Indie rock's place in music history

Let's say you know nothing about classical music, and you ask me to recommend a good composer for you. Suppose I were to respond, "Well, there was this guy two hundred years ago who was really well liked by everyone in the Hamburg scene. He was always promoting upcoming shows, and he would always stick around for hours afterwards, signing autographs and chatting with fans. Oh, and get this: He started his own music publishing company, because he wanted to empower himself and others as independent artists!" If I were to say all that, I think you would look at me like I had sponge cake for brains. These aren't traits we typically value in long-dead composers.

And yet, it's openly acknowledged and celebrated that building up a following and being self-reliant in matters of promotion is precisely what gets a band noticed and respected in the indie rock scene. The kind of priorities which set indie rock proudly apart from the popular mainstream, in other words, are also counterintuitive to music history as a whole. If a band aspires to get signed to an indie label, they're expected to expend enormous amounts of time and energy on doing things, and being things, that really don't matter much to the greater world of people who listen to and appreciate music across oceans, generations, and ideological divides.

It's not that actual music is incidental to indie rock; rather, the goodwill that a band naturally generates by being out and about invariably carries over into our assessment of their music. Objective standards provide a mechanism to counter this tendency, but a scene like indie rock that rejects such standards will grow to cheer it on instead, comfortable in its assertion that a band's artistic worth is inextricable from its likability. So if one runs an indie label, and one likes Band A better than Band B as individual people, then one will attend more of their shows, one will hear and like their music more, one will judge them to be the better band, and one will ultimately sign them over Band B. And since supporting indie labels is how bona fides get earned, we're left with relatively few past instances in which these judgments have been openly called into question.

But how long can this kind of support last before it finally begins to erode? After all, the difference between Band A and Band B is still a blind taste test for the general public. We'll always choose Band A over the Band B we know nothing about since they didn't get signed, of course, but we don't live in a vacuum; all of us know some amazingly talented Band B working our local scene. Overall, they probably number in the tens of thousands. Check out the most recent addition to any indie label's roster, though, and chances are it won't be readily obvious what advantages their music possessed to have vaulted them over the tens of thousands of other bands equally worthy of consideration. Don't get me wrong, they're almost always pretty good. But the same could be said about all the forgotten bands snapped up by the major labels in the heady 90s. Remember Chalk FarM?

Back then, the major labels were casting a wide net, signing every band out there who'd worked hard to build up a regional following, hoping to find just a few who could make it big and recoup all their investments, with a tidy sum added to boot. The rest had their fins sliced off before being thrown back into the sea. The majors were hoping to make a killing; by contrast, the indies in these uncertain times are simply trying to make a living. Signing bands who signal a can-do spirit towards self-promotion minimises their risk of losing money. So it's easy to sympathize with their struggles to stay afloat; nobody will be penning an indie-label counterpart to Steve Albini's rant against the major labels anytime soon.

And yet, their respective criteria for choosing which bands to sign aren't really all that different, are they? And as such, couldn't the same be suggested about their respective places in music history?