Indie Rock and Society

Online I found an interesting article about Indie Rock and Society, the following is an abstract from the article "What is Indie Rock", from Ryan Hibbett's Book, "Popular Music and Society".

This article defines the music category “indie rock” not just as an aesthetic genre, but as a method of social differentiation as well as a marketing tool. Using Pierre Bourdieu's concept of “cultural capital,” it draws a parallel between indie rock and high art, both of which depend upon a lack of popularity for their value, and require specialized knowledge to be fully appreciated. In its attempt to locate indie rock at the intersection of various artistic, social, and commercial phenomena, the article engages in detailed analysis of particular artists, songs, lyrics, websites, and reviews, from which it concludes that this relatively new genre is part of an old and familiar social structure.

Hibbet begins his article by drawing a connection between high art and indie rock, and their relation to popular culture. While popular culture has a large audience and produces an abundance of economic capital, both indie rock as well as high art have small audiences and produce little economic capital. Hibbet uses this comparison simply to demonstrate that, like high art, indie rock acquires its value by being recognized as not popular culture. Obscurity is thus considered a positive feature of indie rock which is aspired to because exclusion is seen as “a necessary consequence of the majority’s lack of taste”. One of the ways in which indie rock is able to achieve obscurity is through maintaining a DIY ethic in its musical aesthetic. This ethic is also mirrored in the sense of dress apparent in the indie rock scene, in which both producers and consumers of indie rock must present themselves as outside the economic field. Kruse alludes to this phenomenon in her article, where she defines the indie rock “look” as including thrift store clothing, basic jeans, t-shirts and sneakers. She says that this reflects an important characteristic of indie pop/rock, which is a tendency of performers to see stage wear and street clothing as interchangeable, lessening the distance between performer and audience. By displaying a sense of homology between musical aesthetics, style of dress, and interaction between performer and audience, this article does a good job in making the general ideological underpinnings of indie rock apparent.