Independence Play

This July 4 marked 250 years since the Second Continental Congress formally adopted the Declaration of Independence in the United States of America.

One day before this official anniversary, Madonna released a new album that is decidedly built on the concept of freedom from tyranny too, only on the dancefloor.  In my humble opinion, it is a far greater celebration of liberty than any of the official commemorations on offer this summer. 

Without any comment on UFC, the stalling sculpture garden or reflecting pool, I am following her lead and thinking about independence in a literal sense, with books about music.

Michael Barclay and Chris DeVille wrote very different surveys of the Indie scene in North America from the early 2000s onward.  The fact that books like these exist at all is a testament to how we are all truly getting old, and everything becomes history eventually.  Their work tracing Death Cab for Cutie, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, the rise of Emo, the Shins, Arcade Fire and emergence of Jack Antonoff from the dustheap left by MGMT shows how the story of indie music in North America follows a familiar pattern. 

In cultural production and consumption, what starts as a niche eventually disperses and diffuses.  New movements either spark and fade or catch on and get boring.  When independent spirits hit the big time, they inevitably flame out or start to sound like everything else.

Barclay and DeVille share story after story about how indie artists went mainstream, or withered in to obscurity; much as all niche culture does, eventually.  Groundbreaking revolutions can start with spilling tea, and end with peeling paint.  

Political history around the world shows a tendency for oligarchy to represent the mean and the norm rather than a weird blip: power hungry structures are unfortunately the mainstream radio hits, on average.  Open, liberal democracies are more like listening to your college station. 

Canadian Hubris

Michael Barclay has cornered the market on writing tomes about esoteric Canadian music scenes.  Hearts on Fire picks up where his previous work Have Not Been the Same left off, telling the story of independent music in this country and how for a brief moment, a few Canadian indie artists made it very big worldwide.  He focuses on the five years from 2000-2005 and offers more than 700 pages about this brief era.

Barclay isn’t interested in the hard economics of Canadian independent music, even during this supposed golden age of its flowering.  His point is more to utter a giant 700-page WOW that so many Canadian bands did what they did at all, and received any kind of recognition from the rest of the world about their work. 

There can’t be a more Canadian impulse than that: to cheer for ourselves extra hard when anyone living outside of Canada takes notice.  This tiresome and yet classic trope of our national identity courses through Barclay’s work, which might be summed up by saying “look! They see us!!”

Is that Canada up there?

Barclay also makes no room to assess how Canadian artists were inspired and influenced by American musicians, and treats our home grown talent as if it sprung directly from the Canadian shield fully formed.  The Constantines frequently mentioned Fugazi as an influence; the obvious impact of other artists like Sebadoh, Dinosaur Junior, the Pixies and Pavement get no acknowledgement from Barclay. 

Canadian artists weren’t working in a vacuum, exclusively influenced by each other.  Yet Barclay doesn’t dare make room to write about the audible impact of American sounds on Canadian musicians.

Even Arcade Fire’s success may be less a story about Canadian cultural might and more a case study in how they were able to keep moving physical albums at a massive scale in the late 2000s and 2010s, despite the rise of file sharing and streaming services.  Another anomaly about this band, beyond coming from Montreal and wearing evening gowns, was that they managed to regularize hitting No. 1 on the American Billboard 200 without the support of top 40 style radio singles. 

What makes a band Canadian?  Even going back to the classics from another generation, die-hard definers of what makes Canadian music have agonized about the Band and Heart for their inclusion of – gulp! – AMERICANS in their original lineups.

The heroes of Barclay’s indie rise are no different.  Will and Win Butler of Arcade Fire were from Texas.  Neko Case of the New Pornographers was born and raised in Washington.  Peaches, Feist and Chilly Gonzales all had international families with a footprint in Europe before their fame.  Chilly’s grandfather founded Aecon and owned an apartment in Paris.  Nothing comes from nowhere, and Canada has always been a global place. 

Barclay does admit this pattern at one point, and offers that having “non-Canadian parentage” or being born outside of Canada somehow freed artists like Stars, Metric, Broken Social Scene, Caribou and Sam Roberts from a particular kind of Canadian “humility” that might otherwise have kept them playing small.  What he’s really saying here is that of all things, HUBRIS and CONFIDENCE, which are decidedly more stereotypically American than Canadian qualities, were correlated with a lot of Canadian stars’ successes in this era.  To really hit the big time, Canadians had to go for it just like a ballsy American would. Hm.

Some of the value in these success stories also speaks to the importance of how musicians needed to SEE others succeeding as a way of knowing what was possible.  Maybe Godspeed getting an NME cover truly was all it took to increase other artists’ confidence that recognition and conventional success might be possible for them to achieve. Indie musicians needed mentors and expanders around them, just like everyone else who is interested in growth.

If anything, Barclay’s work proves what a small town Canada is.  The ‘national’ indie music scene thrived through close connections between people rather than some massive cross-country network of like-minded artists. 

Members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor happened to live in an apartment co-owned by Patti Schmidt, host of Brave New Waves on the CBC.  Peaches and Feist lived together in an apartment above Come as You Are on Queen Street, and Brendon Canning of Broken Social Scene lived above Soundscapes on College.  Chilly Gonzalez’s grandfather (born as Jason Beck) started the engineering company that built the CN Tower.  Richard Reed Parry from Arcade Fire sang on a Sharon Lois and Bram album as a kid.  Leslie Feist grew up in the same neighbourhood as Rush. 

And yet, isn’t the entire world this way?  Matt Damon and Ben Affleck met in high school drama class.  Donald Trump is directly related to the Heinz family, and yes, that means the iconic ketchup people.  Robin Williams and Christopher Reeve attended the Juillard School together.  Nick Cage, Sofia Coppola and Jason Schwartzman are first cousins.  Whitney Houston’s mom was a backup singer for Elvis Presley.  Nevermind Canada, maybe the world is a pretty small town.

Tall poppies look out

There can be a dark side to small world thinking too: close-knit communities have the capacity to produce a lot of envy when friends succeed outside of an established social bubble.  On working in Montreal in the 90s, Sam Roberts said “It was an insular place. We had to fight for every inch. When Blinker the Star or Godspeed or Bran Van 3000 or Melissa [auf der Mar] or whoever managed to get a foothold in somewhere that wasn’t [local weeklies] the Hour or the Mirror, it was highly motivating for the rest of us."

What are the lessons that Barclay offers in this massive survey?  Creative people often have global origins and trajectories.  It’s hard to make money as an artist, and particularly in the post-streaming music business.  Artistic communities are small towns, even when operating in the heart of big cities.  And Canadians might not be as exceptional as we like to think we are.

Viewed more positively, being broad and having a global footprint elevates your work.  Digital services present opportunities too, to be rediscovered by new generations.  Embracing new technology will always give you an edge.  It’s good to have good friends, who can host great dinner parties and spend time together in 3D.  As Feist sang on her strangely disavowed debut album, “It’s cool to love your family.”  And really, aren’t we more related to those American cousins of ours than we would ever like to admit?

So grab your passport and let’s see what Chris DeVille has to say.

American Independents

In Such Great Heights Chris DeVille tells the tale of America’s indie music scene from the early 2000s up to the present day.  Compared to Barclay he travels through a longer scope of time, and covers a greater number of bands, who enjoyed more sheer volume of sales and greater levels of celebrity, in under half as many pages.  DeVille is a good American: efficient, effective and to the point.

He begins with the very fitting question, “what is Indie?” and the answer is tied deeply to identity, with a nod to the dynamics of power.  “As in politics, so much of this discourse was about posturing. Popular music was a way to figure out who we were, but also how we wanted to present ourselves to the world. And as with the two-party system, the nu metal vs. teen pop binary was an extremely reductive lens for identity—like attempting to boil down an eclectic student body to jocks and cheerleaders.”  Thank you DeVille, for not being the only one to see a parallel between music and politics as cultural instruments.

Underneath all of that are points about who gets to define what is cool, and how does coolness become uncool so quickly when the wrong people start to like those things.  Also here are considerations of how technology impacts creative production, how culture thrives on variety, how the meaning of a simple, two-syllable word like “indie” can morph over time, and how what starts as an insular sub-culture can become the new norm.

Feeling Receptive

After years of fermenting, Pavement emerged as ultimate avatars of the new indie sound.  Their 1997 interview on the Wedge on Canadian soil captures perfectly their sardonic existence, dripping with cool and palpable discomfort at just existing.  In DeVille’s words, “The simplest explanation of indie rock is music that sounds like Pavement" without ever reaching the scale of success that happened for Nirvana.

In that same interview, Stephen Malkmus describes their ability to make music from the simple art of noticing things, because “just being our age group in our country and just being an observer you encounter a lot of unusual behavioral patterns amongst the other members of your society so if you just keep your eyes open and you know talk to strangers and talk to people then you don't need to necessarily hunt for a weirdness it'll definitely come up.”

Indie was interesting.  Indie was weird.  Indie appreciated the quirks in life.  Indie offered a very strong sense of superiority wrapped in baggy jeans, vintage sneakers and soft t-shirts.

Indie had an edge that said something about one’s ability to be discerning in the world.  It was a signal to peers that you were aiming for a cut above and something different than the norm.  And it extended backwards through the timeline of influences too; as some bands were accused of ripping off the sounds of 70s rock, that only inspired indie kids to discover Steve Miller and Led Zeppelin and Jackson Browne for the first time.

So many of us college-educated kids bought copies of No Logo and Vice and Adbusters and dabbled in the remnants of a working class culture that we and our parents most likely did not know or remember any more.  The rise of Pabst Blue Ribbon, trucker hats and smash burgers rode in on a wave of 1990s irony that metastasized in to mainstream kitsch.  At the time, we weren’t thinking about the class implications of choices like this.  We were just chasing after whatever was cool, as a way of signaling our own smartness.  We may have been insufferable jerks.

DeVille is more specific than Barclay about how technology impacted the music scene in the early 2000s.  In the wake of Napster, file sharing services like Morpheus and Kazaa created a new math in consumer minds that could now compare the opportunity to download an album or wait for a friend to rip it against the significant financial decision to buy a physical copy. 

With the stakes raised on whether or not a purchase of music was truly necessary, aggregator sites like Pitchfork became touchstones and guideposts for taste as never before.  Their opinions not only indicated what was “cool” but also what was worth paying for.  The cost of physical media compared to digital downloads, though they were illegal, now drove a need for reviews and aesthetic guidance to justify investment.  The average CD cost $20 in 2004, which is equivalent to over $31 today.

After Pitchfork’s extremely high reviews for Broken Social Scene and Metric albums helped to solidify a fan base for these bands in America (you’re welcome, Canada) there were few other companies that personified COOL more than Apple at the time of their Feist ad.  Her bangs, her sparkly jumpsuit, the dancers, all of it cemented her as officially famous on a scale that would not have been possible in Canada alone. 

However, more exposure at a greater scale came with a cost.  Very soon the appealing qualities of indie rock that went mainstream tipped over in to a new kind of “adult alternative.”  Nothing was more uncool to a hipster than seeing their more basic friends and relatives embrace an artist they used to love.  Indie stars like Death Cab, Arcade Fire and Feist as well as more singer-songwriter-y acts like Gillian Welch, Rufus Wainwright, and Aimee Mann all got swept in to this bin. “The more your music appealed to Grey’s Anatomy viewers, the less chic it seemed.”

Inevitably, DeVille concludes that the brief rise of indie music in America “was enough to attract some Grammy love for the scene, but not enough to stop the music industry from replacing indie’s would-be crossover stars with similar artists who boasted hits, not hipster clout.”  His observation simply describes the eternal cycle of pop culture, cultural production and decline.  

This well-worn pattern didn’t make an exception for indie music: a cool new thing is enjoyed by taste-makers, those people who are a little more sensitive and aesthetically endowed and intelligent in a certain way, it gradually gets adopted by more and more people and in the process, changes; the rough edges get sanded off with wear, and the tradeoff for that dilution is a greater spread and adoption and influence.  So has culture moved, forever and ever.  DeVille is simply observing this pattern in a uniquely focused period of time, around a particular genre of music that was called Indie.

Hipsters who defined themselves as different and cutting-edge rushed away from all that because “There’s a limited amount of difference in the world, and the mainstreaming of its pursuit has only made difference all the scarcer. The anxiety that there is no new terrain is always a catalyst for change.”

DeVille isn’t blind to this: “Because feeling like you’re in on the new thing, the secret thing, the special thing can be even more enticing than a generalized sense of belonging….The transformation of indie rock into pop, the permeation of indie aesthetics into mass culture, the stretching of the word “indie” beyond all meaning” was simply another step in the eternal Conquest of Cool, an instance of capitalism doing its work on any subculture big enough to generate market value and therefore get noticed by corporate executives.”

DeVille lands at the end of his indie survey by finding some comfort in being able to appreciate music (and culture) as a web where holding simple awareness of the links between things can itself become an exercise in taste-making and identity creation.

This shortened excerpt is from the Kinbright Writes newsletter.

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