kennel_district
Active member
from http://blackdownsoundboy.blogspot.com
"Lots of people grew up to, and still listen to, indie. If you go to those gigs, ignoring the obvious issues with musical formulism and tediously safe rituals, even in this city they are tediously monocultural. A thin slice of people of the same class and race, each reinforcing their overwhelming similarities."
I was having a discussion with a friend the other day, and I was saying a similar thing about hip hop as this says about indie - that it has lead itself into several different aesthetic and cultural culd-de-sacs, comprised of excessive reverence for form, a far-too-particular form of wordplay, and certain frames, such as the 'guns and booty' which are at best limiting, or at worst 'aesthetically brutal'.
But reflecting on it I think we're both wrong. In the end you can have a transcendental aesthetic experience from any music - regardless of whether it's stuck in an aesthetic cul-de-sac, just as you could have architecture that moves you in a cul-de-sac. Music's intention isn't necessarily its effect.
I think the error Martin Clark makes is first of all using race as a category, a divider. It's not, or at least it shouldn't be. Anyone who decries racism while talking about how it's great that different races can have a dialogue is stuck on the same side of the coin. The only way we can celebrate race is if we accept it doesn't make us different as a group - that shared racial grouping is a defensive, aggressive act, that we are each different.
In response I'd like to make the point that I believe people at an indie gig are no more or less differentiated by class than those at grime nights - but being someone who now frequents far more indie than any other type of music events I wouldn't say that I'm best placed to report on this, but I get the impression that most types of music attract in the main a certain self-selected subsection of people, whose positions in the various fields that constitute everyday life are reasonably similar.
"Lots of people grew up to, and still listen to, indie. If you go to those gigs, ignoring the obvious issues with musical formulism and tediously safe rituals, even in this city they are tediously monocultural. A thin slice of people of the same class and race, each reinforcing their overwhelming similarities."
I was having a discussion with a friend the other day, and I was saying a similar thing about hip hop as this says about indie - that it has lead itself into several different aesthetic and cultural culd-de-sacs, comprised of excessive reverence for form, a far-too-particular form of wordplay, and certain frames, such as the 'guns and booty' which are at best limiting, or at worst 'aesthetically brutal'.
But reflecting on it I think we're both wrong. In the end you can have a transcendental aesthetic experience from any music - regardless of whether it's stuck in an aesthetic cul-de-sac, just as you could have architecture that moves you in a cul-de-sac. Music's intention isn't necessarily its effect.
I think the error Martin Clark makes is first of all using race as a category, a divider. It's not, or at least it shouldn't be. Anyone who decries racism while talking about how it's great that different races can have a dialogue is stuck on the same side of the coin. The only way we can celebrate race is if we accept it doesn't make us different as a group - that shared racial grouping is a defensive, aggressive act, that we are each different.
In response I'd like to make the point that I believe people at an indie gig are no more or less differentiated by class than those at grime nights - but being someone who now frequents far more indie than any other type of music events I wouldn't say that I'm best placed to report on this, but I get the impression that most types of music attract in the main a certain self-selected subsection of people, whose positions in the various fields that constitute everyday life are reasonably similar.