Those shiftless indie-yuppies
Influential pop music critics like Sasha Frere-Jones, Jody Rosen, and Ann Powers have put a lot of effort, in the last decade or so, into bringing down the general critical estimation of indie music, especially vis-à-vis hip hop. Frere-Jones has flogged a theory that indie music represents a sort of cultural retrenchment by middle class white kids in reaction to the cultural primacy of hip hop, the creation of a specifically white music, or, as Frere-Jones had it, whiteness music. This mode of theorizing blew up in Frere-Jones’s face when he called Stephen Merritt a racist and got so roundly slapped down for it that he didn’t even try to defend himself. But, even as Frere-Jones and Rosen seem to be rediscovering the virtues of brainy pop music, the urge of to pose as a friend of the oppressed by hating on the white indie hipsters remains. David Prince of Billboard.com was on Marketplace the other day talking about how the recession appears in contemporary music, and, well, note how glibly he gets to an explanation of why indie music is so “elitist”:
Ryssdal: What about indie music? I mean some of the folks out there just doing their own thing.
PRINCE: You know, I think of indie music in a lot of ways as the most elitist and the most ignoring the recession and the economic realities. Because if you have the opportunity to really pursue a music career in this day and age and do nothing else, then you probably have some expendable income.
Ryssdal: Expendable income. So it’s kids who have some money, basically.
PRINCE: Indie yuppies is a phrase I think of a lot when I’m reading Pitchfork.
Really? “Indie yuppies” is a phrase you think of? Maybe you should think of a different phrase, because that one’s pretty stupid.
What about Yindies? More seriously, I’ve always thought that indie rock valorizes a certain kind of blue collar authenticity. Obviously, a lot of affectation and appropriation goes into this, but that’s a far cry from straightforward elitism.
— Will · Feb 26, 05:21 PM · #
Actually this is pretty accurate … “indie yuppies” sounds about right. I mean, a good portion of the 20somethings in Williamsburg who start bands are living off their parents’ trust funds
— paul h. · Feb 26, 05:28 PM · #
If we’re going to divorce music criticism from what music we actually like to listen to, as they can we point out to Mr. Frere-Jones (et al) that white critical overappreciation of hip hop is just another example of white appropriation of black culture? (Cultural imperialism, if you want to go in that direction.)
— Freddie · Feb 26, 05:34 PM · #
I guess working for Billboard means living a perpetual crisis of conscience and personal relevance. “Sure, my job is to categorize and commodify pop music, but at least I’m in touch with the struggles of the common man, and not one of those Brooklyn Trustafarians!”
— Matt Frost · Feb 26, 07:02 PM · #
Some people should just critique the music, put down the bong and leave the socio-economic philosophizing at home.
Mike
— MBunge · Feb 26, 07:28 PM · #
David Prince may lash out at rich white momma’s boys making brainy songs. But I bet his spleen truly stems from how little rockin he gets to do anymore.
Indie music is currently rich in blissed out, harmonizing gents, sometimes of the bearded, flannel variety, other times dressed for space travel. A lot of it is otherworldly. Much of the rest is overly detached. Most of all, it wants to avoid confrontation. Audience members would be advised to remain still.
It’s like a nineteen eighties college radio scene heavy on the paisley shirts and erratic journal entries of what we called “progressive” music, minus the off-setting intensity and aggression of hardcore and rap.
The alternative metal scene may be thriving, but the great alternative rocker tradition— shouldered by bands as varied as the Misfits, the Replacements, X, Janes Addiction, Pixies, and Jesus Lizard— has gone into hiding lately. McClusky was doing its part, but it’s gone now too.
Prince is faced with a lot of bands he’s expected to stand before, absorb and acknowledge with restrained applause. (In the case of Cat Power, he might even be asked to sit down and be quiet.) But all he wants to do is drain some brews, holler some oaths and throw the goat.
— turnbuckle · Feb 26, 09:39 PM · #
I don’t know that it’s stupid. It’s specific. It’s probably unfair. I think it’s neither the most nor the least helpful term — it drowns out in reverse snobbery a recognition that indie rock has roots in music that was more confrontational than its current highlights.
It’s not very new. I think it started here, in an article on Vice Records, and then Stereogum ran with it.
— K-sky · Feb 27, 12:11 AM · #
From K-sky’s link to the “Virtues of Vice”: “Bands like Death Cab for Cutie, Iron and Wine, the Arcade Fire, Broken Social Scene, they are great bands, really great bands, with great albums, great songs, high quality. And to me, it’s just so fucking boring…”
Well said.
In my first reply, I failed to mention the White Stripes. They have rocked both the indie elitists and the masses better than any band since Nirvana. So reports of the decline of edgy, alternative rockers might be premature.
Still, I have the sense— maybe unfair— that by and large the species is dormant.
— turnbuckle · Feb 27, 02:01 AM · #
I think I’m going to do another post in response to these comments rather than any long comment here – since most of the TAS crew has gone into witness protection and cannot post until they get their aliases synced up with their usernames and so I might as well be adding content. But I wanted to say that I endorse most of what Turnbuckle says in that first comment and all of how he says it. And also that, even if it is in some kind of wide use, “Indie Yuppie” is still a godawful term – managing to be ugly, cliched, and inaccurate all at once.
— Matt Feeney · Feb 27, 02:38 AM · #
Turnbuckle,
So, rock just doesn’t rock enough anymore? Do the Yeah Yeah Yeahs count? I think there’s something to what you’re saying, but it’s probably in part because the audience for rock music is growing older; I listened to a lot of punk and hardcore a decade ago, and I listen to a lot less now. The same is true of most of the guys I know my age. But our age, I suspect, has a lot to do with it. It’s easy to rock out to Earth Crisis, and dress the part, when you’re 18 — less so when you’re jobbed up, wearing a tie, and thinking options for getting a mortgage at 28.
— Peter Suderman · Feb 27, 03:22 AM · #
Suderman,
I think I’m with you. Like a lot of people, I go in and out of love with rocking rock. During college, I took a music appreciation course that got me involved with classical music. For a time, I actively disdained a good portion of anything grouped under rhythm and blues, largely because once you start trying to catch up with a genre as enormous as classical— or art music, as some awkwardly call it— it soaks up most of your leisure music time, not to mention funds.
Then, in a way I got over being such an old crank and returned to rock. (Not that I ever really abandoned it, especially if I wanted to have productive cross talk around a keg.)
Don’t get me wrong. There’s plenty of recent non-rocking music that I’d never want to be without. The Sea and Cake, Jim O’Rourke and Grizzly Bear, to name a few, make terrific, enduring music. I want everything they record.
You’re right. I certainly don’t want to be the dude who talks about how good the music was when he hit drinking age and how it suffers now in comparison. If anything, I was acknowledging that a certain side of alternative music is fantastic right now and fully stocked. It’s just that ugly face of rock, covered in warts and tapping the dropout in all of us, the kind of music that’s supposed to horrify your parents, that’s in short supply these days— or seems to be anyway.
In the end, though, don’t let the mortgage interfere too much. Always reserve a slush fund for putting your boots into the muck and cigarette butts. You never know when Bob Log III or Man Man will play a lounge near you, and ten years later you don’t want to be the guy who says, “Yeah, I had the chance to see them, but goddamn it, daycare’s expensive!”
— turnbuckle · Feb 27, 04:18 AM · #
I agree with Turnbuckle, and am glad The White Stripes made it into the conversation. But I stand by my previous point: none of us should be lectured on what rocks and doesn’t rock by anyone who works for Billboard.
— Matt Frost · Feb 27, 04:24 AM · #
Feeney,
By the way, indie yuppie is a bad, lazy phrase. Obviously, many of the musicians Prince is lumping under this banner don’t have social climbing, or even chart climbing, foremost among their ambitions. If anything, quite the opposite. As for bands buoyed by trust funds, sure it’s kind of obnoxious, but aren’t a lot of us envious at the potential to have our weirdest artistic efforts fully funded? The field of architecture, for one, is rife with individuals who came from money and fortunately funneled it into beautiful, challenging work that might not have found an audience under other, struggling circumstances.
Anyway, I suspect David Prince, like almost every music critic, is a huge Big Star fan, and however much Bell and Chilton might have rejected the notion, they were exemplary beneficiaries of family money.
— turnbuckle · Feb 27, 04:35 AM · #
I’ll add one more thing:
Wayne Coyne
— Matt Frost · Feb 27, 04:51 AM · #
The irony is that it’s Friday night, and somewhere Shonen Knife is playing a bowling alley. Instead of booking the next direct flight there, I’m posting windy remarks on the American Scene. Weak. My inner rocker is disgusted.
— turnbuckle · Feb 27, 05:06 AM · #
Hip hop=rock. Electronica=rock (via Neu). Country=rock.
If it’s descended from rhythm, the blues, or rhythm and blues, it’s rock. And rap and hip hop are far closer to rock on the genealogical tree than what are commonly compared to rock. There’s far, far more of Motorhead in Wu Tang Clan than there is Miles Davis, if you’ll allow me to crib.
— Freddie · Feb 27, 05:25 AM · #
Arrrgghhh, Matt Frost,
Ye shouldn’t be so glib an eager in yer tossing around er Wayne Coyne quotes. Niether Long John Silvers nor Skippers nor even that Olive Garden are the snow shoes to the top that Coyne quote suggests. Pleanty an aspiring young rocker had his future deep fat fried in the galleys er Ameicas fast food fleet. And it’s a sad sight to see through an order window—the faded tatooes, the earlobes elongated for the years er weighty crucifixes, the rude boy do pent up in a hair net like a coven er weary bats behind the scenes at a rabies demonstration…. No, the failed rocker/life-sentence fry cook is one er the mothers seas most tragicist creatures, and something to be hid from our young: one glimpes er this ledgendary beast is enough to crumple the delicate dreams er a tender youth like a tinfoil swan in a mosh pit.
— ol' one eye · Feb 27, 05:45 AM · #
Freddie, I will allow it, and you bring the conversation back around to the original Merritt/Jones dust-up Feeney linked to in his original post.
Indeed rhythm and blues rock’n‘roll powered Wu Tang Clan. More recently, Ghostface Killah, too. For that matter, Miles Davis famously built much of his later work out of the rock/funk of Sly Stone and Jimmie Hendrix. But there’s a kind of flip truth at work. Whatever selections of favorite “white” music Stephin Merritt made for TimeOut New York— choices that rankled Jones— most of it was inevitably indebted to rhythm and blues inspired by African immigrants.
Just as there’s no Wu Tang Clan without Motorhead— a funny choice but I’ll take it— there’s no Motorhead without Ike Turner and Chuck Berry. Attempts to decipher essential whiteness versus blackness from American music, or English music for that matter, especially after the middle twentieth century— is bound to be met with frustration. The mix of traditions is too thick to fathom. Yes, I know, New Order sounds really white and Junior Kimbrough sounds awful black, but with either the perception is superficial and misleading.
But never mind. I’m glad you tripped my fuse panel to hunt down Wu Tang’s “Fast Shadow.” Listening to it right now. Next, I plan to sample Lemmy’s “Stay Clean,” specifically the live No Sleep Till Hammersmith version. This, to be followed with a palate cleanser, the color green by Ken Nordine.
— turnbuckle · Feb 27, 06:39 AM · #
Why the hell are you people commenting on a blog when you could be in a wine bar listening to The Shins?
(ah, I like the Shins all right. And I just came from a wine bar.)
— K-sky · Feb 27, 08:01 AM · #
Attempts to decipher essential whiteness versus blackness from American music, or English music for that matter, especially after the middle twentieth century— is bound to be met with frustration. The mix of traditions is too thick to fathom.
Oh, totally. No argument from me.
— Freddie · Feb 27, 03:43 PM · #