When you flip a coin ten times, your odds of getting ten heads or ten tails in a row are about 1 in 500. Your likelihood of getting six or seven in a row is, of course, much higher: about 1 in 10 and 1 in 25, respectively. So if you were to do a hundred such trials, chances are pretty good that you'd get quite a number of sixes and sevens, an eight or nine here and there, and a full ten if you're lucky.
Yet if you were to ask a hundred people to simulate a random sequence of ten coin tosses in their minds, it's unlikely you'd get a single streak of more than three in a row. As humans, we're really, really bad at recognizing and recreating true randomness. And this is important to keep in mind, because the universe itself is random. It doesn't behave according to anyone's prescribed narrative, and history rarely follows a predictable sequence of events. In other words, if you're trying to anticipate where things are headed, it might be good to leave room in your calculations for some impersonal and objective metrics, because whatever you're capable of visualising probably won't be it.
The problem is, indie rock is all about the highly subjective and deeply personal. The idea isn't to make decisions based on objectively impressive traits, but to correct the damage done by those who do. I'm sympathetic to this; I was attracted to this scene for these very reasons, even when they ended up working against me. When my band was rejected by Secretly Canadian, for example, Chris Swanson made it clear that this wasn't based on any objective judgment of our talents, which he genuinely admired. He simply listened to his heart, and it told him we weren't the right fit.
Fair enough! But what if Secretly Canadian— and all the other indie labels following their hearts out there— are no different from people tossing coins in their minds, whose seemingly random sequences betray an overarching homogeneity of thought once taken as a whole? We all want to discover and proclaim the ideal band, and we all have an inkling of what they'd look and sound like: familiar enough to be loved, yet unique enough to be respected. But if every band getting signed out there embodies this perfect combination, then the result is a boring, static mush.
A scene made up entirely of well-rounded individuals is, paradoxically, not going to be well-rounded itself. Without an occasional outlier taking things too far and thus giving us an improbable ten heads or ten tails in a row, we no longer get a diverse range of visions and perspectives. Just superficial quirks that can't be distinguished from afar.
There's nothing wrong with loving the probable, of course. It's fine to prefer what we can visualise in advance. The danger comes when we tweak the results to ensure that our subjective preferences win out all the time, every time. Because, let's face it, history is disproportionately shaped by improbable events. Woody Guthrie could never have guessed that his successor would be a middle-class Jewish kid from Minnesota, and back when rock and roll was synonymous with Southern rhythm and blues, the next big sensation after Elvis was unlikely to be four kids from Liverpool. No improbability, no history.
So if we care about the future of music, perhaps we'd be best advised to just relax, take our thumbs off the scale, and allow the momentum of objectively impressive traits to take its natural course.
Update, November 25, 2011: It's official, I'm coining a new term, which I'll call "Bennett's paradox":
"A well-rounded scene includes those who aren't well-rounded. If everyone's well-rounded, then the scene itself won't be."
In a future post, I might write about why this helps to explain not just the current state of indie rock, but also that of Western society as a whole. Until then… pass it on!
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