It’s been a big week of news and opinions in the indie music world, beginning with Nitsuh Abebe’s piece for New York Magazine about Grizzly Bear and their relative wealth. There’s been a lot of discussion on the viability of making money in music, whether we’re stuck stylistically, and if our 20-aughts zen moment of intersection between indie culture and the mainstream actually did more harm than good.
Now Hipster Runoff curator Carles has entered the fray with a piece called “How Indie Finally OFFICIALLY Died: The Broken Indie Machine”. In the piece Carles, in his characteristic sloppy genius style, bemoans the death of indie culture as we know it. It’s an extremely personal and unsurprisingly provocative piece of writing. My friend and past hMsM contributor Max Horwich drew my attention to the piece (I generally avoid Carles, to be honest), and he and I had quite different reactions to reading it. Max works within the music industry, and is also a musician himself, recording as Sewing Machines.
The two of us had a rather lengthy discussion of the article via a facebook chat. Obviously it’s a bit messy, but the whole discussion unfolded so quickly that I felt compelled to share it with you.
(Please read the Carles piece before you read this discussion, it’s not essential, but it will help. And it’s worth reading anyway.)
KB: Ok, first response…. haven’t finished the whole thing… he says “Maybe it is time for indie ass losers to just go and die, listening to the same overhyped artist from ‘the prime years of indie’ until we all die. We’ll just keep buying ________ (tenured indie band) albums until we’re dead, growing old alongside our favorite artist that connects us to the cognitive prime of our youth even though their music already sounds old and dated.” This started in the 60s and has been going on ever since, a lot of what he sees as stagnation, I see as perpetuation.
MH: I think that’s a valid point but I also think that the engines for discovering new music (“content farms”) have fallen back on that mindset a lot more recently, especially in the past year or so and even the new stuff that gets picked up, the coverage that the various sites are voicing are just increasingly predictable party-line opinions. And, moreover, at this point, we can’t even take refuge from the “mainstream” in the “indie community”, because rolling stone and stereogum now essentially post about the exact same bands.
KB: Alright, but as I continue to read here, I’m slowly hatching the idea that everything Carles is saying in this piece is completely misguided and that what he perceives as doing bad is actually doing good… I dunno man I’m not bored a lot of people aren’t bored it just frustrates me the way he’s transmitting his own feelings about things through the general population, it feels stilted and often delusional. But I still haven’t finished the piece, almost there, bear with me…
MH: For sure.
KB: OK I finished it. So I think the anxiety surrounding the assimilation of individual voices (within a collective like P4k) into a collective hollow din is probably his most interesting point and beyond that I probably disagree with about 90% of what he says…
MH: That’s fair. To be honest I agreed with a lot more than I wanted to.
KB: So what upsets me about this (and about Carles in general) is that it’s all cut through with a suffocating negativity. To the extent that he shoots himself in the foot by “hearkening back to an earlier time” when indie was pure and things felt better because if his fucking smart ass was living back then he’d probably be bashing THAT “status quo”. It’s just provocation to me.
MH: Well, yes…
KB: I understand that there are some negative aspects of the content farm era, but there are also some fucking FANTASTIC aspects that he chooses to ignore and then there’s these points he makes that seem demonstrably misguided to me. For example: “there hasn’t even been a good album cycle this year”… um…. FRANK OCEAN?!?!?! his rise is partially the result of a world where things can be taken seriously because a bunch of people collectively decide they are important.
MH: Okay, I think Frank Ocean is a great counter-argument, I’ll definitely give you that one. I think he’s definitely emblematic of what is Right with “indie culture” (by which i basically mean “people who consume and share music on the internet”) right now. But i think the points he make about publicists and indie movers-and-shakers and those guys really rang true and hit home for me in a lot of ways. I think frank ocean got popular because he’s phenomenally talented but I think that’s only part of the picture. I think he also got popular, in part, because he has one of the best PR teams in the world working for him.
KB: True.
MH: And i think his “coming out” letter — I don’t want to sell this short, because I don’t think he had ulterior motives with that — but i think that was a really shrewd PR move, whether intentionally or not (and let’s be honest, intentionally, because his handlers know what they’re doing). And like i said, not to discredit his music or his honesty or anything, but once you see how many hands are in the game, it gets very difficult to trust anything.
KB: That’s true, and you have a better view of that side of things than I do, but i just think, who CARES about the “honesty” of the PR move, it’s been this way for time immortal (or at least since the dawn of the record label), but does that mean we should collectively shake our fists at PR as a phenomenon? For all the accessibility of music currently, I don’t see major changes in the “popularity cycle” as a result of the internet. Bands are going to continue to get popular when they’re good, and not stay popular for long if they’re not.
MH: Well, yes…
KB: I know I keep coming back to Carles bashing, but I guess I just don’t like that just because Carles has decided there’s a problem, this is suddenly a crisis. Which is not in any way to belittle you for identifying with his points, but there’s just a lot of hypocrisy that goes along with being an “unwitting mouthpiece”… when you’re Carles….
MH: Yeah, I mean, I think carles is to blogs kind of what John Stewart is to news. I think he’s kiiiinda part of the system but he’s part of it to call other people out on their shit and he, more often than not, does that in a fairly grating voice, with fairly hyperbolic language. And, as i was telling another friend who posted this article I think the BIG problem with PR companies being the new “gatekeepers” to success (whatever that even means anymore) is most of those companies are paid up front, out of the artists’ pockets. That means it’s waaaaaay easier to break through the noise if you can spend a few grand a month on a publicist who has Ryan Schreiber on speed dial. And while “it’s easier to be successful if you’re already rich” isn’t a new problem, or a new argument it brings up all kinds of issues of privilege and authenticity that really shouldn’t be part of the conversation surrounding the music, or at least not to the extent that they’ve become. Look at those dudes on the Stereogum message boards calling Ed [Droste of Grizzly Bear] out for being a rich kid. I mean, look at Lana [del Rey], look at Vampire Weekend…
KB: Yeah except Vampire Weekend are awesome…
MH: I totally agree! But they’re also not WASPS, they’re middle-class Jewish kids and an Iranian, but it becomes part of the conversation, you know? And it’s distracting.
KB: But that can be somewhat productive… I think this cuts both ways, people will automatically hear a band if the $$-controlled PR machine throws it in their face, but they will also be more guarded when forming opinions. That started with music on the radio sometime around 30 years ago, it’s kind of what started indie actually.
MH: Yeah, indie was supposed to be the safe-space from all this crap, and then some time around ’03-’04 people started realizing how marketable this stuff is (I blame garden state) and then it became the new race to grab up every indie act (or “indie” act) that anybody could get their hands on.
KB: Well blamed…
MH: And not just among majors. I mean, yeah, Columbia especially has been on this huge kick with first MGMT, then Chairlift and Passion Pit, and fucking Death Grips* is on Epic Records or whatever. But more than labels, which still matter but only in terms of how much money they can throw around, it’s marketing people snatching up all this stuff. WHY does mountain dew have a record label? Why did they sign Neon Indian? What does that have to do with ANYTHING? And artists are put in this weird place where you need to have this super-hooky back-story to get noticed (e.g. “I recorded this alone at a cabin in the woods”).
KB: Well if you’re in a band, and a label comes calling carrying around billions of Pepsico dollars wouldn’t you be a bit more receptive to swallowing the embarrassment of being sponsored by neon yellow cat piss?
MH: Without a doubt, it’s weird… I mean, there’s no right or wrong answer. I know other friends of mine in similar positions might answer differently, but for me, yeah.
KB: I think that would be the reaction of most “indie artists”; “it’s not my fault i want to keep the heat turned on”.
MH: Right, but also to maintain that “success” once you’re there, or to make it sustainable/lucrative/whatever, you need to make some concessions about your music/image/”personal brand” (to borrow a phrase from Carles). You know, Bushmills ads, songs licensed for “Twilight”, all the things that would have been called “selling out” 20 years ago, but, like, what else are you gonna do? You don’t wanna work at that coffee shop forever, and it’s not like anybody’s buying your records…
KB: There’s always the prostitution solution, but we’re getting a little to old to be making the big bucks…
*We both hate Death Grips because they are awful. As Max put it in a very apt Facebook status right after the release of their new LP:
“things that annoy me about death grips:
1) they recruited one of the best drummers alive and got him to tap quarter notes on a drum pad
2) literally everything else”
Any readers of this piece are encouraged to leave a comment if they feel so inclined, Max and I will do our best to respond.
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