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

[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.