Empire of Dirt. Wendy Fonarow
in part, to the nature of each medium. CDs are digital and vinyl is analog. Many indie fans feel that analog sound is superior to digital sound. I was often told by members of the indie community that CDs sounded either “metallic” or “too clean” and that vinyl sounded “warm.” However, even this difference in sound is complicated, because most recordings are mastered digitally and then reconverted to analog to put on vinyl. Many indie fans find that even the addition of scratches and minor skips are an enjoyable part of listening to a vinyl music recording.45 A skip on a CD results in a high-pitched, repetitive pulse that makes the track unlistenable; by contrast, minor augmentations to sound on vinyl recordings were likened to the “aging of a fine wine” (C.W., age twenty-five).
The physical appearance of CDs is also criticized within the indie community. The shiny metallic discs look high-tech compared with the matte-black surface of standard vinyl. For many indie fans, there is a certain amount of fetishism in the enjoyment of the purchase of a vinyl recording. Many fans discussed the smell and other sensual qualities of vinyl, its inner sleeve, its cover. Vinyl junkies inspect their records carefully before playing them. I was told, “Vinyl gives more information about the recordings. On vinyl, you can look at your record and you can see how long the songs are. You can see changes in music, and how much music there is on the record, by looking at the grooves” (R.G., age twenty-six). CDs have surfaces that are uniform to the naked eye and that impart only a fraction of the information that vinyl does. To the indie fan, CDs look anonymous, slick, and undifferentiated.46
The anti-CD position advocated by indie enthusiasts is evident in the discourse of bands. In an interview, the members of Flying Saucer Attack, a band on the independent record label Domino who had slogans such as “CDs destroy music” and “Buy Vinyl” printed on their CD-format releases, summarize their antipathy for the CD format:
“I hated that Eighties rock sound, and it’s sort of spilled over into an irrational hatred of digital,” says Dave. “I don’t even own a CD player. I just can’t relate to CDs. It’s not so much the way they sound as the things themselves, those horrible plastic boxes.” “A piece of vinyl is a physical object—you can see the songs,” concurs Rachel. “With a CD, it’s like a satellite’s beaming the music into your room.” Continues Dave: “I am a very miserable person, right. Records are your friends. You can look at the song you’re hearing; it’s physically there in the spirally groove.” (Melody Maker, October 14, 1995.)
Flying Saucer Attack differentiates between the two mass-produced, technological objects, emphasizing a semiotic dichotomy that identifies the CD as plastic and inorganic and the vinyl as organic. While both vinyl and CD are composed of plastic, CDs, composed of aluminum acetate, are generally packaged in a clear plastic jewel case while vinyl is generally in packaged in the more organic paper or cardboard. Flying Saucer Attack also contends that the vinyl recording brings the listener into intimate contact with the recording, while the CD is unrelated to the music produced from it (“beamed in from a satellite”).
The desire to hold on to vinyl is not merely due to the technophobic stance of indie: there is a nostalgic element in maintaining the format of cultural artifacts associated with one’s introduction into a field of interest. Flying Saucer Attack’s comment that CDs are associated with the music of the 1980s indicates that, for them, vinyl harkens back to the era prior to that technological boom. Vinyl is thought of as the original form of musical recordings, and though it is a technologically mass-produced object, it has become traditional when contrasted with the newer CDs. For indie, as for many cultures, most individuals believe tradition is what one did in one’s own childhood. While indie fans wax lyrical about seven-inch singles (the format in which most of the indie fans during the tenure of this project had bought their first records), indie fans do not romanticize 78s or other early forms of recording technology. Thus, as indie ages and the community becomes composed of younger individuals with little experience of vinyl, there is a great likelihood that the seven-inch will disappear. One indie label boss commented to me that “there is a romance to vinyl that CDs don’t have.” Allied with the associations of tradition, analog, and nostalgia and contrasted with the metallic, synthetic, digital, modern CD, plastic vinyl has been transformed by the indie community into an organic, originary art form.
Indie’s eschewing of the technological is not confined to sound and format. Indie possesses an overall ethic of technological nonproliferation. Live performance is championed over prerecorded music. This is a continuation of a punk ethic that privileged live music as direct and immediate over musical recordings as constructed and removed (Laing 1985: 53). Bands are considered “proper” if they perform convincingly live.47 Bands that cannot deliver onstage even when they have fine albums become objects of speculation and commentary: though occasionally excusable, this inability typically indicates that the band is a sham. The use of synthetic sound under the guise of being a live ensemble is regarded as a form of moral turpitude.
One thing about Jesus Jones that sticks in the throat is how little has been made of their dubious image as a band. In some puritanical corner of my mind, this carefully nurtured rock and roll fallacy indicates some kind of moral corruption. The fact that multi-instrumentalist Mike Edwards works in solitude, flanked by banks of technology as opposed to his hired hands (which is all, in effect, the rest of the band are) seems a bit of a con, really. Big deal, say you. This is 1993, Mr. Indie Saddo, not a world of residencies at the Reeperbahn and paying your dues. (NME, January 23, 1993)
The reference to the Reeperbahn, the district in Germany where the Beatles had a residency prior to their success, points to the idea that a “real” band is generated by performing in front of live audiences. The performance of music in a live setting is a measure of a band’s authenticity within the genre.
While many of its traditional generic components represent a longing for, a connection with, and an appreciation of preceding eras and musical antecedents, indie does not advocate the wholesale restoration of previous musical trends and eras. While it is nostalgic, indie is not revivalist. The reintroduction of previous styles is to be met with a contemporary sensibility—the present longing for the past is not the same thing as the past itself. Although indie has a playful, youthful quality, it is constantly undercut with melancholy: “Although the cutie look was essentially fun and playful, underlying its childlike innocence was a deep-rooted sense of gloom and doom” (Polhemus 1994: 122). The indie fan wears black on the outside because black is how he feels on the inside. Indie aspires to a return to a childlike state of innocence for those who are on the brink of adulthood. This unappeased longing is the wellspring of a melancholic lyrical focus: loss of love, loss of innocence, loss of the 1960s. Although traditionalist and nostalgic, the indie community nevertheless emphatically believes that it is a domain of artistic innovation and originality while still calling upon the values and tools of the past.
Puritan tenets permeate the generic conventions of indie. For Puritans, lavish ritual, stately dress, and non-essential embellishment created distance between the individual and the divine. Puritans removed ornaments from houses of worship, substituted ordinary dress for clerical vestments, and held simplified services. Similarly, indie bands perform in everyday wear. Indie advocates simplicity in songs, modesty in adornment, modesty in consumption, and a particular type of physical discipline to acquire a look that suggests an aversion to worldly pleasures. Even the use of the lower case “i” in indie suggests modesty. Indie advances a program for music that is basically simple, in structure, in production, in accoutrements, and in style, in order to foster a pure, unmediated experience of music. In indie’s generic characteristics, we find again the underpinnings of Puritan ideological practice.
Romantic tendencies also sit in an uneasy reconciliation within indie’s Puritan conventions. In indie, we find none of Romanticism’s fanciful exaggerations, opulence, or imaginative posturings. Yet a Romantic strain does exist in indie’s tendency to value the natural or organic, in its introspection, and in its preference for ordinary people. The untrained artist combines the simplicity of Puritanism with the Romantic notion of the untrained artistic genius whose intuition, instinct, and spirit govern his artistic creations.
Indie promotes a return to basics: the simple, the ordinary, and the untrained. All superfluous elements should be stripped away to purify music. The Puritans,