| February 16th, 2006 by Godfre Leung (Permalink) Add Comments |
For decades now, the term “avant-garde” has so often been bandied about that it has seemingly lost all meaning. Appearances, however, can be deceiving. Really, the term “avant-garde” has gone from denoting a specific set of social formations and cultural producers to becoming the name of a genre. If a certain kind of academic can be held to be an authority on such matters, the term “avant-garde” properly stands for, and only for, the following early 20th century artistic movements: Dada, Surrealism, Russian Constructivism, and Futurism. Writing in the moment of the student demonstrations and social uprising of the late 60’s, the literary critic Peter Bürger, wary of the new art of his time, devised the term “historical avant-garde” to differentiate the true avant-garde of the early 20th century from works of art that merely mimicked the style of the avant-garde. He called these new artists the “neo-avant-garde.”
I mention Bürger and the concept of the avant-garde because we are currently in a similar situation. Death Cab for Cutie, the Decemberists, Modest Mouse, and Franz Ferdinand: all “indie rock” bands but not one of them independent. Now, I’m not advocating the coining of so insufferable a term as the “historical indie rock.” What I’m getting at, rather, is a differentiation between movements as social formations and as genres. This column will concern what I call the (Imaginary) Pop Résistance, whose beginnings can be found in the work of bands like Television Personalities, the Clean, and Young Marble Giants and which has, over the last thirty or so years, included bands as diverse as Bratmobile, My Bloody Valentine, K.I.T., and Heavenly. The Pop Résistance is neither a social formation — how could it be? I just made it up — nor a genre. Rather, what we get with the Pop Résistance is a kind of music that exists between social formation and genre.
All or most of the artists of the Pop Résistance participate or have participated in the D.I.Y. punk rock underground and their work, at least their work that falls under the rubric of the Pop Résistance, reflects this. But what characterizes the Pop Résistance for me is an investigation of the arbitrariness of genre. For this reason, Galaxie 500 is the Pop Résistance band par excellence. Any Pop Résistance band can take another’s song and make it their own. For example, Superchunk’s cover of the Magnetic Fields’ “100,000 Fireflies” sounds unmistakably like Superchunk. The Magnetic Fields could just as easily turn “Slack Motherfucker” into a Magnetic Fields song and, furthermore, in Belle and Sebastian’s hands, either of these songs could sit seamlessly on an album between authentic Belle and Sebastians. Of course, the pop song existed long before the late 70’s. This is where Galaxie 500 becomes useful.
Compare George Harrison’s “Isn’t it a Pity” to Young Marble Giants’ “Final Day.” Galaxie 500’s covers of the two songs testify to the essential elasticity of the pop song: style can be lifted right out of the originals. But what Galaxie 500’s covers and Young Marble Giants’ original version of “Final Day” have that Harrison’s “Isn’t it a Pity” doesn’t is a performance of the song’s alienation from its style. At the core of Harrison’s “Isn’t it a Pity” lies a formal aestheticism, as if the song could only be as he recorded it. (I should note here that not every independent pop band belongs to the Pop Résistance; for example, a band like Quasi writes and performs its songs with a classicism that draws from the tradition of Harrison’s formal aestheticism.) Galaxie 500 and Young Marble Giants, on the other hand, play their songs with an awareness of the songs’ seriality. For all of Galaxie 500’s epic grandeur, one never loses sight of the fact that pop songs are by nature reproducible, that the Bacharach song you hear the Shirelles singing on the radio could very well be coming out of the Beatles in a year’s time and the Carpenters a year or two after that. A generation later, perhaps a geriatric Elvis Costello or Nick Lowe might be giving the song a go.
But let us not forget about the political element behind the Pop Résistance. I had Calvin Johnson’s International Pop Underground (a singles series that spawned the epochal IPU Convention) in mind when I came up with the name. The name of this website is Independent Culture, to which the Pop Résistance pledges its allegiance. The domain name, “Indie Cult,” is more problematic. “Indie,” of course, no longer, if it ever did, stands for independent — no more, anyway, than “cult” is shorthand for culture. “Indie,” as we understand it today, is both a musical genre and a somewhat specialized marketing demographic, and the two seem to run hand in hand. The “indie” we get from the O.C., Vice Magazine, or whomever else borrows the style of the independent punk rock and post-punk traditions to affect an aura of resistance. This phony resistance is a rebellion for rebellion’s sake, a manifestation of corporate capitalism in the guise of an anti-establishment culture. What we have with today’s so-called “indie rockers” isn’t culture but a cult. Merriam-Webster defines “cult” as
a : great devotion to a person, idea, object, movement, or work (as a film or book); especially : such devotion regarded as a literary or intellectual fad
b : a usually small group of people characterized by such devotion.
I believe in a self-reflexive strain of pop music whose politics, even if they’re not all necessarily D.I.Y., participate in a project to dissolve genre. I borrow the term résistance from the French not to appropriate its revolutionary aura but to establish a continuity between instances of real resistance, as opposed to the phony resistance of the so-called “indie rock” or the art that Peter Bürger characterized as neo-avant-garde. Future columns will deal with specific examples of pop resistance and, imaginary though the Pop Résistance may be, Calvin Johnson proved in the summer of 1991 that the continuities that unite imagined communities are often more real than we might think.
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