What Matthew Bannister thinks about indie music

Bannister, Matthew. (2006) White Boys, White Noise: Masculinities and 1980s Indie Guitar Rock. Ashgate Publishing Limited. Hampshire. 

Chapter 3 – What does it mean to be alternative? Indie Rock as a genre. pg 57-90

The chapter is about indie rock and what it means to be alternative. Early on in the chapter, Bannister talks about indie being concerned with “what not to do” and that is how it differentiates itself from mainstream music. You can see from this why and how indie has changed so much since the late 80s. But even within the apparently shapeless thing that indie is, Bannister writes that there are formats that people follow such as the angry punk aesthetic, Andy Warhol's Pop Art and Brian Eno's minimalistic music. Each of them show a level of detachment in their delivery, says Bannister. He then discusses the use of the terms 'rock' and 'pop' in music publications and how indie differentiates itself from both. It is interesting to note that punk began as a reaction to rock music and now indie has to separate itself from both mainstream punk and mainstream rock as well as pop.

Bannister's claim (which I like :P) is that indie is NOT a style-less genre, despite its free-artistic-expression ethos. It has formats and rules much like any other genre. The rest of the chapter is devoted to describing the stylistic features typically found in indie (Bannister notes that any genre description is not fully satisfactory): styles of production, musical characteristics, semiotic aspects and behavioural aspects. This shows what (I find) problematic about indie: that it is somewhere in between fitting to a style and being a free artistic expression. Bannister says that this is why indie is so “gesturally restricted: not obviously black or danceable or too macho and 'rock and roll' – few blues scales or phrases, little syncopation, relatively uniform in tone and texture, performed loudly but understatedly and without much individual expression.”