4. Independent To What? Investigating The Complexity Of
4.1. The Complex Understanding Of Indie As A Genre-Based Category
As I have mentioned in the introduction, most of the theorizations of the notion of independent refer to its relevance in enabling aesthetic categorizations. Here I will not particularly focus upon the notion of independent for its stylistic features (e.g. guitar-based rock music in Bennett, 2001) as a genre-based category to define particular styles of music.
While in this work, I’m more interested in looking at the notion of independent in its relation to the production, distribution and consumption of music, rather than concentrating my attention upon genre and stylistic classifications.
From this point of view, I’m influenced by Becker’s (1982) assumption that making aesthetic judgments and classifications is not allowing a better understanding of an art world but rather aesthetic judgments need to be understood as part of the collective activities and conventions of art world members. Besides for Becker convention is much more understood as a means of organizing coordinated activities rather than creating symbolic meanings.
I’m aware that avoiding to consider the aesthetic judgments and categorizations suggested by the notion of independent can entail some critics, the same which have been done to Becker’s (1982) perspective and more generally to the production of culture perspective (e.g Peterson, 1976) namely the fact of “ignoring what’s special about art; what distinguishes it from the production of automobiles or shoes” (Alexander, 2003, p.80). However there are many studies which provide genre-based analysis of independent music and which demonstrate how it’s difficult to categorize and define independent music considering its aesthetics. Fonarow
77 (2006) for example tries to provide a set of elements which can categorize British independent music (indie) as a genre but she then assesses how it’s complex since categories are changing over time and are very contextualized. She states that “writing about indie often seems like trying to hit a moving target: as soon as you hit one part, another part has already moved”
(Fonarow, 2006, p.18). Similarly according to Toynbee (2000):
Increasing the amount of detail in order to specify genre only makes the definition more difficult. For as the number of required traits increases so the number of texts which conform …will decline (Toynbee, 2000, p.
105).
However at the same time I agree with Toynbee’s (2000) statement that music genres are crucial to music apparatus because they provide self identification by musicians and fans, classification and representation in the media and in the music industry. But genres need to be understood as processes, as way of doings things rather than as aesthetic classifications. As Toynbee states: “genre is also constructed through the structure of record labels, the layout of bins in a record shop, in the constitution of music magazines or radio station formatting”
(2000, p. 154) and not only in aesthetic classifications. Therefore genre are not only understood in terms of musical forms and pure stylistics connotations but in terms of technologies, contexts, production, distribution and consumption practices.
As Hesmondhalgh (1996) suggests, the peculiarity of indie and independent as a genre-based category is that “no music genre had ever before taken its name from the mode of production of its recordings” (1996, p. 111).
Hesmondhalgh (1996) refers to the fact that what mostly characterized the traditional and vernacular understanding of the notion of independent music is its affiliation to independent record labels (the indies) which are opposed to the corporate music industry (the major recording companies Universal, BMG Sony Music, EMI and Warner).
The different notions of indie as aesthetics and independent as a set of production processes are absolutely intertwined in a vernacular view and fans and journalists tend to make several assumptions about their connections, for example assuming that bands which turn to a corporate major label will have more mainstream music styles than before. However it’s not easy to imply correlations between aesthetics and institutional positions:
It is still difficult to describe these features as the political-aesthetic consequences of major/independent collaboration, as the outcome of a set of institutional politics…It is too simplistic to see the conservatism of
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1990s indie as deriving solely from its institutional base in networks of collaboration with the major companies.
This does not mean, of course, that aesthetics are autonomous of social forces as a whole; but we do need to be cautious in assuming that oppositional or conformist institutional politics lead to correspondingly oppositional or conformist textual forms (Hesmondhalgh, 1998, p. 60).
Besides it’s interesting to notice that indie became a successful and established genre exactly when major companies realized that indie was becoming an important segment of the music market and therefore indie music was incorporated in the mainstream music industry. As Hesmondhalgh’s (1999) refers in relation to the British market, when indie was categorized as an established global pop genre instead of referring to its independency to the music business, independent charts in UK started to “be based upon musical style, rather than on the basis of whether the distributor had ties to a major corporation (the definition of ‘independent’)”
(Hesmondhalgh, 1999, p.53). From this moment “indie was a term now generally used to describe a set of sounds and an attitude, rather than an aesthetic and institutional position”
(Hesmondhalgh, 1999, p.54).
This example makes clear the complex interplays of elements which need to be taken into account to understand the notion of indie or independent and which cannot be reduced to either aesthetic classifications or modes of productions. More than that moral values and ethical issues, which explain the oppositional relation to the music industry, need to be taken into account.
There are three levels of discourse here that we need to consider and that have been perfectly summarized by Robert Strachan (2003) in his work about independent record labels. He distinguishes among three main areas: industry, which refers to all the industrial processes such as production, distribution and consumption practices; ideology which refers to a set of values and believes, social discourses, ethics; and finally aesthetic which refers to stylistic characteristics.
Even though I assume the absolute importance that the third (the aesthetics) can play in the judgments of musicians, fans and music producers about their musical tastes, I will mainly focus upon the first two levels. A lot has been written to try to find correspondences or homologies between music styles and groups formations or modes of productions18. Therefore I won’t deal with them and I will focus upon the interlinks that particular social discourses can have upon processes of music productions.
18 I’m referring to the sub-cultural theories I have talked about the previous chapters which were interested in finding homologies between music styles and class-based social formations.
79 The following paragraph will therefore examine the ways in which ‘independent’ has been analyzed referring to its narratives and to its modes of productions and looking at its interrelations with the music industry.
I will refer to this distinction made by Strachan (2003) between ideological and industrial dimensions as the key elements to take into account for the theorization of the notion of independent. For the sake of discussion, I will leave at the beginning these two elements distinguished, to underline how these elements belong to different academic traditions, and I will then try to look at the interplay between them.