Indie Hits the Wall

Because I'm not that into "indie" music, I don't know much about Joanna Newsom. I've heard the name, sure, scattered about the mags like so much hipster detritus, but never bothered to listen. The name does not excite me and I've other things to do.

So it's something that Nitsuh Abebe, inaugurating Pitchfork's "Why We Fight" feature, draws me into an analysis of the elbow-throwing and hyper-criticism of the music world that centers on Newsom. The theme runs universal, I think, fandom puts pressure on artists to meet ever-rising expectations while limiting the range in which the artist can act on them. A typical band fan wants every record to sound like the one he/she fell in love with, and yet be different. The impossibility of this diminishes its ubiquity not one jot.

Besides, we want pop stars to be oversized and perverse-- often we want them to think they're more special than us. My question, though, is this: Don't we want the same level of imagination and confidence from indie acts? And if so, why do a lot of us seem slightly wary about the possibility? Why celebrate pretense and bold gestures in pop music, but get weirdly skeptical of them in the indie world? It's as if we've reached the point where one long-running indie value-- the idea that the performers are a lot like the audience-- has started eating up a much more interesting one: that indie can be a realm that embraces oddity and strangeness. This is the funny predicament of a lot of talk about modern indie. It's as if the audience doesn't think of itself as very interesting, and is skeptical of any band that comes out of its midst thinking it's any better. (Especially if people, somewhere outside of the indie world, seem to agree.) Successful, self-conscious strangeness in the mainstream is a triumph; the same thing in this fringe genre is, for some reason, sometimes considered pretentious, self-satisfied, laughable, overstepping one's station.

This sounds exactly like the problem that punk rock had/has: the grooves are so well worn, the visual and audio expectations so determined in the word "punk" that it's impossible to push the envelope without becoming something else, and thereby losing the audience. I'm as guilty as anyone else; most of what gets called "melodic punk" sounds overwrought and dull to my ears, while what gets called "77-style" sounds like a tedious copy of other bands work. There's something of inevitability to this process; rock music is deliberately amateurish and there's only so much you can do with 12-bar structure and pentatonic solos.

So maybe the answer is recognizing the un-originality of this and embracing the repitition, or at least, not being surprised by it. I'm rather moving in this direction myself; there's no pleasure in telling people "This was better 20 years ago, when it was __________" except as sharing _____________ as something cool. We don't need to reject the Raveonettes to save the Jesus & Mary Chain.

Overall, though, I'm intrigued by this series. Music meta-criticism is rather long overdue.