Empire of Dirt. Wendy Fonarow
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Indie positions itself in relation to the mainstream as an oppositional force combating the dominant hegemony of modern urban life. Any band that is seen as “chipping away at the facade of corporate pop homogeny” (Melody Maker, April 1995) is a positive addition to the indie fellowship.
One telling difference between indie and mainstream rock can be glimpsed in the importance that indie bands place on the avoidance of the guitar solo, which I discussed earlier. Some fans joke that indie bands can’t do guitar solos because they can’t play their instruments well enough, noting the contrast in the professional abilities of rock performers and young indie upstarts. However, eschewing guitar solos is regarded by most as a moral issue. Guitar solos are seen as self-indulgent, pretentious, narcissistic displays often likened to masturbation. The avoidance of guitar solos places indie as modest and unpretentious.66 In general, indie inhabits a position of leanness and sexual austerity, though the latter waxes and wanes within indie. The “Madchester” scene of 1986 combined features of indie with dance’s openness to drugs and sexual expression. Being tight, taut, and lean are positive attributes when noted by reviewers in their discussions of indie bands, and most bands manifest this notion of thinness physically as well.67 In this sense, the emphasis on slender performers is a simulacrum of the ideological stance of indie in contrast to the mainstream. Indie views the mainstream as slovenly, bloated, corpulent, clichéd, excessive, sexually promiscuous, overripe, and rotting from decadence. Contrasts in genre function in the community as barometers of virtue.
The mode and manner of indie’s debate with the mainstream is not new in British history. While the topic is different, indie’s stance about appropriate music practices is analogous to arguments over the nature of appropriate worship set forth during the Reformation. Indie and the mainstream play roles in an ancient and continuing religious drama between Protestants and Catholics, Swift’s Lilliputians and Blefuscudians. Indie fans are the Puritan reformers against the established Roman Catholic Church of the mainstream music industry. In its ideological endeavor, indie paints the mainstream in a manner similar to the Reformation’s portrait of the Roman Catholic Church. The mainstream, like the Catholic Church, is depicted as a corrupt bureaucracy of clergy who are susceptible to bribery and appointed by higher authorities who are unrelated to local interests. It creates a caste of businessmen who exploit the masses for their own personal advantage. It is tantamount to a church that has deviated from the original purity of the musical experience. Indie views the mainstream as filled with empty rituals, featuring excessive flourishes and ridiculous costumes. The mainstream and majors are represented as a Catholic church filled with unscrupulous, dissolute men in suits who exploit the faithful and encourage indulgences. The mainstream is held to be a force that desecrates music by turning it into a commercial enterprise devoid of its sacred character.
Indie traces its heredity to the inception of protest in the music industry: the punk movement. The moment of punk itself was a reenactment of the philosophy and religious warfare of the Reformation, the moment when the corrupt autocratic and hierarchical “church” of the music industry was assailed by local organizations wishing to establish their own independent congregations who were able to (s)elect their own ministers. Punk assailed the existing church of music and demanded reform in both the production and the consumption of musical forms. Both indie and punk demand the purification of the existing liturgical order by stripping away the excessive accoutrements of the dominant system and replacing them with the lean and austere music, production, performance, and style, to become the “purest incarnation of the spirit of music” (Laing 1985: 23).
NME journalist Stuart Bailey once asked in a column soliciting views on indie, “Why are indie kids so tight-assed and elitist about their music?” (NME, July 18, 1992), but he may as well have asked why Puritans are so puritanical. Being “tight-assed and elitist” are fundamental tenets of the ideological system that produces the specific form of music and ritual practices he was attempting to define. The Puritans believed that they had purified their form of worship from all traces of Catholic and pagan influences. Indie is also a drive for purification. Indie attempts to free itself from anything that debases, pollutes, or contaminates music. The language of indie’s musical discourse is peppered with religious overtones. Indie fans are called the “indie faithful” or “disciples.” Various marketing reports characterize indie fans as “musical evangelists” who attempt to convert others to this style of music (IPC Music Press 1993). Indie fans are characterized as “purists” in their own discourse, as well as in marketing reports (EMIRG UK 1993). Indie’s purists take up the Puritan gauntlet and continue the battle of reformation and transformation through the act of reform in the milieu of music.
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