, sounded like the most extraordinarily adventurous pop single I had ever heard. On Saturday night, it blazed anew, the guitar much more upfront in the mix, altering the contours of the song altogether. Stewart told the rock writer Simon Reynolds that the song was "an attempt to mix up poetic, existentialist stuff with political yearnings". It is all that and more, something truly beautiful and breathtaking in its formal risk-taking.
The Pop Group were young, fearless and full of themselves when I first encountered them, unafraid to be overambitious, even pretentious in order to express their impatience with pop music. They ransacked free jazz, dub reggae, noise, funk and the outer reaches of experimental rock and, for a few brief moments, before the conspiracy theories, the relentless politic ranting and the faux-tribal stylings took over, they blazed a trail that few, if any, have had the imagination or the bravado to follow. It was good to be reminded of how singular and beautifully abrasive the Pop Group could be, and how dreadfully conservative most rock music since sounds in comparison.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - New music: Marina and the Diamonds – Shampain (Pictureplane's Deep Dolphin Remix)
Marina gets a 'dark wave' remix courtesy of Pictureplane and some wailing synths
For all the attention awarded to Marina and the Diamonds during the first six months of 2010, she's yet to really capture the public's imagination. Her debut album, The Family Jewels, entered the UK top 5 but hasn't shown any real staying power, and this despite a run of singles that most pop acts would burn their collection of Topshop hats for. Still, she's not giving up yet. Shampain, her fifth single – complete with drunken lingerie models re-enacting Thriller in the video – has been remixed by 'dark wave' pioneer, Travis Egedy aka Pictureplane, who adds lashings of echo to the vocals and strips away the slightly fussy musical backing to leave a simple beat and strange, wailing synths. That line about feeling "celestial" certainly makes more sense now.
Shampain is out on 11 October
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать
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