All That Is Solid is an attempt to examine the relationships between popular music and global capitalism. Click here to access the archive.
1997 was a watershed year. I say this in part because it was a formative year in my teens -- the music I discovered that year would guide my taste for the next 10 -- but also because I feel there are generation-defining characteristics that all came to a head, all at once. Not only that, the iconic records that spearheaded those movements were pretty outstanding. If you were born after 1980, a quick roster of 1997's best releases probably includes at least one of your all-time favorite records: Homogenic; OK Computer; Homework; Portishead; I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One; Either/Or; The Richard D. James Album; Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space -- these are all not just great albums, but monolithic recordings whose shadows we have yet to outlive. But there's a more important album released the previous year, one that predicts each of these and most every indie trend since: 1996's Odelay. You read the title to this column, so you know where I'm going with this. Let's back up a minute first.
The fact that "Next Big Thing" is a well-abused cliché to the point of self-consciousness speaks to the unassailable truth that capitalism thrives on novelty. Here I bring up the same Marx quote I discussed last time around, from which this column gets its title: "All new-formed [relations] become antiquated before they can ossify." Capitalism demands not only progress and novelty, it demands those things at an accelerating rate. Eventually, the acceleration of novelty leads the culture industry to feed back on itself (see: "Retro" and "Vintage") and fold inward, as the sort of "natural" rate of human ingenuity is not fast enough to keep up with the demand for new content. In music (as in other art forms), the introduction of sounds and techniques external to the tradition or genre in which an artist normally works dates back centuries -- classical composers have incorporated "ethnic" dance music from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean in the 18th century to the Middle East and Southeast Asia in the 20th century. Picasso was famously accused of baldly appropriating African masks in his Cubist works. Then, as now, we have two kinds of (imaginary) subject: the Cosmopolitan subject, whose world is heterodox and whose tastes are Global; and the Ethnic subject, whose world is orthodox and whose tastes are provincial. The obvious exploitative relationship is repeated infinitely: in order to maintain worldliness, there must always be an ethnic Other through which the cosmopolitan subject gains his/her heterodox, catholic perspective.
So, the exploitation is nothing new. I would argue, however, that the late 20th century presents a different challenge. When, for instance, Béla Bartók sought inspiration in the folk music of Hungary, he was attempting to revitalize an orthodoxy of which he was a part -- the prejudices and traditions of the Classical canon. When Beck weaves together elements of hip-hop, country, bluegrass, alt-rock, folk, easy-listening, and punk rock, what tradition is he revitalizing? What is being grafted onto what? You've probably beat me to the answer in a hundred friendly arguments: the tradition being upheld and pushed forward is pastiche itself. If this is the case, then Exploitation is itself a genre of music, and it happens to be the one we here call home. And if Exploitation is a genre, that means that hybridity is no longer a means to some other creative end; it is becoming an end unto itself.
You've read this all before, though. Perhaps you've discussed Graceland in an academic context and your eyes glazed over two paragraphs ago. But I'm not just talking about Odelay, or Homogenic, or OK Computer, or Portishead. I submit that most indie musicians, indeed most indie movements, are hybrids. Along with "Next Big Thing," another wonderful critic's cliché is "Record X sounds like a cross between early Y and the guitar work of Z" or "If (Pop Artist A) and (Experimental Artist B) had a baby who was raised by (Iconic Singer-Songwriter C), it might sound like Record X." We make fun of this convention, but I wonder if it's possible or even advisable to avoid it at this point. Honestly, which of our heralded records of the last five years could not be described in such a manner? Even the artists we celebrate for their "originality" and the movements that seem so New are, essentially, hybrids. TV On The Radio? Check. Animal Collective? Check. Freak folk? Pop maximalists? Indie's collective Dance Revolution, 2003-present? Check, check, check. I don't mean to put any of these artists/movements down -- I do appreciate some of them quite a bit -- but it seems as if we've been in a holding pattern for some time now. To further accent (belabor?) the point: according to Pitchfork, the #1 record of 2008 can be described as "the threads of Brian Wilson's intricate coastal pop, Appalachian folk, modern indie rock, Grateful Dead jams, and other influences... masterfully synthesized in the band's harmonies and simply orchestrated but constantly shifting instrumental arrangements." Full disclosure: I have not listened to the Fleet Foxes album, but based on this synopsis, I feel no need to. I've already heard this record hundreds of times in the past decade.
I'm not just erecting a monument to backlash or being grumpy, though -- I think there are real consequences of this problem. The most important one is that wholly original recordings are completely out of place in indie music and don't coalesce into a movement. The way most of us learn about new music is by connecting the dots -- if we like Record X, we want to find something that resembles what we like about it. Record companies know this and present new music in those terms. On the press kits that accompany every demo CD that goes to radio or press for review, a band's bio inevitably ends with an RIYL ("recommended if you like..."). Music that is truly New, by definition, exists on an island, and can't be incorporated into that grid. It's almost impossible for an album like Scott Walker's The Drift -- one of the most arresting and unique recordings I've ever heard -- to gain any traction, specifically because it doesn't sound like anything else (I also recognize that even The Drift can be seen as derivative of something, but I argue that hybridity is used by Scott Walker as a means to an expressive end, whereas for many indie musicians it is an end unto itself). Furthermore, new production and composition techniques are dismissed if they don't yet connect to the current indie-exploitative grid. I doubt most readers here will embrace Auto-Tune until Radiohead or Sigur Rós use it (or Death Cab For Cutie -- I'm calling your bluff, Ben Gibbard!) -- and yes, that does make us racist (but that's for another column). The truth of the matter is that mainstream hip-hop and R&B, with a steady stream of singles that are remaking our relationship to the human voice, make indiedom look pretty conservative by comparison -- and they're the ones who are supposed to be "destroying music" by being "derivative."
I'm no biologist, but I've been told that one of the essential processes that takes place while we sleep is the folding of protein in our body. Only during sleep do the chains of amino acids have an opportunity to fold -- however many thousands of times necessary -- in order to assume the protein shapes that allow them to carry out their function. I think independent music has been, essentially, "sleeping" since that 1997 explosion, using this past decade to fold and transmute, and while we sleep, we create in a purely exploitative mode. It's what capitalism needs us to do until we wake up and start a movement that's truly original.
Next up, I'll be discussing music "discovery" tools like Pandora -- the harnessed, yoked, and saddled horses that plow this hybrid field (or are they the saddle/yoke/harness? Stay tuned to find out!).
