Enter the den of “indie rock” — where there is no late night HBO and the best porn you’ve got is a Lane Bryant catalog
Most think that “indie rock” is defined by its means of distribution, outside of the musical-industrial complex; the truth is that it is perhaps as strongly defined by its tendency to scurry away from overt sexuality. Here in the second decade of the 21st century, as society becomes more accepting of differing sexual practices and even grandmothers tap their toes to the sex jams that blare from the radio, “indie” is bent on replacing society’s increasing coming-to-terms-with-lust with ascetic penury.
We are told again and again that we live in an era of wanton sexuality, our children tarted up before their time and society’s pillars decayed by an obscene and vulgar lust that has spread like rot throughout our culture. It used to be that the source of this sort of cultural tut-tutting was the proverbial out-of-it old person; but now, the age barrier to becoming an old fuddy-duddy is dropping precipitously. Chances are that if you hear someone under the age of forty shunning, say, the time-honored pastime of attempting to hook up in a club to a popular tune that is itself about hooking up in a club to a popular tune, that person’s mind is most definitely enthralled to the thought-scrubbing prudishness of so-called “indie rock”.
Most indie rock fans will confess to a general dislike of popular music, a pose meant to define an individual as possessing a sophisticated aesthetic palate. In popular music’s past, taking this stance was an indication that one’s taste might be unsightly in full view of the so-called “straight world”– for example, the office worker who was secretly a goth, or the engineering student who moonlit as a fan of hoary hair metal. In both instances, the inclination towards the obscure or cultish was seen by both the secret fan and society at large as a perversion, an aberration from having a quote-unquote normal relationship with music and culture.
Just wait Gen X’rs. In a few years, this will be job apparel.
But at some point in the last few decades, the tables have turned: a flip through the dial of pop radio, if you can survive the gauntlet of boorish sports jockeys and right-wing pundits assaulting your sensibilities, will often yield EDM-buoyed tuneage exhorting all manners of sexual flagrancy. There was a time where these outsized odes-to-ids were couched within nuance and wordplay (“Is ‘Norwegian Wood’ a tale of vampiric prostitution?” or “Do I detect a subtext of power and submission in this Phil Spector-produced ditty?”), but most will agree that the cards are now laid out on the table when it comes to sexually explicit lyrical content in popular song.
Perhaps the most surprising result of all of this is that the underground rock culture that used to revel in upsetting the cultural mores of their elders, has zagged as modern culture has zigged: as a pop-filled world accepts the S&M kinks of the latest Rihanna and Bruno Mars tune as the sound of our times, it is those that fancy themselves underground enthusiasts who have turned what used to be a den of illicit perversion into pop music’s eunuch wing.
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It makes a certain amount of sense: after all, underground music has always been largely reactionary to popular trends, a “back to basics” corrective to the alleged indulgences of popular commercial culture. Whether the freak flag of 60s acid rock flying in the face of a sea of Pat Boones, 70s punk and its inept answer to the question of what to do next after prog, disco and Captain and Tennille, or Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon acting uncomfortable whilst accepting a Grammy in 2012, “indie” culture has always wagged a finger at the sins of the music business whose product normal people consume.
In retrospect, the tipping point for the prudishness of underground music was probably reached in 2005, the year when the mainstream music biz gave us “My Humps” by the Black Eyed Peas, and indie culture triumphed Illinoise by Sufjan Stevens in what can only be seen as retaliation and repudiation. It is important to place “My Humps” in its proper historical context: it was the second milk-themed sex jam hit on pop radio in as many years (following on the heels of Kelis’s 2004 smash “Milkshake”) and was the logical conclusion to the course set by “Milkshake”, Ciara’s “Goodies”, and Khia’s “My Neck My Back”.
“My Humps”, though, hit a commercial crescendo that those others were only paving the way for– for a while there, every orifice of pop culture was belching out the bizarre single entendres of will.i.am’s hit. It was the kind of phenomenon where you probably didn’t know anyone who had a reaction to the song other than revulsion or kitch appreciation, and yet someone clearly was enjoying a song that wound up being such a sustained chart topper. For the next half-decade, expressing disgust with will.i.am and the Black Eyed Peas became a common way for those with allegiance to underground culture to cope with the legacy of this tune and its dripping and uncomfortable carnality.
Stevens’s Illinoise album isn’t, in any true sense, a response to “My Humps”; rather, the universal underground acclaim for the record is a clear indicator that, for a certain segment of the audience for popular music, an aesthetic of childlike twee bookishness was preferable to the garish sex parade that was going on in the greater pop universe. It was also a repudiation of the perceived falseness of what pop music had become. Pop stars, by the mid-2000s, had taken the this-is-my-tale earnestness of rap and twisted it into personal branding, with each new pop artiste making their outsized persona their way of making sure that they would be remembered by a fickle ADD-addled listening public. Fergie, vocalist and mouthpiece for the Peas, was the vessel used by will.i.am to spread his pop song wares, and her perky and sassy demeanor made the clunk of “My Humps” work for millions of listeners.
“Oh my, oh my, oh my, let me see that thong.”
“The persona is a complicated system of relations between individual consciousness and society,” explains C.J. Jung in 1928 in his landmark essay “The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious”, “fittingly enough a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and on the other hand, to conceal the true nature of the individual.” This complicated system is consistently at play in popular music, with music fans falling into relationships with these personas, attempting to try the pop star’s mask on for size every time they hold a hairbrush like a microphone whilst dancing in front of the mirror. It’s, in large part, why “back to basics” moves are so cyclical: artists become stars, stars become personas, and new artists emerge in opposition to the falseness of the existing coterie of stars, until they too become the stars they once despised and a new generation goes “back to basics” to oppose them.
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This cycle has repeated enough times that it is easy to be a fan of current indie rock without understanding its lineage from the 70s convulsions that led to the multi-front assault that was punk. The case could be made that indie was truly formed from the confused quagmire that was late 70s/early 80s post-punk, which when dosed with the LSD of MTV became both the popular genre new wave and the less popular, more target-audience-focused world of college rock. College rock morphed into alternative rock in the 90s with the success of a few key underground artists, with the next twenty years being filled with enough dorks squawking “Alternative to what?” that culture just threw up its hands and renamed it “indie”. The web’s relentless fracturing of popular culture into tiny little bite-sized pieces served this self-styled indie rock just fine, as it turned out, and by the twenty-first century you have bands like Arcade Fire and Bon Iver winning Grammys thanks, in part, to a climate that sees music press leaning so indie that in 2005 a whimsical overstuffed novelty record like Illinoise would be seen as a universally adored and important work of genius.
The success of indie in recent years has been perplexing, in part because it is a musical aesthetic created with an oppositional underdog mentality gradually becoming the dominant sound of non-hip hop non-country popular music. And it isn’t just about winning awards: increasingly, indie music is the sound of modern day advertising. Justin Vernon may have felt ambivalence about accepting a Grammy, but he was fine doing ads for Bushmills Irish Whiskey; Sufjan Stevens had no problem lending his music to AMC for a holiday-themed ad; car commercials nowadays are soundtracked by a who’s-who of hyped indie bands. People get bogged down in the endless debate of whether it is acceptable for this artist or that artist to sell their music to advertising, without seeing the more important question here, which is “Why is Madison Avenue suddenly interested in indie music to sell its wares?”
Well, one reason is because indie artists are cheap to get, so for a fraction of the cost of a Katy Perry or Jay-Z endorsement, you can get Vampire Weekend or Grizzly Bear for your Honda or VW ad. But more crucially, indie music tends to be devoid of outsized personalities, focused as it is on an internal melodicism that works well within the confines of a thirty second advertising spot. If you are creating an ad, would you rather have a pop song that is littered with sexual entendres and lyrical boasts, or a jangly piece of pablum to place underneath your pithy short film about upper income people driving around the suburbs in their shiny sporty vehicles? Ultimately, what makes the indie fan wince when he or she hears pop radio is the relentless id of modern popular music; the outsized sexual content is just part and parcel of a popular culture that is comfortable with expressing desires and pounding chests with pride. The perverse result, in terms of indie music’s relationship with advertising, is that music that is steeped in self-reflection and occasional embarrassment is better for selling than music made by people who are very good at selling themselves.
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Selling out, as a concept, has been such a predominant focus of what has become indie culture; it’s the bogeyman of generations of underground rockers. But in a sense, in underground culture the ultimate form of selling out is falling in love, which may explain why indie’s culture of sexlessness is in part due to its being derived from post-punk anti-romanticism. Seventies punk is often regaled as having been a world that was open to female musicians and female fans, an antidote to the corporate stadium rock that gave listeners an alternative to the FM cooing of bands like Foreigner and REO Speedwagon.
10cc reminds us that big boys don’t cry
The truth is more complicated, though: not only because 70s punk would eventually lead to the no-girls-allowed treehouse fort called 80s hardcore, but because it laid the foundation for the anti-love-song rebellion of post-punk.
Perhaps the most decisive anti-romantic salvo in rock was shot out of a cannon in 1979 with the closing track “Anthrax” from Entertainment!, the debut long-player by Leeds University rock deconstructionists Gang of Four. Often mistaken as a political band, Gang of Four were actually anything but, instead focused on tinkering with what exactly it was that a rock band did, and why. Why do songs have hooks? And why do pop songs always have to be about love?
“Anthrax” is a strange formalist exercise masquerading as a rock song– the different instrumental components operate independent of each other, meaning that bass, drums and guitar are never necessarily playing in sync with each other at any given point. On top of this strange unfinished jigsaw puzzle, lead vocalist Jon King pleads the helplessness of being in love’s throes. Synchronously, guitarist Andy Gill recites a spoken poem that underscores the theory behind King’s bleat. “Groups and singers,” Gill recites, “think that they appeal to everyone by singing about love, because apparently everyone has or can love, or so they would have you believe anyway. I don’t think we’re saying there’s anything wrong with love, we just don’t think that what goes on between two people should be shrouded with mystery.”
And there you have it: “We aren’t saying that there is anything wrong with love songs, BUT…” King and Gill were and remain astute observers of the world around them, and as such they couldn’t help but point out the holes in the fantasy of romantic song. It was a concept that caught on like wildfire, especially in the punk world. Two years later, Epping collectivist-punk project Crass released their Penis Envy album, which closed with the track “Our Wedding”, a parody of quote-unquote radio love ballads that presented love and marriage as the ultimate deal with the devil. “Never look at anyone, anyone but me/Never look at anyone, I must be all you see” coos Joy De Vivre, using her dripping falsetto to mask the tune’s threatening undercurrent.
Soon thereafter, antipathy towards love became de rigueur: the most successful single of 1983 was “Every Breath You Take” by The Police, a song that equated love with stalking; 1984, John Lydon of Public Image Ltd. masked his disgust with his own record label in an anti-love rant called “This Is Not A Love Song” that became his first post-Sex Pistols flirtation with chart success. In January 1987, Steve Albini’s Big Black released their final album, Songs About Fucking; in the liner notes, commenting on murder ode “Pavement Saw”, Albini wrote “the male-female relationship, as a subject for song, is thoroughly bankrupt.” Then, in the fall of 1987, American audiences connected with a tune by underground heroes R.E.M. called “The One I Love”, sending it to the Billboard top 10 and essentially ushering in the age of alternative rock.
R.E.M., being college rock favorites, were considered, by their adoring faithful, too intelligent for the mainstream. Thus “The One I Love” was a trick for those in the know who could get the irony of a song that pretends to be a love song when in fact it is an ode to love’s cruelties reaching the Billboard top 10. The success of “The One I Love” pitted it against the likes of George Michael’s “I Want Your Sex” and INXS’s “Need You Tonight”, breathy and lusty thumpers– to the R.E.M. crowd, “The One I Love” was a Trojan Horse subverting the stupidity of the typical romantic or carnal yearning at the heart of popular music. People would call in to Casey Kasem and dedicate “The One I Love” to their squeeze based on the tune’s repeated line “this one goes out to the one I love”– “The rubes! If only they paid attention to the lyrics”, R.E.M. Nation thought to itself, squealing with self-satisfaction.
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It was Jim Morrison who dubbed the rock star the “erotic politician”, in part because he or she turns multidirectional lust into power, and in part because deciding how to wield that power turns the most mundane part of a rock star’s life into a series of political choices. If a musician decides to write and then perform or record a little ditty about sex, merely being a popular artist gives that silly impulse power in the real world; so too does an artist deciding that outsized sexuality is not a suitable topic or pose for a song or performance. Ultimately, the shunning of sexuality by the indie rock world is a decided blow against the very institution of rock/pop stardom, an attempt to remove the “and roll” from rock and roll, to avoid the ridiculous and artificial, whatever that means, in the room full of mirrors that is our current cultural landscape. But in avoiding the ridiculous, indie sets itself up to be used as a commodity, its sexlessness masking a willingness to concede the struggle of its forebears under a passive aggressive guise of self-righteous piety.
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-Daniel Brockman
boston nova 