The question “What is indie music?” troubles the bicycle mustachioed barista, artisanal birdhouse designer, and misunderstood undergraduate alike, racking their brains as they lay awake beneath their framed Joy Division posters. Is it a musical movement against corporatism in music? A genre of rock music that highlights mostly white, androgynous-male hipsters? A collection of small popular-music artists and fans who favor a liberal DIY ethic? Fans[1], musicians[2], academics[3], and businesses[4] have all struggled to define indie music in any cohesive sense, to the point that “indie” cannot even be universally considered shorthand for “independent” anymore. True to its name, it seems that every participant has their own personalized definition of what it means to be into indie music. And yet, despite its seemingly endless collegiate desire to find itself, the loose collection of fandoms using the term have remarkably consistent group practices dating back decades. While self-described indie music fan cultures have a history of progressive politics, its foundational practices are also fraught with domination by white male voices and boundary policing. These issues can be traced to indie music’s industrial structure as well as indie fandom’s traditions of tastemaking and canonization, all of which incorporate and recapitulate hierarchy.
1. Cultural Origins in Middle Class Privilege
Issues of representation and elitism in the indie music scene date back to its origins. In his book, White Boys, White Noise: Masculinities and 1980s Indie Guitar Rock, Matthew Bannister traces the roots of indie rock fandoms, from which the broader term “indie” evolved, to the 1980’s UK and American alternative guitar rock scenes. He writes how the fan scenes of indie rock began as a cultural reaction by mostly white men to the machismo of mainstream 70s and 80s rock, the violent ruggedness of hardcore punk, and perceived inauthenticity and corporate excess of Pop and Glam Rock. Indie rock provided its mostly male performers with the space to play with gender and create a version of masculinity that was more sensitive and bookish than popular mainstream.[5] For fans and artists alike, music became an intellectual pursuit of consumption, in which “activities of record collecting, debates about the composition of the ‘canon’; music ‘connoisseurship’, exchange and hoarding of information”[6] While there is nothing innately problematic about treating popular-styled music with an intellectual styled curiosity, it also fed into an elitist rockist[7] mindset among artists[8] and fans alike. As many feminist musicologists have noted, the adoption of this pro-rock elitism is problematic for its dismissal of Pop, a genre with a canon dominated by women.[9] So not only did indie begin with a white male majority, many active participants were self-considered musical savants who set sonic boundaries according to their often discriminatory tastes.
While the early indie scene’s leading voices usually expressed leftwing viewpoints, the scene’s mostly male and overwhelmingly white voices left black fans and female fans in the margins, despite shared sensibilities. Also take for example the experience expressed in the article Here’s How It Felt to Grow Up as a Black Indie Fan in 90s Britain. As a teen, Josh Surtees “wanted to be like Morrissey—sensitive, bookish, lonely, cynical, outspoken, quite probably gay and with immaculate taste in absolutely everything.”[10] However, he found it difficult to ignore the racially tone deaf comments by his idol, plus the feeling of being “ the anomaly among tens of thousands of white people… at festivals”[11] Likewise Riot Grrl, a key space for alt rock women, has been frequently accused of being primarily focuses on the experiences of white cis women.[12] These issues indicate that classic indie was coded white by its participants, and failed to include would-be fans from underrepresented backgrounds.
In addition to the cultural gatekeeping of indie fandom, material barriers to entry into the music industry, in combination with its emphasis on “authenticity,” have historically limited access to the economically privileged. Firstly, there is the issue that pursuing a career in music has a high financial risk, and if you are an independent artist, low reward. The costs of instruments, lessons, time practicing, recording, performing, distributing in an incredibly saturated market relegates participation to those with a strong financial support network. Also, as noted in Hugh Brown’s Valuing Independence, artistic “authenticity,” or the idea of pursuing art for arts sake “is of great value to the few fans who follow ‘cult’ acts, [but] it may not translate into a sustainable income.”[13] Generally not successful in the charts, classic indie bands sought small dedicated local followings, surviving on ties to a local independent record label. While the common insult of “selling out” lobbed at artists that pursue financial stability has not been as prevalent in the modern scene,[14] this characterization of indie had coded the genre as an expression of white middle-class privilege.
2. The Power of Tastemakers and Fans
Indie’s ritualized emphasis on trusted tastemakers was cemented by changing mediums of music distribution and promotion in the mid-nineties, particularly with the rise of wide reaching medium-sized record labels and the review website Pitchfork. While the alternative music scenes of the 80s and 90s, such as Grunge, Riot Grrl, or Brit Pop emphasized local community, the growing indie fandoms in the late nineties turned their eyes toward the plethora of music appearing on the internet. Holly Kruse dictates how the internet appealed to indie fandom’s emphasis on consumption, stating “the online marketplace… provides its own stores and opinion leaders in its virtual spaces, and websites like Pitchfork are certainly more available to more people worldwide than indie hipster bricks and mortar operations.”[15] Likewise, the move online transitioned power away from localized record labels with strong communal relationships to a mid-sized class of “major indie” labels with farther reaching influence.[16] Rather than indicate a fan commitment to local independent work, this shows a preference for globalized marketplaces. And to sort through this global marketplace, many indie fans have placed their trust in aggregate review sites and the “major indie” labels to determine the makeup of the newly digitalized scene.
While these online institutions typically present themselves as against corporate influence, they have exhibited an unacknowledged discriminatory power over the makeup of the indie scene. Pitchfork is “widely believed to have the power to pluck a band from obscurity and thrust it into the indie consciousness, and to push it out just as quickly.”[17] That power, for much of the sites existence, benefited mostly voices of white male artists and the opinions of white male critics. From the year 2000 to 2009, the height of indie’s presence in the mainstream, acts fronted by women or people of color comprised only 20% of the spots on Pitchfork’s annual top ten albums lists.[18] Similarly, the Pitchfork writing staff consisted of wholly men in 2000,[19] a dynamic that moved to a still overwhelming 85% men by 2008.[20] Presumably, the major indie labels, which also grew out of the 80s and 90s alternative/indie scenes, were not much better. Given the power enabled by indie fandom’s trust in these taste-making institutions, they demonstrably biased the indie community’s attention towards a similar demographic of artist. This representational bias is the culmination of a culture that held a loose belief in the superiority of independent labels and the possibility of a “refined taste”, both of which benefited those claiming that authoritative position.
Indie festivals, which have become the main artist-fan space for indie fans, most prominently spotlights representation imbalances. Indie music festivals meteoric rise into American public consciousness in the 2000s reflected the increasingly globalized tastes of the indie crowd, and the demand to see them live in their areas. Generally owned or operated by either Live Nation and AEG live, major media conglomerates, the festivals notably did not include many women on their extensive listings. Despite being attended on average by 51% women, major indie festivals featured female or mixed gender acts roughly 25% of the time, according to a study by Huffington Post.[21] Additionally, there is pay gap between genders for artists, and a difference in treatment. As rapper Angel Haze claims, “Women make way less — like significantly less — and are treated way worse than men at any festival I’ve ever been to.” The near even split of men and women attendees at festivals indicates that indie fandom is not a man’s world, but the industry surrounding it certainly is.
While the music industry is certainly guilty of capitulating top-down discrimination, Indie fandom is by no means absolved of problematic behavior either. Take for example the “Indieheads” community of 230,000+ indie fans on Reddit, an admittedly biased group that is 90% men and 84% white.[22] The online fan space makes deliberate efforts to address its bias, holding weekly discussions, moderated by women, about female led acts in the indie scene. Additionally members purportedly frame the community around all non-mainstream music. However, its rules privilege acts with sonic roots in indie-rock, allowing discussion for the incredibly popular Radiohead or Arcade Fire while disallowing discussion about popular, yet unsigned, Pop (coded female) or R&B (coded black) acts.[23] The rockist pre conception of indie, even as the definition is supposedly expanding, is also apparent in the semi-common fan use of the term “PBR&B.” New Republic writer Noah Berlatsky articulates the problematic nature of the term:
“The whole hipster R&B genre, aka “PBR&B,” seems designed to avoid labeling black artists as “indie.” Performers like SZA, FKA Twigs, or Dawn Richard all work with spacious, off-kilter beats and psychedelic electronica flourishes—they sound like peers of Bjork, not Beyoncé. But Bjork is considered central to indie, and SZA, FKA Twigs, and Richard are all R&B with an asterisk.”[24]
While indie has come to be a catchall term, used interchangeable with the terms “underground,” “punk,” or “alternative,” the fan culture surrounding the term has retained patterns of behavior from the 80’s indie-rock scene. Consequentially, there is a continuation of discriminatory fan practices from the original indie-rock culture, which presumes the genre to be a space for white men.
3. Post-Indie
As complaints about the homogenous white male face of indie mounted in recent years, tastemakers have attempted to address their representation problems, with mixed reception. Pitchfork’s favored albums have increasingly come from women, queer people, and people of color[25] and it has hired more writers for issues of identity. A New York Times think pieces declared “Indie rock, especially, has undergone an identity crisis this decade. Often, male-fronted indie bands have begun to feel rote or even parodic,” and that the spotlight must move to “female artists.”[26] However, these reforms and critiques were received rather poorly by artists and fans alike. The same artists spotlighted in the NY Times piece “ expressed frustration at how quickly their presence became politicized.”[27] Likewise, fans quickly pointed out the irony that Pitchfork, which for years promoted mostly white male rock, now chastised the scene’s demographic makeup.
This demonstrates the ultimate limits of tastemaker culture’s ability to reform itself. When the industrial components of indie are still led by men, and the term indie has decades of history being coded a certain way, any top-down attempt at change feels like tokenization. To use the metaphor of Korean-American musician Michelle Zauner:
“I just don’t want to think that women of colour making music is the new chillwave[28]… I read food articles about how Korean food is over and it’s all about Vietnamese and I think, ‘Fuck you. It’s not going anywhere.’ My identity is not your fad. You don’t have to spit it out at some point.”[29]
Dismissing the voices of white male artists does not feel like progress, as altering who gets the spotlight does not challenge the power of industry gatekeepers. Instead it seems like a desperate attempt for the industrial authorities to retain their credibility, without actually changing the unequal material conditions that enabled certain voices to receive priority in the first place.
Recent movements in the underground music scene demonstrate that real progressive changes come not through the expansion of old spaces by old authorities, but the creation of new spaces by new voices. Take for example the music festival Afropunk, which was created in 2006 as a space for black punk-rock fans, but has since expanded to include black artists typically associated with hip-hop, indie, pop, and R&B. It’s founder, James Spooner, “had become deeply frustrated with the DIY scene and its adherents for presenting themselves as progressive, but never making room for a conversation around race and identity,”[30] and therefore looked to make a new community. Likewise, a roundtable of artists who could not break into the indie music industry expressed how instead they turned to websites like Bandcamp, which had no discriminatory gatekeepers in their way. “I think Bandcamp and the D.I.Y. route are really cool,” says Lindsey Jordan “because it allows people who may not be able to afford guitar lessons or maybe come from different financial backgrounds to like put their stuff out and not necessarily pay a million dollars for studio time.”[31] These movements mirror the reasons for the creation of Riot Grrl, Grunge, and even Indie itself, which was created by and for sensitive white men when they faced gatekeeping from mainstream rock masculinities. Also note the language shift: They don’t call their work “Indie.” It’s “DIY.” It’s “Afropunk.” They are literally starting movements on their own terms, with a necessary separation from cultures that did not include them. Indie, and the decades long culture surrounding it, certainly will remain a home for many artists and fans alike. However, indie, as a term an industry and a culture, has outlived its usefulness for many young artistic voices today and frankly, from an innovation standpoint, that may be a good thing.
[1] R/indieheads Reddit Thread, “Can We Talk About the Boundaries of Indie,” 2015, https://www.reddit.com/r/indieheads/comments/27ot2n/can_we_talk_about_the_boundaries_of_indie/
[2] Dave Cool, What Is Indie, film, 2005
[3] Hugh Brown, “Valuing Independence: Esteem Value and Its Role in the Independent Music Scene,” Popular Music and Society 35, no. 4 (2012): , doi:10.1080/03007766.2011.600515.
[4] Tim Donnelly, “How to Expand Without Losing Your Indie Culture,” Inc.com, https://www.inc.com/guides/2010/12/how-to-expand-without-losing-your-indie-culture.html.
[5] Matthew Bannister, White Boys, White Noise: Masculinities and 1980s Indie Guitar Rock (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). 24-27.
[6] Ibid. xv
[7] Rockism: Belief in the superiority of rock music, generally due to its being “raw” or “authentic”
[8] Maggie Serota, “8 Unpopular Morrissey Opinions,” BuzzFeed, https://www.buzzfeed.com/maggieserota/8-unpopular-morrissey-opinions. The Smith’s lead singer Morrissey, considered a staple of indie is known for having expressed several problematic views. “[Morrissey] told the Guardian Weekend magazine that he regarded the Chinese people as “sub-species” over their animal rights track records” “Morrissey condemned dance music as “…the refuge for the mentally deficient. It’s made by dull people for dull people.” Note that dance music is generally considered a more gender-neutral space than indie.
[9] Ann Powers, “A New Canon: In Pop Music, Women Belong At The Center Of The Story,” NPR, July 24, 2017, https://www.npr.org/2017/07/24/538601651/a-new-canon-in-pop-music-women-belong-at-the-center-of-the-story.
[10] Surtees, Josh. “Here’s How It Felt to Grow Up as a Black Indie Fan in 90s Britain.” Noisey. March 01, 2016. https://noisey.vice.com/en_us/article/ryz4eb/what-it-was-like-to-grow-up-as-a-black-indie-fan-in-90s-britain.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Laina Dawes, “Why I Was Never a Riot Grrrl,” Bitch Media, May 15, 2013, https://www.bitchmedia.org/post/why-i-was-never-a-riot-grrl.
[13] Hugh Brown, “Valuing Independence: Esteem Value and Its Role in the Independent Music Scene,” Popular Music and Society 35, no. 4 (2012): , doi:10.1080/03007766.2011.600515.
[14] Rachel Bresnahan, “What Exactly Is Selling Out in 2016?” Sonicbids Blog – Music Career Advice and Gigs, August 31, 2016, http://blog.sonicbids.com/what-exactly-is-selling-out-in-2016.
[15] Holly Kruse, “Local Identity and Independent Music Scenes, Online and Off,” Popular Music and Society 33, no. 5 (2010): 630, doi:10.1080/03007760903302145.
[16] Ibid. 627
[17] Justin Sinkovich, Philippe Ravanas, and Jerry Brindisi, “Company Profile: Pitchfork: Birth of an Indie Music Mega-brand,” International Journal of Arts Management 15, no. 2 (Winter 2013): 73.
[18] “Pitchfork ‘Albums of the Year’ Lists By Year,” Album of The Year, https://www.albumoftheyear.org/publication/1-pitchfork/lists/.
[19] “Top 20 Albums of 2000 – Individual Staff Lists” Pitchfork, January 01, 2001, https://pitchfork.com/features/lists-and-guides/5816-top-20-albums-of-2000/?page=2.
[20] “The 50 Best Albums of 2008 – Individual Staff Lists” Pitchfork, December 19, 2008, https://pitchfork.com/features/lists-and-guides/7573-the-50-best-albums-of-2008/?page=6.
[21] Alanna Vagianos, “Music Festivals Have A Glaring Woman Problem. Here’s Why.,” The Huffington Post, March 25, 2016, http://data.huffingtonpost.com/music-festivals.
[22] R/indieheads Reddit Thread, “r/indieheads census 2017 results!,” 2017, https://www.reddit.com/r/indieheads/comments/649b74/rindieheads_census_2017_results/
[23] R/indieheads Reddit Thread, “New Rules Presented + Feedback Session,” 2018, https://www.reddit.com/r/indieheads/comments/856lau/modpost_new_rules_presented_feedback_session/
[24] Noah Berlatsky, “Why “Indie” Music Is So Unbearably White,” The New Republic, April 02, 2015, https://newrepublic.com/article/121437/why-indie-music-so-unbearably-white.
[25] Pitchfork, “The 50 Best Albums of 2017 – Page 5,” Pitchfork, December 12, 2017, https://pitchfork.com/features/lists-and-guides/the-50-best-albums-of-2017/?page=5. Notably only 1/10 albums in the top ten came from a white male.
[26] Joe Coscarelli, “Rock’s Not Dead, It’s Ruled by Women: The Round-Table Conversation,” The New York Times, September 01, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/01/arts/music/rock-bands-women.html.
[27] Jillian Mapes, “The Year “Indie Rock” Meant Something Different,” The Year “Indie Rock” Meant Something Different | Pitchfork, December 29, 2017, https://pitchfork.com/features/oped/the-year-indie-rock-meant-something-different/.
[28] Chillwave is a subgenre of electronic music that had a notoriously short period of prominence from 2010-2012
[29] David Renshaw, “My Identity Is Not Your Fad: How Indie Got Woke,” The Guardian, July 06, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/jul/06/identity-not-your-fad-how-indie-got-woke.
[30] Nikita Richardson, “How Afropunk Became a Full-Blown Movement,” Racked NY, August 20, 2015, https://ny.racked.com/2015/8/20/9180091/afropunk-festival-history.
[31] Coscarelli, “Rock’s Not Dead, It’s Ruled by Women.”