I was raised on a musical landscape that agonized over whether it was a betrayal to still buy REM records once they signed to Warners (and made one of their masterpieces, what a shame it would have been to miss it) and the band felt such a burden that they painfully trotted out the scene they had left behind as opening acts, for an arena tour only the headliner was equipped for. Bands like The Pixies and Throwing Muses needed to be signed to UK indies and covered in v23 sleeve designs before we could embrace their return to our shores, courtesy of Seymour Stein and Sire. It was the era that the five-dollar all-ages policy was laid into cement by Fugazi and bands like The Minutemen turned living econo into a badge of honor. All that mattered was that you did your best not to compromise your music.
Once grunge exploded, pulling punk behind it like a personal indie albatross laid across Kurt Cobain’s checkbook, the conversations about our musical ethics took on a hyper focus. We were willing to give in to the perfect culmination of our record collection that was “Nevermind,” and sure, Sonic Youth deserved to finally get paid – as long as we heard those words “creative control” in the contract. But we still had our standards and some things were off limits. The majors began to relax and stopped hiding their “fake” indie labels they had set up to cover the true farm team nature of such arrangements. Plus Sonic Youth, like REM before them, were using the increase in funds and exposure to make some of the best music of their lives. It was starting to smell like a win/win.
Then, someone that couldn’t possibly benefit, financially or creatively, stepped into the argument, in a way that they surely could have never imagined during their brief lifetime. Nick Drake’s beloved (by tens of thousands at best mind you) iconic “Pink Moon” found it’s way into a Volkswagen commercial. Drake had been a tightly held secret amongst the indie circles. Someone only shared once you were deemed worthy of all that his recordings had to offer. I tried to get everyone I could find to fall in love with American Music Club, but Nick, well… Nick was just for me.
Somehow the ad didn’t bother me all that much though. I was older, and in a way, I felt like I (and others like me) had held on to “Pink Moon” for long enough. Besides, I was soon surprised to find myself falling so hard for a little record my friend had done the design for, some mix of all the shambling pop strummers of scenes past and sounding like every sweet note in the Flying Nun handbook called The Shins. When their pitchy doo-da-doos were suddenly emanating from my television, I couldn’t believe it. When I saw it was for a McDonald’s commercial - I knew a sacred cow had been slaughtered (and eaten.)
Like everyone around me, I could see that the business model for selling records was rapidly changing, and even though I didn’t know I would be talking about “syncs” right and left today, I did know that the rules of the game were forever altered. I decided that it was a good thing that The Shins were able to find a way to make enough money to turn this into their full-time job and invest in some additional equipment to get them where they were going quicker, and on their own terms. Not to mention actually getting paid, as opposed to ripped off like the long line of Tom Waits impersonators of the past. I hated to put it this way – but I “forgave” them for selling out, as it were.
Who knew all of this indie “guilt” would just melt away? Hearing that commercial, and gauging the reaction to it, seemed like an alternate universe from the one where I actually considered whether wearing my beloved REM Green tour t-shirt (from their show at the Capital Centre) was going to get me a load of shit at a high school field party (I wore it anyway – had to rest my Wire “Kidney Bingos” tee.) There seemed to be only one travesty left that you could commit – selling out by changing your sound.
It was strange enough to see that indie/punk was a marketable avenue to this degree anyway – pushing millions of records by the suddenly fashionable thrash of the likes of Green Day (who still haven’t really changed their root sound) or bands like The Strokes, or Interpol, taking the past decades of cool and turning it into something I love - but my Mom might buy at Starbucks as well. There was money to be made here.
Now, even the hard liners have always accepted that bands have to mature over the years, and progress their sound, and the loss of members is likely to send them into a new direction (Jonathon Fire Eater to The Walkmen raising no more eyebrows than The Minutemen to fIREHOSE) but it had to happen organically. You couldn’t suddenly go “disco” as so many rock artists had done to terrible effect in the 70s.
Or could you?
In the past, the move was to do something like Kara’s Flowers putting out a crap record only to re-emerge as the slick and silky Maroon 5. No cred there, and in truth, none needed. A brazen grab at the brass ring of Top 40 stardom and screaming little girls and late night trysts with Jessica Simpson, where no one expects your t-shirt to sell anywhere other than Hot Topic.
But the past few years have seen a sudden change, where a band like The Drums can rise from the ashes of the likes of Goat Explosion and Elkland, after their major label mishaps, and name check The Wake and get a pass. I love The Wake and I am glad to hear that sort of influence in anyone’s music - and to be honest any Wake is good Wake. It didn’t take long for me to notice that they were cribbing heavily from the oldies channel, either with their doo-wop melodies or classic structures, and when I heard one of their strongest lines from another source – kid’s balladeer Laurie Berkner no less – I had to wonder where they both lifted it from. Oddly, I didn’t much care about all of that in the end because they made an exhilarating EP of odes to summer and careless days and nights that hit me in so many good spots that I could no longer resist. I just liked it.
The final bridge to cross, for all of us aging music snobs, eventually reared its shaggy head on our radios/TVs/computers recently, dripping with… well… with sincerity (and a long ass name.)
Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes seemed like the typical hippy neo-psych SoCal-country collective that we have come to embrace, along the lines of Devendra Barnhart and his famous girlfriends. Only this time, it had a Sheryl Crow polish on it that should have set off an alarm or two.
You see, the band is fronted by Alex Ebert “playing” the messiah that is Edward Sharpe - no biggie - except just a few years earlier he was fronting one of the most horrible brass/ass grabbing bands of all-time in Ima Robot. The scary part about Ima Robot is that they already appeared manufactured, and a little past their prime, with Ebert doing a sincere presentation of the figure Russell Brand would lampoon to riotous world wide success. Just looking at his horrific hair and v-neck tees makes me wretch. Ima Robot was everything wrong with the music industry. I mean this.
So when he gathered some LA musos, and bragged about his rehab, and boarded an aging school bus to tour the country – well… it is safe to say that we were skeptical as to his intentions. That he did so by hiding his former credits, and given name for that matter, certainly didn’t dispel our suspicions -nor did his ready for soccer moms ballads and annoying as hell website.
Soon, the band was skyrocketing from small clubs to selling out the 930 Club and, as with everything that becomes popular so quickly, a lot of eyebrows were raised. That the music was suddenly linked to every product on TV, and a scathing Pitchfork review revealed the ruse to hipsters all over the web, seemed to be the nail in the coffin. Finally, I thought, the issue of “cred” would be back on the table.
But you know what? No one cared.
You didn’t see the blogosphere picking up on Pitchfork’s indignant post. You only started to hear their music in more places, until it was all consuming and unavoidable, and not a single whistleblower was heard. Even I had to admit “Janglin” was no worse than the other beard bands, even with its forced “check check” at the beginning. Certainly it had as much right to help sell shit as anyone else. Not to mention that “Home” was the finest slice of tragic romance delivered in call and response form since The Jesus and Mary Chain’s “Sometimes Always.” I found that I wasn’t offended in the least and I sorta liked what they were doing.
And more than anything:
I no longer cared why they were doing it.
God loves a cheerful giver.
ugh, "indie" is still crap. theres plenty of genres that still have an inaccessible nature and rabid fan bases. Acting like the watered-down slow or garagey rock that twentysomethings can easily consume is truly "indie" is dumb. Go to some fucking house shows.
LOL Indy Cred
this is soooo great.
dear musicians--if some cheesedick licenser thinks your song is good enough for a reebok commercial, take the money and run because CONGRATS YOU HAVE A CAREER!!!!
because for darn sure nobody is buying your other 11 shitty other songs and nobody is going to care about the cover art you and your girlfriend spent six months making.
i love the idea of ima robot--very rock and roll. some dope musicians got together, wrote some pop songs, toured with the white stripes, slayed models, and now they all have their OWN studios in hollywood with shiny black luxury sedans and significantly hotter wives with more tasteful tatoos than they could ever have dreamed of. ed sharp just went back for more--why the fart not?
maaan--if you've got some talent and you can write a song, you can have some fun in the industry. you may as well fucking go for it. see the light. dc 4 evar
@Martin Celery. Amen. Shit Ima Robot! Them bros were like, daaamn im bored with playing drums in Beck, let's start the biggest band in LA and see how big we can take it. And it was a commercial flop. But they are all still making music and getting paaaaaid. Cause they are more talented than you. And like they give a fuck about cred when they are writing hits for Flo Rida.
"Indie cred" is a marketing tool just like sync licenses.
The loosely defined genre of "indie" is just poorly recorded, often poorly performed, idiosyncratic pop music.
158837 @Martin Celery: Yeah brah, god forbid anyone ever gets any money for writing a great song. Let's all charge 5 bucks for our shows and play in drug-free alcohol-free 'show spaces' and not sell shirts because anything else would be too, like, commercial, mannnn.
All of the indie bands I listen too are more indie than the indie bands you listen to.
Hey look guys it's an old man complaining about the kids on his lawn. That is what this article is. It is "HEY YOU KIDS GET OFF MY LAWN."
158844 @Dave: You must have terrible reading comprehension. "Get off my lawn" is a complaint about what the 'kids' are doing, you see, whereas this is a justification for what the kids are doing.
As a label, the term "indie" carries no meaning, and neither does saying that "indie is crap."
fugazi and master p taught children of the 90s the same lesson.
viz, control the means of your own production or run the risk of being successful in a way that you cannot stand.
so musicians learned that we have to be our own business managers and market ourselves rather than let someone else do it for us. once audiences are used to music being just another branded piece of merchandise, it became impossible to do without that structure around yourself--a band without a logo is nothing, there is no functional difference between the band and its hype, especially since the only real money to be made is to convince folks to come to your shows, not download your album, since nobody listens to more than a single at a time now anyway.
The developments are neither good nor evil, they are simply what is. You can be a good marketer or a bad one, those are your choices. Anyone who thinks this is a new or revolting development has never understood Malcolm McLaren.
great piece john.
158849 @Peter: LOL "great piece"
I got pavement tickets in central park I can sell you Peter, 200 bucks. I heard Malcolm McLauren is guest DJing.
@Nate 1: It is a justification for "What the kids are doing" wrapped in a complaint about the inauthenticity of the experience re: What the kids are doing. It is a recognition that good music has nothing/little to do with number of units pushed or the label that a band is on disguised as novel revelation. I don't feel illuminated by reading the piece, I just feel pity that people (STILL) have to create false dichotomies between good and popular. It seems to be snobbery disguised as intellectualism.
The two merits I can think of for "discovering" a band are the ability to see them play for cheap at a smaller venue with fewer people and a greater utility in "signaling" to others something more essential about yourself through the art that you connect with. If I tell you I like the Jackson 5, you know little about me. If I tell you I like [xxx] Matador band from the late 1990s you know more about me. If I tell you I like [yyy] Harrisonburg, VA band from the early 1990s you know more about me. But that doesn't change anything about the intrinsic value of the art in question, it just tells you something about how I perceive myself or want to be perceived by others. That doesn't make the actual songs better.
The great tragedy here is that the definition of “indie” that was cemented between 1986 and 1989. As Simon Reynolds points out in Rip it Up and Start Again, before the mid 80s, indie was a catch-all term to describe a sonically diverse range of artists who were releasing music on labels that were not part of the major label system. Look at the track listing of the C81 cassette: the free-jazz rock of James Blood Ulmer, Orange Juice, the (English) Beat, Furious Pork! It’s an insane listen, but it’s got some range. Compare that to 1986 “C86” which was basically an hour of second rate Smiths copyists. (In that release’s defense, some of the bands on C86 were able to shed the shambling sound for more adventurous things – the Wedding Present, Primal Scream and of course McCarthy).
Perhaps even more depressing is the dismissive attitude that some people have taken towards DIY culture and anti-mainstream culture. The guys in Ima Robot are careerist hacks, indie-cred be damned. What’s worse? Paint by numbers indie or shameless culture-vulturing as a means to sell records? Shit music, regardless. Have fun writing for a no-talent rapper. Scared of a wee bit of hard work, are we?
I will defend the recording practices of some of the more shambling elements of the indie ghetto because the sounds they come up with are a helluva lot more interesting than the horseshit that is being pumped out cut-corner “producers” whose studios are stacked with the most expensive rack mounted processors. Too many shit pop records that sound the same. Same guitars. Same tones. Same vocal processing. And for the record, I’m not a luddite.
I’ll also defend some of the great indie bands for defecting to the majors. Rough Trade, Homestead, SST and IRS were all notoriously bad with their artist support and accounting practices. Sonic Youth and REM both benefited hugely from having bigger recording budgets and access to wider markets. Galaxie 500 would’ve done well on a major, had they not split up (Rough Trade never paid them any royalties).
I also realized the first time I watched Edward sharpe et al. that their female singer, Jade, used to model and work for American apparel towards the beginning and was queen of the LA cahuenga hipster scene for some time..seemingly boning the cobrasnake, and everything. Now she's a "hippie." And the music's still good to me...
youre not an academic. or an intellectual. you just like music a little more than most people. stop being an overly analytical asshole.
158881 @your sweet internet name: It's a shame he put a gun to your head and made you keep reading it, huh? Somebody should do something about that John Foster, he's a menace.
@Nate 1 Oh, so turgid, self-serving essays shouldn't be criticized? Got it. Generally I like to read things that are well-written, but clearly our opinions vary.
I didn't think this was particularly self serving.
158890 @dave: Agree with Svetlana. How is this self-serving? And your previous comment seems to draw EXACTLY the same conclusion the author drew, which is that despite his inclination to ascribe 'careerist' intentions to a band like ES&TMZ, he ultimately finds he no longer cares about that aspect of it. I arrived at a similar conclusion some time ago. Evidently you did too. Why you think it's such a bad thing for somebody to lay that process out in writing is kind of dumbfounding.
death of indie cred? or the transformation from inauthentic cool to admittedly uncool (getting older)
I think this piece was self-serving because it started out as self-aggrandizing standard trope about how the author was there when indie meant something. What is the use of establishing that that author had indie cred if he then goes on to say "But it doesn't mean anything anymore." You can cut the article to the line about Edward Sharpe and the essential point remains more or less the same.
That last comment was mine, not Nate_1's (obv)
158891 @Svetlana: When you read something and you learn more about the author than the topic-at-hand it's self-serving. In some cases that isn't a bad thing, and all reviews/articles/diatribes/etc will have the authors viewpoint and background as part of the material, but this one seemed a tad over the top.
yup. it's all about having hotter wives/girlfriends, nice sedans and gettin' paid.
will.i.am