Class War Revisited!*

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

*no not that one.

http://www.slate.com/id/2176187/pagenum/all/#page_start - Carl Wilson's "The Trouble With Indie Rock", where he argues that "it's class, not race" (in response to that SFJ essay we talked about)

Comments

[koganbot]

Minor point: He's not saying "it's not race, it's class" he's saying "it's not just race, it's class."

(I'm not ready to comment as I missed the whole discussion last week.)

(Actually, that reason is bullshit; I'm always ready to comment, just have other things I want to do. But I'd say that the basic split is the old one of boho versus mainstream, but in this instance the mainstream - the U.S. Top 40 (incl. Fergie and Justin, for instance) - is crawling w/ "miscegenation," and to the extent that what SFJ is pointing out is even true, it's the indie guys who are resisting the commandment to dance. But my point is that this split isn't necessarily upper-middle vs. others, but rather upper-middle-niche-bohos-who-are-rapidly-being-accepted vs. mainstream, and the mainstream itself has its divisions between preps [who I'm guessing - emphasize the word "guess" - are veering emo and indie these days] and skaters etc. [who I'm guessing are going pretty emo these days][hmmm]. Btw, the social reasons to resist the commandment to dance are kind of understandable.)

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Though I bet they still go out dancing every weekend, albeit to indie discos. (I totally understand people not liking dance music if they don't like dancing though.)

[awesomewells.livejournal.com]

I'm still not sure this debate adquately translates to the UK.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

A lot of the big buzz issues in the States don't really translate to the UK - even MP3 blogs, I can't think of any really big UK-based ones (and had NO IDEA OiNK was a British site come to think of it).

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

clue: IT'S CALLED OINK

Vital Question For Carsmilesteve

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Did OiNK have the Uncle Pigg flexi?

Re: Vital Question For Carsmilesteve

[awesomewells.livejournal.com]

Do American pigs not go 'oink' then?

Re: Vital Question For Carsmilesteve

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

as regards variant animal linguistics -- paging dr vick!

(what i guess i meant: OINK is a word that brits are more likely to find amusing and viable as the name of a greed-driven service?)

Re: Vital Question For Carsmilesteve

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

In Finnish pigs go "nöff nöff"!

Re: Vital Question For Carsmilesteve

[koganbot]

Pigs go "Meow" in America and like to play with yarn.

Re: Vital Question For Carsmilesteve

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

arf, i've never been on oink.

i can't remember where i found the Uncle Pigg song, i honestly thought it was off of trawl...

i go poop poop jiggle jiggle parp parp oink and then i don't feel bad etc.

[koganbot]

It isn't so much that they don't like dancing, but the reasons that they don't like it (or don't like official dance-club dancing or hip-hop dancing or college mixers or the prom as opposed to, say, slam dancing), which would be a feeling of alienation from the conditions of dating and dancing and standard public display and peer pressure and parties that you're not invited to and even if you were you wouldn't know what to do at them.

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Yes - to clarify, in the comment above I was specifically referring to the physical action of dancing. Of course the social awkwardness/associations can detract from one's enjoyment of the physical motion.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Bohos v mainstream rings true, and the way they've blurred into each other while maintaining at least the appearance of battle lines goes a way to explaining various things. But I do wonder why gender hasn't been brought into it...it strikes as more the heart of things than race or class.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I'm still confused by the class issues here. Most people who listen to indie music are in the general "university" orbit, probably between ages of 18-25 (skewing toward thirty-plus and sixteen on either side) and in transitional economic/social brackets. Many come from middle- to upper-middle-class backgrounds but are currently making a grand total of $14,000 a year (hello!) or an entry-level wage, plus paying the costs of living in an urban area. (Plenty of my friends in New York are worse off financially than I am, and they probably make double what I do.) Or they're in college, downloading the OINK outta music (hardly -- well, didn't -- knew ye) and still feeling broke all the time; if they're exercising their privilege, it likely isn't in he realm of music, where it's easiest to save your beer money by bootlegging everything. (So we're probably talking about "lasting effects of privileged upbringing," which encompass loads of some of the stuff discussed upthread, and not actual as-it-appears-on-a-tax-form class.)

And of course none of this changes the fact that "we," the people going to grad school or going into white collar and "knowledge" work (or whatever), will soon be in a comfortable middle to upper-middle bracket. But while our listening habits are most intense, we won't fit neatly into a particularly discernible econ class.

I think in the specific case of indie music, (econ) class AND race, though they seem to add up to a general "problem," aren't particularly useful lenses through which to analyze this stuff. You can certainly incorporate them, but they don't really tell us exactly how indie's audience works, what kind of assumptions they're generally making and how their tastes/social habits/etc. are actually influencing bestsellers. (And I doubt that armchair-crit is the best approach to answering these questions, which might explain why this whole series of conversations have felt like everyone spinning around in circles toward no particular goal.)

Btw, Lex is right that gender is a way way more obvious route to take here, and it's the one thing that isn't currently being discussed. Been discussed in the past, sure, but WHY NOW etc.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

"Bestseller" also a dead giveaway here: it seems like the more obvious "problem" (or, to use a softer term, "bias") here is with the writers of these pieces and not the audience, since if we're talking about general music-consumption trends (in which case we need to talk about TEENAGERS and EMO) indie (the kind being discussed across the board lately) is of extremely little importance. Unless your point is that the music you used to like is all terrible, but no one is actually making this argument at the moment.