Scrawled in Wax

At the end of subculture, does the world become more or less like the culture of indie rock?

[Update]: Please see the comments, where Tim makes the excellent point that Carraway’s article makes a lot more sense as a eulogy for a certain kind of indie rock culture.

If you were searching for a symbol for the death of mass culture, you could do worse than looking to the passing of Michael Jackson. It seems hard to imagine so many people from around the globe ever coming together over a pop cultural figure again, at least in the kind of numbers and uniformity witnessed today.

But as the world of Pop fragments and fractures, the world of indie rock – a genre and subculture defined by its opposition to both a now-disappearing mainstream and its aesthetic – seems to exist still. Its influence may be waning, the possibility of a definition more murky, and the web itself may ultimately render the notion of subculture an impossibility, but the game and cult-ure of indie rock – its one-upmanship, its insistence on performing cultural capital, its saturation in ironic resignation – has yet to entirely diminish. What, after all, is Pitchfork but the manifestation of indie’s obsession with measuring social capital by any means possible – other than, of course, sales and success? In fact, you could make the same argument about a great deal of 2.0 culture, perhaps most obviously in the entire idea of ‘commenter culture’ and the spread of snark. You might say that the subculture of indie rock is ‘gone’, but that it has has also gone mainstream by becoming the culture of the (western, North American) web.

Though I have never called myself an ‘indie rock’ kid – perhaps because there’s just too much melanin in my skin to say it with a straight face – I know what it’s like to spend one’s time ‘trying to stay on top on things’. And as such, I can also relate to the idea that, once you reach a certain age – or, perhaps more accurately, stage -  the incessant need to keep up that lies at the core of much of indie rock culture starts to seem less desirable and more ridiculous. And I think that assertion is that the core of Kate Carraway’s piece in Eye this week, titled “Slanted and Disenchanted“, in which Carraway signals her departure from the culture of indie rock, partly, she suggests, because of the “the social eventuality of indie rock, which is that it fucking sucks”.

Note, though, that she said social eventuality. It isn’t a knock against the music. No, the target here is the overlap of hipsterism and elitism, the exhausting process of being too cool to care, but also cool enough to make fun of those who do.

I’ve frequently argued that on some level the dismissiveness and irony of modern hipsterism stems from a well-founded distrust of sincerity, of being witness to the effects of unsubstantiated belief that destroyed so much in the 20th century and, in things like homophobia and post-9/11 eurocentrism, continue to destroy still. Yet at the same time, the constant stream of ironic detachment can sap one, and Carraway argues that this knowingness is “reinforced by over-educated snottery and inflated hipster egos. Where the music [and subculture] is conceptually dense and artistically provocative, indie rock diminishes and makes precious the grandeur of sex, love, friendship and identity, and the socio-cultural spirit around it has all of the same bloodlessness and hesitation.” To wit, when all that’s left is ironic detachment, culture becomes the performance of interpretation rather than the acts of living themselves, a discussion about sex rather than the mute, inarticulable nature of what it’s actually like to fuck or make love.

And so the question is whether or not the destruction of subculture will give us a freer, pastiche vision of pop-culture identities – a world in which, at the end of indie one-upmanship, a pluralist, value-neutral approach to aesthetic engagement becomes the norm – or, instead, that the entire world will become like indie rock: all of us attempting to outdo each other in our performance of the things we know, the things we consume and things we do (and this is where I feel a bit weirded out by Mediaite’s Power Grid). If the web is any indication, things are on the edge right now and could go either way. The Buzzfeed-, Tumblr-driven world seems bent on the latter option, silently aligning itself with two-coasts (or, in Canadian terms, Toronto-Montreal-Vancouver) lefty hipster-elitism. And yet, in other corners of the web, the sort that I am increasingly drawn to now, there is a far more open approach where elitist condescension is as verboten as racism, hipster snarkist as unwelcome as /b/tards (hey, speaking of irony…).

This is also loosely thought out and typed out quickly. It’s quite possible that the entire notion of performing identity will have to be rethought when the arenas for doing so have multiplied exponentially in the virtual, rendering notions like pop, subculture and irony obsolete. Still, for the time being check out Carraway’s thoughts and lemme’ know what you think.

Note: The image used here is from this post on Crawdaddy.