What Ryan Hibbett thinks about indie rock and what I think about what Ryan Hibbett thinks about indie rock

Hibbett, Ryan. "What is indie rock?" Popular Music Journal 28 (2006): 55-76.

Business Stuff

This article is broken into four sections. In the first, Ryan Hibbett talks about the role of "cultural capital" in indie rock and gives a brief analysis of the actual term. In the second, he looks at recordings he considers more like indie than anything else and then contrasts them with post-rock bands who don't downplay their production of music but aim for complexity to distance themselves from everyday sort of music. In the third and fourth, he looks at how indie culture is "disseminated" through how-to-indie websites and Amazon's way of marketing similar music through the apparent taste of its customers. The article really focuses on the complexity of indie rock's claim to high art and how the claim manifests itself in music and mass media.

Using the cultural capital idea was a good way to demonstrate indie rock's attitude towards itself and other forms of popular music. It also shows how indie rock is always running away from popularity; the more people there are chasing cultural capital, the less valued cultural capital becomes.

The soyouwanna.com section of the article also shows this (link below, now at eHow). As a how-to guide, the site tells people how to fake being an indie expert. It takes a step back from the indie "mainstream" and looks at it with an ironic and detached viewpoint, which is just how indie views most other things. So "faking" being an indie expert is hardly faking, it is the very essence of indie manifesting in a new way!

How to fake being an indie rock expert

Ranty Stuff 

Hibbett mentions, in relation to indie rock, the acquisition of cultural capital, an idea from Pierre Bourdieu. Cultural capital is basically special knowledge that allows you to understand "cultural" things like music and artwork. Already this makes indie sound like a bit of an exclusive club, resisting the mainstream, as you'd expect. But it goes further. Using Michel Foucault's idea that "power and knowledge directly imply one another", Hibbett says that you can apply this special knowledge to gain social distinction. You can also use beer and a ute to gain social distinction. But these people want the top. They want to be looked upon with wanting eyes, a la the Mark Zuckerberg character in The Social Network, and we all saw what that got him: more money to make friends with and an ex-friend. Is this the need to be needed? Ugh.

So basically, all those wierd-looking people you see on the bus listening to someone you have never heard of have a great amount of influence on what is "high art". Fair enough, but Hibbett says they define high art differently from the way (perhaps) ABC Classic FM does. And I can't see why their music should be considered high art. The fans are the only ones saying it (as far as I can tell). But classical music has a history of being appreciated by lots of different types of people: poor people and rich people, silly people and smart people (although there seems to be more of the latter of both), even bad people, like lawyers, Patrick Bateman and the main dude in A Clockwork Orange! (Check out my irrelevant cultural capital that allows me to refer to these characters! (I haven't even read/seen A Clockwork Orange!)) I can't back any of this up with statistics or anything so feel free to criticise this claim (feel free even if I could back it up).