Empire of Dirt - Wendy Fonarow Music Culture

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an album and utilize all forms of technical wizardry during production.64 Punk’s bias against elaborate production was inherited and embraced by the indie community. Indie opposed mainstream’s many stylistic flourishes, such as studio overdubbing or pre-programmed dance rhythms, hence indie’s persistent lo-fi production style.

      A key element that distinguishes indie from mainstream music is its “size.” Indie connotes small, personal, and immediate, while mainstream evokes all that is enormous, distant, and unspecialized. Indie bands are seen to use grassroots campaigns and fanzine promotions, while mainstream music uses multimedia campaigns to achieve market saturation. Smallness for indie is a trope in its performance spaces, budgets, and popularity. The mainstream is stadium music, while diminutive indie is the music of small, intimate venues. The majority of successful indie bands play at venues that hold five hundred to two thousand people. However, festivals such as the Carling Leeds/Reading Weekend, Glastonbury, the V Festival, or T in the Park, where multiple bands perform, are exempt from this size prohibition. Indie fans oppose traditional large-scale arenas. Indie bands that become popular know that if they play a large stadium, many indie fans will see this as a conversion to the mainstream and will no longer patronize the band. Thus, the most popular indie bands attempt to circumvent this prohibition by playing their large shows in non-traditional locations that suggest a festival atmosphere or a one-off event. Blur, after it achieved massive success, arranged a stadiumsized show with multiple acts at Mile End, a non-traditional stadium often used for football matches, rather than at Wembley, where mainstream acts often perform. At the height of their popularity, the Stone Roses arranged a performance on Spike Island, another non-traditional large-scale performance space. In 2002, Pulp played a series of gigs in national forests.

      Indie gigs are about being near to performers. Indie bands often mingle in the crowd before and after shows, and artists are easy to meet in these settings. Audience members regularly approach band members at shows. Several fans said having direct contact with performers was one of their favorite aspects of indie music. Indie also attempts to maintain an equal relationship between musician and audience member—hence the everyman trope and the similarity of dress between audience and performer. A major reason for indie’s denigration of stadium shows is the distance created between the performer and the audience member, which is seen as an impediment to the direct experience of music.

      This size distinction between indie and mainstream is not confined to the size of a venue but also extends to the relative success and popularity of a band. As one NME journalist put it, “Ever since the advent of ‘Independence’ as both a musical and business proposition, massive success has always been frown [sic] upon. The logic goes that if you reach millions of homes, you must have tailored your music for that very purpose, sold out to the corporate ogre and diluted any sparks of real life you once had” (NME, February 5, 1994). Indie’s distaste for arenas such as Wembley is largely due to their size, although it has also to do with the community’s occasional, but by no means consistent, distrust of popularity. As John Harris notes, “The most hard-bitten indie disciples seem to view mass market success as a pollutant of artistic purity” (Harris 2003: xv). In a particular segment of the indie community, once a member personally discovers a great band, he feels a certain proprietary right to the band. He will try to get other friends to like the band, but at the same time he feels that the band is “his.” When the band becomes successful, his ownership feels diluted, as if some personal control over the artist has been lost. He will stop counting the band in his personal repertoire or will remind people that he liked it before anyone else did. It is common for people to brag that they saw some wildly successful band years earlier in a venue holding only one hundred people. Other indie gig goers continue to like a band after it has become successful but will refrain from seeing it at large venues, because they miss the intimacy of the small club setting. An indie band that becomes successful and plays stadiums instead of clubs may be transforming devotion into a mass production and is necessarily suspect. Turning away from a band merely on the grounds that it has achieved popular success is not a uniform reaction among indie fans. However, successful bands are scrutinized to make sure that they have remained true to their roots and have not been transformed by their success. The community looks to see if a band has been polluted by its exposure to the corrupting influences of the mainstream. Thus, indie sees popularity as an ethical issue, a perspective that includes a belief that a band is “morally superior because they are not successful” (Cavanagh 2000: 177).

      Indie’s proponents view indie as a rebellion against the mainstream and its morally bankrupt value system. Indie cultivates an image of rebelliousness as an alternative to corporate consumerism. Indie is not the only music genre that celebrates the image of the rebellion, however; because indie is a subcategory of rock, one would expect some of the same images to prevail in both.65 This connection between rebelliousness and postwar musical productions that come under the rubric of rock and roll has resulted in a certain consistency in musical iconography. The leather jacket was popularized by Marlon Brando in the film The Wild One (1953). The use of working-class imagery within the film produced a sense of iconoclasm and seductive danger that remains a potent image associated with rebellion. Similar connotations are evoked by the Doc Martens boots associated with punk, some phases of indie, and American grunge. Despite being a primarily middle-class phenomenon, indie considers itself to be “down with” the working class, perceived as a wellspring of authenticity that is denied to the bourgeois class. Therefore, the behaviors and stylistic tropes of the working class are fetishized by the comfortable classes (a phenomenon common in academic settings as well). Manchester, home of several of the most important indie movements, is viewed as working class, and therefore bands with Mancunian dialects are valued for their “authentic” voices.

      Indie’s ideological stance contrasts with its own image of the mainstream as bloated, safe, clichéd, and banal. In this view, the mainstream is seen to produce “products” that are overprocessed and slick. Indie invokes the mainstream as a bogeyman full of avaricious Frankensteins, large corporations with their legions of men in suits, manipulating the gullible public by pandering to their worst instincts. As one Melody Maker journalist put it in a viewpoint piece, it is “music made with anaesthetized suburban housewives in mind—the same people their friends sell washing-up liquid to, with an equal amount of aesthetic concern” (Melody Maker, March 12, 1994). Indie, in contrast, creates an image of itself as taking the intellectual high ground, privileging aesthetic concerns over commercial interest. Often bands pride themselves on giving the audience not what they want but rather what the band thinks they need: My Bloody Valentine’s 1992 tour show featured twenty minutes of modulated guitar feedback that sent many fans into venue lobbies. Indie finds the music of the mainstream hollow; in the words of a Smiths song, it “says nothing to me about my life.” Indie, on the other hand, is meaningful. Indie music is filled with specific literary and political references, while the mainstream uses bland, repetitive clichés peppered with absolutes such as “never,” “always,” and “forever.” Within indie’s aesthetic discourse of evaluation, indie music reproduces the high art/low art dichotomy that marginalizes the study of popular music in the first place.

      These contrasts do not occur in a vacuum but are part of an ideological drama played out within a moral universe. Thus, indie views mainstream’s use of lavish production style, and its popularity, as corpulent, unoriginal, impersonal, and unspecialized. Indie sees its own lack of elaboration and its love of live performance as lean, personal, immediate, raw, and human. Each of the contrasts in musical practices between the different communities is submitted to subjective evaluation as an ethical concern. Thus, these contrasts in definition are reinterpreted by a community in value-laden terms that usually privilege the community doing the defining.

      What emerges from this portrait of indie contrasted with the mainstream is an ideological system with implied moral stances in musical practices. These contrasts can be mapped out in Lévi-Straussian fashion:

INDIE MAINSTREAM
independent labels major corporations
gigs stadiums
independent centralized

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