a grammar

the last long thing on genre, “indie,” and critical discourse

A lot of people sneer at so-called “NPR rock” for being wimpy or something, but it’s a hoary cliché that underground music has to be loud, fast, and out of control. Once upon a time, mainstream culture was blandly, blindly complacent, so underground music was angry and dissatisfied… . But in 2010, mainstream culture isn’t complacent; it’s stupid and angry. So underground culture has become smart and serene. That’s not wimpy—it’s powerful and constructive, a blueprint for kicking against the pricks.

This is Michael Azerrad — a solid believer in underground/indie music — in some excerpted Pazz & Jop commentary. I have to admit: the way he’s thinking about music here is very close to the way I tend to. A few years ago, I wrote a piece attempting, in a very unfocused way, to explain something very similar about indiepop of the twee-and-snotty 80s/90s variety. The way I heard that music was as a transgression and a critique — a way of rejecting the fact that underground music’s ethos could be very aggressive, masculine, and cynical, very guarded. I heard indiepop as a thumbing of the nose against those qualities: musicians deciding to be sweet, or poppy, or girly, or childish, or to dress like librarians, to be un-tough and nerdy and happy, and to do it all with a kind of careless vigor that said hahaha fuck all y’all. It never occurred to me that this aesthetic would really go anywhere, and for the most part it didn’t: only a tiny circle of people listened to that stuff, and those outside the circle barely recognized the music as a critique of anything; they tended to think it was just dumb. But something close to that aesthetic did go somewhere — something that folded a little bit of indiepop quirk and whimsy into the “smart and serene” Azerrad is talking about. By the end of the 90s, “smart and serene” seemed like the tentpole of indie, the thing indie offered as an alternative to the rest of the world. Now, ten years on, “smart and serene” feels like the thing indie is actively exporting into the mainstream — no longer as a hidden alternative but as a contender, a meaningful strand of the greater culture.

Where I have more trouble keeping up with Azerrad is in thinking about how things have changed over the past decade. I agree that, no matter how you feel on the indie-dominated portions of the internet, “smart and serene” is still going to present to most young Americans as a novel and maybe even paradigm-busting way for pop music to work. Then again, that’s a big part of the experience I had with it a long time ago, so it’s hard to say anything’s changed. If anything, I tend to imagine the experience of “smart and serene” feels less weird, less jarring these days; “smart and serene” could describe Apple’s advertising agenda. It’s less of a strange private discovery and more of a major option. This could mean Azerrad’s right — that this sensibility is a bigger one these days because more people feel an actual need for it. It probably also means it’s less and less of a strange alternative.

Obviously I think a lot these days about what that means. Last week, I found myself bringing it up while talking about the Magnetic Fields’ Stephin Merritt, and the reasons he now elicits gut-level loathing in a lot of people who used to enjoy his music. (This is a group I’m part of.) Merritt’s music was actually embraced very early on by that snotty-indiepop contingent, because a lot of things about it actually fed the critique they were making of underground rock: Merritt’s music was wry and theatrical; he was a droll older guy who made synth-drenched, feminine, very formal music; he was the opposite of a “rock star.” At the end of the 90s, the group released 69 Love Songs, and it did really surprisingly well — people way beyond the normal sphere of indie found these qualities and quirks really charming and interesting. Today, ten years later, those qualities/quirks are a lot more common: within the sphere of middlebrow music geeks, people are actively sick of them, and in the big-picture music world they’re at the very least vaguely familiar. (“That’s like Juno or something.”) Merritt’s failure to adapt to this change of context — and the fact that his music has only grown more formal and joyless and emotionally distant — has made him sort of irritating, especially now that he’s doing this stuff not as an underdog but from a position of praise and acclaim.

A lot of strains of “indie” music have adapted to this context: I don’t think anyone could look at the taste category we call “indie” and not acknowledge that a lot of its listeners and musicians have spent the past decade pushing in the direction of modern pop — getting more demonstrative, swearing off their puritanism, re-embracing beats and machines. Interestingly enough, a lot of this happened during a period where a lot of modern pop, r&b, and hip-hop was pushing toward qualities we might once have associated with indie — cultivating strangeness, focusing on sonic novelty, even watching their own alternative/underground scenes gel. (The 00s felt like the first decade during which people could talk casually about “underground hip-hop” or “underground pop” as distinct, established things with particular audiences.)

Now imagine I’m very quaintly filing CDs at home, and I put together a shelf containing a bunch of stuff like: LCD Soundsystem, Madlib, Solange Knowles, Santigold, Basement Jaxx, M.I.A., Annie, Gnarls Barkley, Janelle Monae, Brazilian Girls, Erykah Badu, Lupe Fiasco, Dizzee Rascal, Passion Pit, Chromeo, Of Montreal.

How do you think of this shelf? These acts all strike me as a pretty coherent cluster of taste; I would guess they share lots of fans. Some people would say that cluster is just “indie” or “indie-approved” or stuff that appeals to indie-type music geeks, which is probably fair. Other people might insist that a lot of these acts come out of completely different “home” genres and communities — that the list spans indie-rock, international pop, r&b, popular dance, indie-dance, hipster rap, etc. Or “black” traditions and “white” ones. Others would just tell you it’s a modern jumble of stuff that’s sort of common ground to geeky/savvy critic types, and now that the singer from the Shins has started a band with Danger Mouse, trying to untangle its genre distinctions might be sort of beside the point.

You can probably guess what I’d say. Sometimes I think the reason critical discourse fixates on the Near-vs-Far issue I described is because that issue itself is up in the air right now, very much In Play, thanks partly to the number of critic types who started picking at it years ago. And to me, this is a great thing.

If you forced me to come up with a neat encapsulation of what I like in music — the thing that I, with all my subjective biases, tend to like best — I would probably say something like “weird pop.” This category, being broad and subjective, tends to include whatever I want it to include at the moment, but I know what I mean by it: popular song that works in ways that surprise me. When I was a small child, I got “weird pop” from the new-wave on the radio, a whole candy-colored jumble of weirdness. When I was an adolescent, I got it from watching the first pop explosion of hip-hop on Yo! MTV Raps. Through my teens and early twenties, I got endless amounts of “weird pop” out of indie. At the beginning of this century, I got more “weird pop” vibes out of the r&b on the radio, and out of dance music, and through the latter half of the past decade, I’ve gotten flashes of it out of artists vaguely similar to that cluster outlined above — a group that, much like new-wave pop’s weird jumble of punk and disco and soul and electronic dance music, seems to be drawing people from lots of directions into a similar sphere. Weirdly enough, I haven’t always liked the stuff that comes out of that sphere. But as a development, it seems right and interesting to me, the seed (or the symptom) of a necessary shift in how we perceive certain things.