Indie Music Research Paper

Indie Music: Be Authentic Not A Sellout “The word ‘indie’ is meaningless now. It’s so overused that people think it simply means green hair.” Steven Patrick Morrissey, who was originally a part of The Smiths as a vocalist, said that. Today, we do hear indie thrown around and it can be hard to define; but indie has an interesting history surrounding its emergence and what it means to its participants has a lot to do with authenticity. Indie music emerged during times of social and political changes and sticking to who you are against the mainstream became an important part of the ethos of this group of people in their indie world. In this paper I will show that by talking about the role of “authenticity” in indie music through its emergence,

Wendy Fonarow in her book Empire of Dirt: The Aesthetics and Rituals of British Indie Music compares indie music and the mainstream to the Protestant (specifically Puritanism) and Catholic divide. According to Fonarow both churches have the same goal of having a relationship with god or the “divine” just like indie music and mainstream music both seek to experience ““true” or “authentic” music” (Fonarow 2006: 27-28). This difference or divide according to Fonarow is how they reach this goal, for indie music there is an emphasis on direct control on the process of making and distributing music. There is even similarities between some of the values Fonarow has seen in indie music and puritanism. Fonarow states some of these characteristics in her book. She states that there is a similar “distrust of authority”, a preference for the independent operations (i.e. independent record labels), simplicity in “production, and style”, a “promotion of high moral standards […] and conduct”, an “emphasis on education, and an underlying theme of austerity and abstinence” (Fonarow 2006: 28). In indie music there is an aversion to the mainstream and so they have used their own parallel independent system, to which many pledge their musical allegiance to, so to

Bannister himself was an indie musician in his band Sneaky Feelings and he himself (a white guy) grew up in a middle class home in Scotland (Bannister 2006: xi). Similar to the artist, listeners are generally white and of a middle class background as well. They are also usually educated, most of the time university students, and between fifteen to twenty-nine but mostly younger than twenty-five (Fonarow 2006: