When Indie-Rock Genres Seem to Outnumber the Bands – NYTimes.com
When Indie-Rock Genres Outnumber the Bands
A few weeks ago Hipster Runoff, a blog that ridicules bohemian culture with hilarious precision, began advertising a “genre shirt.” In photos that seem straight out of an American Apparel billboard, a young woman poses in the T-shirt, which asks, “What kind of music do u listen 2?” and offers, in a matrix of small type, more than 200 underground musical styles, both real (shoegaze, crab-core) and fake (Sufjan-house, crab-gaze).
For those who has scratched their heads in confusion (or rolled their eyes) reading a music blog lately, the joke is uncomfortably close to the truth. Ten or 20 years ago it was relatively easy to define the term “indie-rock” as a handful of related styles and a collective audience slightly on the fringe of the mainstream. But by the end of the decade it has become an ever-expanding, incomprehensibly cluttered taxonomy of subgenres. So you say you like indie-rock — well, do you mean mumblecore? Freak-folk? Ambient doom-metal? Eight-bit?
Keeping track of it all can be exasperating, which makes it easy to overlook an important fact: Despite this flurry of hyphenation, indie-rock’s gradual atomization has actually been good for the music. The reason there are so many names is that there is more variety in the music than ever. Now, thanks to an accelerated feedback loop of musical creation, consumption and online discourse, a hundred schools of thought contend.
You can see it in the cream that rises to the top of the blogosphere: the elaborate, stylized multiculturalism of Dirty Projectors (inevitably slotted as Afro-indie) and Beirut (Balkan indie-folk); the painstaking historicism of the xx (neo-shoe-gaze) or the Crocodiles (noise-pop); the proud chaos of Health (noise-rock) and crusty, lo-fi approach of Wavves (whose species designation is a rude application of the “-gaze” suffix). To identify all the branches of the electronica tree, you might need a couple of genre shirts.
It wasn’t always this way. Well into the 1990s all but the most omnivorous listeners encountered a much narrower field of sounds. You had your suburban hard-core punks, your collegiate jangle-poppers, your London and New York art-rockers, your grunge and industrial bands, and so on. New scenes took years to establish, building up identifiable audience factions before reaching the end of their life cycle.
Now that process is often compressed into a few months, as bloggers, indulging quirky, contrarian tastes, at times hype undeveloped bands into an illusory, small-pond kind of fame, then discard them once their novelty fades. (Heard of Washed Out or Neon Indian? No? Those groups were among 2009’s biggest blog phenoms.) All those leftover genre names become digital epitaphs to stillborn movements.
But the Internet isn’t the whole story; indie-rock’s fragmentation is also traceable to the decline of the major labels, whose contracts used to serve as commercial goals, as well as to reduced music coverage on MTV, which used to serve as a central musical agora. Without those anchors, the independent fringe has drifted ever further from mainstream tastes.
The downside isn’t hard to see. What was once always on the brink of something bigger has become Balkanized, and the process of genre subdivision has hidden away bands in ever tinier and more obscure pigeonholes, affecting even the best and most widely known among them. Dirty Projectors, for example, has had about as much acclaim as any indie-rock band could hope for in 2009, even landing on the cover of New York magazine, and yet sales of their latest album, “Bitte Orca” (Domino), are only about 50,000 copies, less than Lady Gaga sells in a week.
Is that failure, or a proper measure of success for challenging, innovative music? Does it even make sense to call it indie-rock anymore, if it shares less and less with other sounds in that expanding amoeba of classification? With so much good music, does it matter?
LP Revival 