Empire of Dirt. Wendy Fonarow
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own conventions, one must understand that one of indie’s motivating principles is its assessment of value in recordings and performers. Indie conceives of itself as discriminating; community members maintain that they possess the ability to assess the true value of music. Viewed from this perspective, indie is a mode of evaluation that assesses the relative value of various types of music and bestows critical acclaim on what it believes is the best. Indie fans’ preference in music is not thought to be due to their own personal tastes but arises from their belief that there are objective criteria to support their claims. It is not that they believe indie is the only music of value; rather, indie members consider themselves anointed music disciples whose acute sensitivity allows them to recognize any music of value. It just happens to be that most of the music that they consider valuable is the music of their own community. As an NME journalist put it in an article discussing the meaning of indie, “At its best, ‘indie’ is this strange industry that flourished and is still flourishing in the aftermath of punk, and has made half or two thirds of all the most interesting music in the world … mountains of good music” (NME, July 18, 1992). Indie is not merely a sound with generic conventions but a discursive practice of critical judgment as well. Indie divides the world into a musical hierarchy in which indie aficionados identify themselves as those who can recognize quality in music. Hence, their music of standard preference, indie, must be the music of the highest quality. As one of my informants put it: “I know what indie is: if it’s good and I like it, it’s indie” (L.F., age twenty-eight).
At times, other clearly different styles of music are embraced and incorporated into the indie aesthetic canon. Strikingly, American hip-hop and rap bands often come to Britain and find themselves with an indie audience. Public Enemy, Kayne West, and Gangstarr have appeared high on the bill at the Reading festival, the annual and preeminent indie music festival since 1989.57 Bands such as OutKast and Cypress Hill have a large indie following in the United Kingdom in contrast to their hip-hop fan base in the United States. Rap’s perceived “realness” and radical form attract indie critics and fans alike. The music of other genres accepted into the indie canon generally conforms in either its production or attitude to one or more of indie’s values.
Other forms of music are covered by the indie music press, but in general only as a token sampling to justify to the community that the press really has surveyed all forms of music and to assert indie as the arbiters of artistic value. As a reader wrote to the letters page, “I think the Melody Maker has given music of all types a fair hearing and I hope it continues” (Melody Maker, March 12, 1994). This version of a fair hearing means that on occasion one finds a review of the re-release of a John Coltrane album or a feature piece on a jungle artist. Only one or two of the fifty-two covers a year of the weekly press are devoted to black or Asian artists that specialize in other genres of music. As one letter writer eloquently put it, “While your coverage of indie, dance, and U.S. rock is as good as anyone could reasonably expect, I do think that any claims you make to a diversity of coverage will always carry with them a hollow ring until you finally deal with that big bad booga [sic] man that is black music” (NME, October 9, 1993). Interestingly, it was during the time of the punk reformation of the mid-1970s that the weekly press began to specialize. Previously, the weekly press had large sections devoted to jazz, folk, blues, country, and rock.
Publications nurturing indie music articulate a discourse of quality, not genre. Perhaps the nature of indie’s critical discourse of aesthetic assessment is best examined by looking at NME’s list of the one hundred greatest albums of all time (see appendix 1). In justifying its list, as well as preparing for the inevitable onslaught of outraged letters regarding oversights, the introduction stated that “the results show that the NME is still a remarkable broad church, happy to welcome Coltrane, Sinatra, Marvin, Beefheart, and Dusty as well as the many illustrious guitar abusers that have defined this paper’s heartland” (NME, October 2, 1993). In this move, the NME journalists position themselves as evaluators of a broad range of music who can then use their expertise to judge the relative merit of all artists’ productions. It is more accurate, however, to call the list indie’s most influential records. The top ten on this list strongly favor bands that are most often named as influences on indie musicians. Nevertheless, the list also includes a perfunctory and superficial sampling of other genres. Here, the legendary indie band the Stone Roses is located at number five, while the only recording of Michael Jackson on the list, Off the Wall, is at ninety-three. This rhetorical strategy crystallizes most visibly when reviewing albums of the 1980s, the decade during which indie emerged as a distinct category of music (see appendix 2). More than 50 percent of their top fifty albums of the 1980s were indie, and Manchester’s Stone Roses was given top billing for this decade.
Since indie’s discourse of aesthetic evaluation privileges indie as the very embodiment of quality, indie fans often balk when other genres of music get significant airtime on the radio or television. Thus, when both fifty- to eighty-page weeklies simultaneously introduced four-page sections devoted to dance and clubs, an avalanche of protest letters arrived from outraged readers suggesting bandwagon jumping or abandonment of indie music. A journalist’s response: “We’ll continue to cover the best music from both fields. We’re no more likely to give house room to an uninspired, formulaic club cut than to a bunch of talentless guitar droners. We crave excellence, whatever the genre” (Melody Maker, February 26, 1994). When an occasional letter writer points out the discrepancy between this assertion and the quantitative content of the paper, the token sampling of indie’s broad church is hauled out and recited in litany.
The privileging of the indie community’s ability to recognize value in music is starkly illustrated by NME’s campaign that “the BRITs” should be “the BRATs.” The BRITs is the name of the annual awards ceremonies of the British Phonographic Institute (BPI). Here, critical recognition is bestowed upon musical artists in a British equivalent of the American Grammys. As in the United States, there is often a great disparity between what music critics think is worthy and what the BPI thinks is worthy. NME decided to create its own set of awards, called the BRATs, insisting that their nominations were the truly deserving award recipients.58 A reader criticized this move in the typical exuberant inkie letter-writing style: “You miserable losers. Just because none of your sad, derivative, outdated indie bands received BRIT awards, you deem them to be a failure and a music industry marketing fix” (Melody Maker, March 5, 1994).59 The quality of the acts that had won BRITs was critiqued by a Melody Maker writer: “Whether this was because record companies find it easier to flog recognized (and crap) brand names, or because most people have inherently bad taste, is still to be determined” (Melody Maker, March 12, 1994). For the indie fan, a preference for popular music outside the indie canon is synonymous with poor aesthetic judgment, while appreciating indie constitutes enlightened taste.
Ironically, the BRAT awards soon appeared superfluous, because a year after their inception, the BRITs and the BRATs overlapped for the winners in many categories. Several bands that had been championed in the weeklies had crossed over to mainstream chart success with the explosion of Britpop. This resulted in several of the inkies’ favorite indie bands winning BRITs. Additionally, the music industry had inaugurated the annual Mercury Prize for best album of the year, the musical equivalent to the Booker Prize in literature. The Mercury Prize habitually goes to bands championed in the indie music weeklies. This award was won by Primal Scream (1992), one of the C86 bands; Suede (1993), a band dubbed “the Best Band in Britain” on the front page of Melody Maker before even a single had been released; M-People (1994), a dance band that had consistently received good reviews in the weeklies and had close connections to the independent music scene in Manchester; Portishead (1995), a trip-hop band, another favorite of the inkies that was initially supported by the indie fan base; and indie stalwarts Pulp (1996).60
Indie is often privileged in the broader media as the genre where music and art overlap. A discriminating art-school mentality permeates much of indie. Indie has often been associated with aesthetic movements in the fine arts, where music is combined with an intellectual perspective. Many indie bands form during musicians’ tenures at art institutions, and the education