Is Indie Dead?
Illustrations by Samuel Bosma[Editor’s note: This essay is the cover story for Paste‘s February issue. This version contains corrections.]
In 1966, John T. Elson posed a dangerous question. The Time magazine editor, in a now-legendary essay, asked: Is God dead? “It is a question that tantalizes both believers, who perhaps secretly fear that he is, and atheists, who possibly suspect that the answer is no,” he wrote. Spelled out in red letters on the magazine’s bible-black cover, the question aroused dismay and dissent in newspaper editorials, family rooms and sacristies across the country, despite the fact that Elson skirted a definitive answer to his own loaded query.
Ten years later, another question was posed, though much less formally. In the 1970s and into the ’80s, beneath the surface of a placid mainstream culture, a growing mass in shredded clothes, with flailing bodies and untamed voices welled up, howling in unison: Are we dead? This movement started in scattered urban centers and then spread, flourishing on obscure LPs and in the black-and-white photocopied pages of fan-made ’zines, traded like fine tea from the Orient. It took refuge on low-frequency college radio stations, where DJs blasted the gospel of those wild men and women to listeners who scrawled their own parables with their own furious bands. God may have been usurped in the ’60s, but these kids were baring their teeth, sharpening their knives, preparing to slaughter the idol that rose in God’s place, the slicked-smooth supreme being of Pop. They wouldn’t make money doing it, they wouldn’t be famous, they wouldn’t fit in—and they not only braced themselves against these realities, they adopted them as their core tenets, their creed.
In 2010, we again find ourselves in strange times. More than 20 years have passed since the punk movement and its offspring ground a steel-toed boot into the shin of America’s cultural consciousness, and in that time we’ve seen it rise up, triumph and retreat in an endless cycle, each time leaving shards of itself behind to float or sink in the mainstream. What we’ve called it has never been stable—it’s been known alternately as “punk” for its early attitude, “underground” for where it happened, “alternative” when the mainstream held it up as an antidote to its own poison—each of these picked up then sloughed off when the semantic baggage grew too unwieldy.
Most recently, “indie”—long thrown around as a signifier of how it got done (i.e. independently)—has become the nom du jour. “When I first heard the term ‘indie rock,’ it was about business practices,” says Slim Moon, who came of age as a punk fan in the 1980s, founded the Kill Rock Stars label in the ’90s, and now helms Shotclock Management out of Portland, Ore. “Major labels being publicly held corporations, their primary motive has to be to make money for stockholders. And the distinctions that I think indie labels were trying to make was, ‘We’re independent of that system so we have lots of reasons for doing this: We’re doing this for politics, we’re doing this for cool factor, we’re doing it for aesthetics, we’re doing it for community, but we’re not just doing it for money.’”