Empire of Dirt - Wendy Fonarow Music Culture

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wider culture as frivolous, base, or even worthless. Rituals address cultural conflicts. Some rituals, like rites of passage, address resolvable conflicts. Others, like rites of intensification, address irresolvable conflicts and, therefore, need to be repeated ad infinitum. For most in the indie community, participation in gigs is a rite of passage. As a youth phenomenon, it is temporary; the majority of participants eventually decide to leave the community. The issues and meanings of “youth” addressed and reproduced by participation in this community are resolved by entering the adult world of family and work. The rejection of the community is accompanied by a rejection of its values—that music and emotion matter or that the body is a reliable vehicle for experiencing meaning. What was once meaningful to the insider is worthless to the outsider, which the insider has now become. This ritual event enacts over time an embrace of indie’s values and then a subsequent thwarting of them. Members resolve the conflicts by leaving the community behind. However, nothing repressed is fully resolved, and this conflict will find expression in other ritual forms.

      Not all members reject the community, however. For some, this rite of passage becomes a rite of intensification, presenting profound and irresolvable conflicts that only find temporary resolution in the liminal space of performance. For them, the liminal space of the gig is the only place that feels like home. These individuals have difficulty exiting the community and many become professionals—record industry personnel, musicians, or sexual acolytes—dedicating their lives to this art. These individuals represent a critique of society’s cultural precepts. They persist in valuing emotions, revering art that is viewed by mainstream society as not art at all, and demonstrating that sex is not a commodity to be exchanged for material goods.

      In the end, this book is essentially about how people make meaning in their lives in day-to-day activities. Meaning does not exist outside of culture but is created within it. Meaning is constructed in a multitude of ways, in mundane interactions, in cultural narratives, and in grand spectacles. These ways of making meaning may initially be imperceptible to the casual observer, but they are there, organizing and making appear ordered a meaningless and unpredictable world.

      Here we go … Jon Brion

      CHAPTER 1

       What Is “Indie”?

      This is the definition of my life … The Beta Band

      This chapter examines the definition of “indie.” It describes the indie community, indie music, and indie’s ideological foundations. Defining a collective within a complex social system is not just an exercise designating one’s province of study; it also delineates how one conceives of cultural groups. However, attempts to characterize a category of music are fraught with difficulty. Defining a category like indie is not only problematic for scholars who seek to understand culture; it is also difficult for community members themselves (Frith 1981, Kruse 1993). Fans and members of the British music industry often struggle to come to terms with defining something they feel they can recognize intuitively. They cannot articulate general principles without excluding some music and performers they think should be included or including some they feel should not be.1 For the indie aficionados, what comprises indie appears to be self-evident. For example, when asked to define indie music, one fan stated, “I don’t know how to describe it, but I know it when I hear it” (M.K. age twenty-two). As with many cultural categories and practices, recognition in the absence of a clearly articulated definition is common among fans and professionals alike.

      Why is there confusion in defining indie? In part, it is because indie is not a thing at all and is therefore not describable in the same manner as a stable object. Although indie has no exact definition, the discourse and practices around the multiple descriptions and definitions of indie detail a set of principles that reveal the values and issues at stake for the community. An attempt at self-definition is part of the process of forming a cultural grouping. To form a group, members need to create a set of boundaries between what constitutes and what excludes membership. Creating a boundary means creating an identity for oneself. Differentiation is at the heart of the process of definition.

      Indie music has been considered by insiders to be: (1) a type of musical production affiliated with small independent record labels with a distinctive mode of independent distribution; (2) a genre of music that has a particular sound and stylistic conventions; (3) music that communicates a particular ethos; (4) a category of critical assessment; and (5) music that can be contrasted with other genres, such as mainstream pop, dance, blues, country, or classical. The indie community’s arguments over membership deal with the nature of the ownership of musical recordings and their mode of distribution to a larger public, the nature of musical production practices and their relationship to musical forms, and the relationship between audience members and the music. I consider indie to be precisely this discourse, and the activities that produce and are produced by this discourse, as well as the artistic productions and community members who participate in and contribute to this discourse.

      The strongest voice in indie is the British weekly music press. This press, which at various times has included New Musical Express (NME), Sounds, and Melody Maker—the “inkies,” as they were colloquially known—dominates and crystallizes the indie community.2 Just as a magazine such as Mix-Mag is seen to cater to the dance community in Britain, or Vibe to the hip-hop community in the United States, NME speaks to the indie community.

      The weekly press is powerful in shaping indie’s discourse. It provides a forum for indie fans to debate issues in prominent letters pages and accompanying op-ed pieces, and it is read regularly by professionals and fans. As one reader characterized it in a letters page, “I read the NME avidly—it’s what Wednesdays were made for” (NME, February 26, 1994).3 For young fans, these papers are highly influential in shaping their opinions. Often, they directly paraphrase the weekly press reviews when giving their opinions about bands. For younger fans in their early teens, the music press is like a rare and exotic fruit, as well as a point of entry into a world they initially know very little about. Indie fans purchase music by bands they have not yet heard more frequently than any other British music consumer. They attribute their purchases to recommendations from the weekly press and from friends (IPC Music Press 1993, EMRIG Report 1993). The indie community has a rapid turnover of bands, in part because of the furious pace of a weekly press; there is a constant need for new bands and trends to fill copy. They are the de facto source for information about indie music.

      The weekly press is not the only means of learning about indie music in the United Kingdom; there are radio programs, television, the internet, and local fanzines, the photocopied publications by fans. However, in many ways, when fans stop reading the weekly press they move out of the indie community and soon disconnect from the music scene. To see an unknown band appear on the cover of a monthly music magazine or to hear new singles air on the radio by a band that one has never heard of would be unacceptable for an active member of the indie community, which prides itself on knowing about the “music of tomorrow, today.”4 The indie community has a love/hate relationship with the weekly press, regarding it as a vital link to the indie music world but often furious at its distinctively vitriolic and opinionated journalistic style. When there were two inkies, many indie members, angry at the opinions of one paper, would profess allegiance to the other, a decision rendered ironic by the fact that both NME and Melody Maker were published by the same company, IPC Press, and operated on adjacent floors of Kings Reach Tower.5 Indie is constituted by a distinct discourse, a discourse typified and consolidated by the British weekly music press.

      Some of the arguments of indie regarding production values, clothing, and musical style may seem trivial or hairsplitting to an outsider. It serves well to remember Jonathan Swift’s two empires, Lilliput and Blefuscu, whose members fought to the death over which side of the egg to crack first. Swift parodied the differences between Protestantism and Catholicism, the arbitrariness of ritual, and the significance placed by members on ritual procedures. If the differences between

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