“The importance of being indie”
The title for this (for lack of a better term) “article” came to me while I was waiting for my Santo Coyote sandwich at Morala, in the Glebe. Several blocks away, there is a sandwich board that stands outside of a Cafe between Fifth Avenue and Landsdowne park that says:
Attention Free Thinkers: Demand Superior Products.
When I see things like this kicking around, and it is quite often, I think back to the everlasting debate of God vs god vs good orderly direction vs free will vs this that and the other, and more recently, I think of that Nick Cave song, O’Malley’s Bar:
And he screamed, “You are an evil man”
And I paused a while to wonder
“If I have no free will then how could I
Be morally culpable, I wonder”
For those of you that don’t know the song, it’s a story about a man who enters a bar (O’Malley’s Bar, obviously) and shoots the bartender, his wife, and some onlookers until the bar is empty of life. Its former denizens have either fled, or lay dead, either by gunshot or by other, vicious means:
Well Jerry Bellows, he hugged his stool
Closed his eyes and shrugged and laughed
And with an ashtray as big as a fucking big brick
I split his head in half
Here’s the thing I’m getting at: There seems to be a false divide… culturally speaking. I saw it start when ‘Indie’ became a genre of music, and about the time Pop and Hip-Hop merged together, and then started its slow, Phalanx-Covenant-esque march on to dance music, spawning whatever the fuck is going on right now on Top 40 stations. But I am getting ahead of myself.
Here’s the headline: There is no such thing as ‘indie music’. It’s all a misnomer caused by overzealous journalists who saw DIY musical undercurrents in the eighties influence DIY music in the nineties, who oversaw the takeover of the DIY/Vintage rock aesthetics of the end of the nineties and the beginning of this decade which, thankfully, is coming to a close. “Indie” is not a genre, nor has it ever been. Has it been so long that we forget that Ray Charles was technically an indie artist? Yes, I got that information from the Jamie Foxx biopic. But I have a point, and it’s coming.
“Indie”, as a false-genre encompasses anything that is marketed as unsafe, unfriendly, and often pretentious, and has a spin of ‘oh, you probably wouldn’t like it’ to it. A prime example of this is can be seen in Zach Braff’s film “Garden State”, when ‘Large’ meets ‘Sam’, and says something to the effect of “I am listening to the Shins. You should listen to the Shins. They will change your life.”
Now I don’t want to torch the church, here. The Shins are a band I enjoy thoroughly. Hell, I’m talking from the pulpit: I have ‘Wincing the Night Away’, ‘Chutes too Narrow’ and ‘Oh Inverted World’ on vinyl. Fuck, I’ve even got the CD single of “Phantom Limb” for a couple of B-Sides on it.
A while ago, Adbusters ran an article about hipsters being the dead end of a civilization. For your convenience, here’s a link:
https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html
Now, this article raises some interesting points, which can doom discussion down the path to ennui and American Apparel advertisements full of nipples and ass. I don’t want to go down that path, but I’ll cleverly skate around the issue. And I’ll do this by asking this question:
How are ‘Hipsters’ different from ‘the norm’?
I want to distinguish that I’m using ‘hipster’ as, admittedly, a shorthand term for something much bigger. But I digress.
The question itself is kind of like a Zen koan. You could argue from several points to several end destinations, such as:
A. Hipsters are divorced from mainstream society, and by doing so, have founded their own culture, with their own cultural values.
B. Hipsters are a part of mainstream society.
C., D., E., and so on. I don’t have an answer for this question, which is why I liken it to a koan. There is no correct answer.
But Gavin McInnes touches on an interesting point in the article:
“I’ve always found that word [“hipster”] is used with such disdain, like it’s always used by chubby bloggers who aren’t getting laid anymore and are bored, and they’re just so mad at these young kids for going out and getting wasted and having fun and being fashionable. […] I’m dubious of these hypotheses because they always smell of an agenda.”
Within the ellipses there is what I think is an obvious edit by the author, Haddow, who is clearly taking a slash and burn tactic to false counterculture(s). I think that edit took out something pretty crucial because:
A. No one actually talks in convenient soundbytes. Certainly not in soundbytes that so conveniently fit into an author’s argument
and
B. Haddow’s appeal to a ‘hip’ authority figure doesn’t perpetuate his argument any further. He uses the three star method of breaking a scene, as if to say “…so anyway, back at the bar…”
***
McInnes is on to something, though. I think the John Clellon Holmes meme of “This is the ________ generation” is an outdated mode. Stick with me here while I go on a bit of a rant about books.
“Real” books defy a cohesive genre, it seems. “Literature” and “Fiction” or “Poetry” act as an all encompassing term to define ‘high’ books against ‘low’ books. Margaret Atwood’s books avoid the term “science fiction” by some act of walking across water. As do the works of Ray Bradbury, Aldous Huxley, and so on. What distinguishes “White Noise” from Star Trek? What keeps “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” away from Dragonlance? If you’re looking at me for an answer, I don’t have one. What separates pulp from high art? Craft? Originality? I don’t know at all. But I know, thanks to the academy, that “even retarded giraffes can write detective fiction.” For the academy tells me so.
What we’ve seen over the past few years, aside from the steady exponential growth of information (viva la broadband!) is the steady greying of and decay of divisions. Not only between peoples, but between genres.
Back at the academy, they’re getting into “schizoanalysis”, by post-derridian thinkers Gilles deleuze and felix guattari.
“Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (1968, translated 1994) introduces the importance of a philosophy of difference by describing how difference may be internal to the nature of every Idea and how every Idea may have multiple elements which may be differentiated. Deleuze explains that difference and repetition have a reality which is independent of the concepts of sameness, identity, resemblance, similarity, or equivalence. Pure difference is not a factor of negativity, or a negation of sameness, but affirms the actuality of an Idea.
According to Deleuze, complex repetition involves elements (or singularities) which multiply (or reflect) each other. Repetition may be variable, and thus may include difference within itself. Perseveration, on the other hand, is an invariable form of expression, which has a sameness rather than a difference in its mode of presentation.”
Taken from the “I’m feeling lucky” result… http://www.angelfire.com/md2/timewarp/deleuze.html. Contrast and compare with the result for Rolland Barthes’ S/Z, (which is wikipedia) and Aristotle’s Rhetoric (available in its entirety from various public domain archives hosted on university websites).
I don’t want to really get into this, but what Haddow sees as a dead end, could be argued that it’s not a dead end so much as it is the only logical explanation for an event or model or whatever which is seen as an end-result of our current model of perception. A vista, perhaps?
The ideas of Deleuze and Guattari are completely bonkers. I don’t pretend to understand a goddamn thing either of them say. Period. But a wise professor of mine told me to “think of their idea of the rhizome as a potato plant. Several underground things linked together by each other.” A unity despite separation.
So how does all of this relate back to the importance of being indie?
Being indie is kind of like being Canadian, in a way. A cultural identity defined by its antonym. Canadians are to Americans what Indie is to perceived-pop-culture. I’m oversimplifying here and making outrageous claims. One could argue that Indie is just a facet of pop-culture, and that will just wind up getting Texans and Albertans hot and bothered.
But still, it’s a separation that requires an implied unity.
But do they exist?
Dun-dun-dunnn.