An alternate explanation for the "indie boom"
When we (and by “we” I mean you, me, us, the ones here reading this) describe something as “indie,” we mean that it is associated with some of the cultural objects chosen from a group that includes Vespas, thrift stores, Michael Cera, veganism, etc. So when we talk about indie being bigger now, the implication—and, I think, the assumption—is that it’s not just that indie things are more popular, but that more people are “indie,” in that they too like a number of different cultural objects from the aforementioned group. Their lifestyles, in other words, have changed.
But I am not convinced that this is the case. Having now spent a certain amount of time outside of New York, I have not met a lot of people you would describe as “indie.” I have met people who like, say, Vampire Weekend, but they do not really like any of the other things we might associate with Vampire Weekend. If I had to bet where this (relatively!) expanded audience for indie bands has come from, I would bet my money on it being the same people who buy Starbucks-exclusive CDs, who are belatedly chasing music that reminds them of the music they have always liked, i.e. since the 60s, which is respectable and artistic and so forth. Just because someone likes Vampire Weekend doesn’t mean they like Wes Anderson, and just because someone wears American Apparel doesn’t mean they listen to Vampire Weekend. It just means they like American Apparel. Because we have spent most of our lives immersed in this aesthetic, we assume that this new audience acts as we have acted, which is to pick up on one strain of indie and then follow it through to the other incarnations and situate yourself inside one of the permutations. There is no evidence, however, that this is necessarily happening, or at least none that I’m aware of. They may only like the thing itself, not the broader idea.
My point here is that something more interesting might actually be going on. When a style passes into the mainstream it doesn’t mean that the totality of the lifestyle that style describes is being accepted, but rather that some particular aspect of the style has managed to coincide with mass tastes. Instead of assuming that the new audience for indie has been led there by the same impulses that drove us, or accusing the aspects that have caught their fancy of not being “really” indie but just the old mainstream in slightly different clothes, it’s worth asking—why those clothes? Why did people want to wear them? What about their existing tastes led them to this particular nexus of signifiers? And once we know that, we can start to consider what strains might, in fact, get followed further, and which might be ignored.
Style is important, but as much fun as it might be having style wars and arguing about the true soul of this that or the other, if we’re interested in honestly assessing how style works, we can never assume that it’s static, or that it cares about classification beyond the way that classification gets used as a tactical device. Nitsuh Abebe’s essay (the goad for this, as I hope is obvious) fruitfully considers what the implications of the indie boom might be for the genre itself. But it’s always been more interesting to me, personally, to wonder about what the implications might be for pop culture as a whole.
3 months ago
