Not So Indie Anymore

originally published March 14, 2007

At this point, I probably don't need to convince you that there has been an indie-rock boom in the mainstream consciousness. Indeed, the announcement that the current season of "The O.C." would be the final season of "The O.C.," one of the main facilitators of said bull market, is probably a good a mark as any that the boom has neared its end.

But it does deserve delineating exactly what kind of boom it was. It wasn't like the grunge explosion, with its aesthetics spreading out into the rest of society and major labels snatching up every act they could find that even vaguely fit the made-up criteria. Indie's recent mass-market surge merely represented a shift from indie bands being able to achieve no success outside their world to being able to achieve a moderate success outside that world.

The fact that the success available was only moderate, however, meant that a lot more bands could be caught up in it. And since the most you could hope for was to make a decent living off of it - no one was buying private jets with their Nonesuch Records millions - there seemed little reason to reject corporate dollars, whether in the form of a major-label contract or a placement in a TV show or advertisement. Moreover, the bands that found success weren't really all that far removed from music already in the mainstream. Most were just souped-up singer-songwriter acts different only because modern singer-songwriter acts have become so confusingly glossy. (And because they gave themselves pretend band names like "Death Cab For Cutie.") The rest were just minor variants on the modern rock bands that never really went away after the alterna-boom.

So most bands didn’t need to buy flannel shirts and a Big Muff in order to be caught up, but only have to present themselves in a slightly different way. Since it wasn't a fad, it won't be embarrassing to be an indie band in the future (although arguably it should always be embarrassing to be an indie band) and so the audience has been broadened rather than slammed open.

What this means is that "indie musician" is now a viable temporary career choice. If you're willing to play it safe and hew to a certain sound, you can tour nationally, put out a record or two, and have a not entirely uncomfortable life. Being in a band seems to have become the modern equivalent of the Grand Tour: something superficially cultured and bohemian that represents a deliberate step on the path to moving to the suburbs, raising a family, and having a steady job. It fills up one's 20s.

The result has been a striking schism in the indie arena. If you're in a band these days, it's either indie or it's experimental, whereas the great strength of indie used to be that it melded pop and avant-garde styles in productive ways. Indie bands' bold moves now are things like having a string section, which only counts as experimental if you're living in the Dark Ages, whereas experimental bands are confrontational and deliberately repellent, naming themselves "AIDS Wolf" and putting up a mighty scree. Indie is derided as a middle-class pursuit. (But that was what made it so great in the first place! In finding a middle path, indie-rock combined things in new ways.) Now, though, it's become thoroughly professionalized. "Musician wanted" ads might as well include a list of the position's duties, opportunities for advancement and preferred resumé formats.

Interestingly, this shift has also produced a corresponding professionalization in the apparatus surrounding indie music, which is even more surprising: indie's whole ethos was Do It Yourself. But now, you can hire publicity companies (staffed by cool people who graduated from a liberal arts college, so you don't feel weird about it) to promote your music, graphic designers to make your album packaging (so when people get your album it doesn't look unprofessional), and get your picture in magazines catering to the hipster demographic because you got style. Whereas indie outfits used to be staffed by weirdoes and misfits with the time to devote to boosting the music they were passionate about, now your parents will fund your internship with Nasty Little Man Publicity so you can get +1s at the best shows, find yourself chumming it up at this week's South By Southwest conference and go on to make $30k a year doing marketing at Matador Records, even though your degree was in Environmental Studies.

The weirdest thing, of course, has undoubtedly been the blogs. Arguing about bands and making mixtapes used to be something you did with your friends, or maybe on online message boards. But now advertisers will pay you to do this, and bands and labels will send you free CDs, and this professionalization of argumentation has produced a certain amplification. There's no denying that when you open a given music reviews section of national or regional magazines, you'll see basically the same set of bands as you'd see in any other music reviews section of national or regional magazines, but this is necessary because print outlets' audience is understood to be local. They need to give that particular audience information they presumably wouldn't be getting anywhere else.

But anyone can read any blog, no matter their location, so when every blog is talking about the same band under the pretense of "serving its readership" - a readership that is likely reading many other blogs - the effect is much louder. It's amplified further given the convention on musicblogs is that you only talk about music you like - there's no reviewing stuff yay or nay , just yay yay yay . And given the professionalization, there needs to be a new post, with a new band, every day. The end result is a lot of blogs with a shared readership all looking for new indie bands, and though bands start up each and every day, not every one is special. Those that even barely pass muster get reposted endlessly, even those that don't get a moment (or 20) in the sun.

The result, as with the mainstream incursions, has been a distortion in the discourse surrounding indie. When bands are careers rather than artistic pursuits, they're dumpable as soon as they become unproductive and unprofitable, and the same thing goes for writing. Professionalization necessarily entails a loss of community - you are competing against these other bands and publicists and bloggers for the small share of money available to you, after all - and so where there was once an awareness of the sound left unexplored, the band left undiscovered, and an effort to fill that slot, now there's either grasping for the last piece of cake by going with the tried and true or total disengagement by retreating into distancing abstractions that no one can really call good or bad.

Indie has been entrepreneurial in the past, but now it's codified so much that it's become a profession; even experimental music on the national stage now feels like a series of rote gestures you can see coming a mile away. No longer are we contributing to the whole by contributing something new. We're merely claiming our share, our reward for a short, short lifetime of loyal fandom. It's enough to make even Seth Cohen shed a tear.

Michael Barthel

Liner Notes is Flagpole's music opinion column. Interested in contributing? Contact music editor Chris Hassiotis with ideas at music@flagpole.com.