K-punk on indie

TECH-NO 

Philip from It's all in your mind - sorry chaps, keep getting the title of your blog wrong - with the latest on the 'technique' discussion .....

Philip is absolutely right about Indie, I reckon. It has shunned experimentalism without mastering musicianship, so it remains mired in some mediocre nowheresville. Drabness : forget postpunk, even at its most brown-rice earnest, it glistened with psychedelic intensity by comparison with Turin Brakes and Doves. What confuses me about Indie is what people see - and hear - in it: I'm genuinely puzzled about what people feel they get from Indie these days.

To answer my own question: it's all about authenticity isn't it? The Indie fan rejects chartpop because it is too plastic and too manufactured; rejects house, techno, garage because they are too synthetic; he/she cleaves to Indie not because of musicianship per se, but because of what musicianship is taken to signify: authentic self-expression. In fact, and this takes us right back to Philip's original comment, this is a direct inheritance from lumpen-punk's ur-igingal error : its confusion of ham-fisted bluster with a pure expressiveness and its eschewal of all other means of expression beyond guitar-bass-drums. 

Who's interested in lumpen-punk now? It was a fundamentalist misreading: ur-punk was only significant in that it blew open a space for post-punk. And: if you want to talk about technique, well, it's astonishing how proficient some of the postpunk musicians were: Levene, McGeoch, Adamson, Wobble. But it wasn't just technical ability that made them unique: it was their (modernist?) refusal to repeat or recapitulate the past, their conviction that if you weren't getting new sounds out of your equipment, you had somehow failed.

And this is it, really: you can be a master of technique without producing any new affect . Conversely, you might have no technical ability, but a tremendous capacity for discovering new sounds, riffs, stabs... And that's what Pop - in the broadest sense - is about: new ways of feeling, new ways of perceiving. 

[date unknown - 2003 or 2004 - the very early days of K-punk blog, which don't seem to be up on the internet - I found this in an old document of cut-and-pastes from his blog I'd made, as I did with several others blogs at that time. Lucky i was a hoarder, eh? With a presentiment that so much on the internet might disappear - already some bloggers had abruptly deleted their blogs.... more from the K-punk early archive soon]

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Mark is really talking about landfill indie here - the post-Britpop slop

But "Indie" is just as capable of inventing "new ways of feeling, new ways of perceiving", despite its relative lack of technique

Shoegaze is a case in point

And it's something I have riffed in the UK talks last week: starting with the idea that someone at Dissensus made, that critics are sensualists, identifying the new forms of pleasure, the new intensities

As do musicians too of course 

So for instance, hearing My Bloody Valentine with conventional ears, you might think "this is badly recorded rock music, badly played guitar, with barely-there / barely audible vocals".

And this was a common initial reaction even from people who became fans - Patti Smith heard Loveless and she told me that at first she thought there was something wrong with the CD player - others have similarly testified that they thought it was a damaged CD or a badly pressed vinyl record

But then you realise that it's deliberate and that it sounds better than conventionally well-recorded, well-mixed rock

It's the new form of sonic ecstasy

Perhaps you need to be guided by the critic-sensualist towards that understanding (cf hearing jungle as more than just a chaos of rhythm, hearing Auto-Tune trap as not a cheap, nasty, over-used effect but as a emerging field of aesthetic action)

Overall, "indie" is an entire genre that could be dismissed as badly played, badly recorded rock music, sung by people who aren't singers. 

But that becomes its own aesthetic - a set of possibilities opened up by bypassing conventional ideas of musicianship, fine playing, clean production, powerful vocalisation.