Slanted and disenchanted

by: Kate Carraway

June 30, 2009 3:18 PM

Comments: (8)

Indie rock was everything I ever wanted, until it wasn’t anymore

I wanted indie rock to save me. I really thought it would. I wanted Liz Phair’s languid monotone to confirm that I wasn’t a perverted nymphomaniac, or not the only perverted nymphomaniac. I taped The Wedge, stockpiled Sassy and listened with an accelerating heartbeat to my corduroy-wearing crew of older friends talk about Looper at all-night LAN parties.

I wanted guys that were strange, thin and dirty to hurt me, and I wanted fine literary lyrics to hurt to. Small labels with names like “Sappy” and “Kill Rock Stars” were not just essential as a delivery service for the noise, but to legitimize the distrust I felt for big business. I wanted the half-secret venues down gravelly alleyways and the band names that nobody else knew to justify and reward my enduring awkwardness, my suspicion that we were miles smarter and specialler than we might be. It worked, for a while. But in the end, indie rock let me down.

Indie rock was targeted a couple of years ago by the New Yorker’s Sasha Frere-Jones for its lack of miscegenation, specifically for excluding elements of black music; Toronto writer Carl Wilson responded on Slate.com that the primary problem of indie rock is, instead, that much of it is “blatantly upper-middle class.” Both were right, but both were missing the social eventuality of indie rock, which is that it fucking sucks.

Indie-rock kids experience alienation just to the left of those who fled to punk, metal or hip-hop and, as adults, our cultural tastes and social behaviours are predicated on ironic detachment, reinforced by over-educated snottery and inflated hipster egos. Where the music is conceptually dense and artistically provocative, indie rock diminishes and makes precious the grandeur of sex, love, friendship and identity, and the socio-cultural spirit around it has all of the same bloodlessness and hesitation. It’s depressing.

The youthy concerns of the genre make the music so particular and so essential to graduate students and junior alt-bros. The same pedamorphism, though, is responsible for some of the worst bits of the social world of indie rock, where men and women are equally incapacitated in their grown-upness. This indie nation of silent, unobtrusive Polly Pockets and anxiously impotent man-boys stopped making sense to me just when it became obvious that careerism was verboten; that sex was mostly theoretical; that biking in the sunshine to vegetarian picnics was an ideal — the ideal — weekend activity. So protective is indie rock that developing priorities or perspectives beyond its placated confines is considered treasonous to the be-hoodied negaverse.

Competitive coolness always seemed kind of transparent but benign, until I became unsettled at how cruelly contemptuous I was of everyone else. I still relate to the hipster vilification of other people, and remain basically racist against Richmond Street, but the mean bone in my body was worked so hard when I was deep into indie rock that it got exhausting being so lethargically clever and over it all the time.

Still, I lament the loss of my tribe, the one understood to be mine by big sisters and high school buddies, and the one that ably swept me through my predictable but genuine, over-privileged, white-bread angst. Without a de facto culturally ordered community, I’ve made my own out of political dykes, high-fiving rugby jocks, metal bros; other ex-cools who now ignore most of the Facebook invites for five dollar shows, and the remaining pals who get off on the indie of indie rock just as much as ever (not that they’d admit it). Incidentally or not, I listen to many times more punk rock, hip-hop and sticky pop music than anything else, and I guess technically I’m a yuppie now, if one who’s grown increasingly committed to staying drunktarded in my lingering youth. The exclusivity of cool-kid culture that drew me at 13 repulses me now, but I probably only got to here because of its validation.

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My Life, My Fault

Slanted and disenchanted

Kate Carraway