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This article defines the music category "indie rock" not just as an aesthetic genre, but as a method of social differentiation as well as a marketing tool. Using Pierre Bourdieu's concept of "cultural capital," it draws a parallel between indie rock and high art, both of which depend upon a lack of popularity for their value, and require specialized knowledge to be fully appreciated. In its attempt to locate indie rock at the intersection of various artistic, social, and commercial phenomena, the article engages in detailed analysis of particular artists, songs, lyrics, websites, and reviews, from which it concludes that this relatively new genre is part of an old and familiar social structure.
Introduction
Rock music in recent years has seen itself parceled into countless categories, subject to a process of endless generation and definition that complicates the mainstream/ alternative binary to the extent of inverting its logic. Punk, alternative, grunge, college rock, emo, goth, indie pop, lo-fi, dream pop, industrial, post-rock, ambience, techno, britpop, hardcore, slowcore: one needn't spend much time skimming reviews or shopping online to experience the dizzying circulation and generally flippant use of such tags. Is it conceivable that each of these corresponds directly to a unique "type" of sound, to a genre that can be defined and limited within a rapidly diversifying field? Perhaps. But such a list begins to make evident a certain makeshift qualityone that allows for a facility in naming, in mixing and matching, more than it provides accurate representation of sounds. Although these terms refer vaguely (not insignificantly) to notions of social class, industry politics, and aesthetics, they are operative at least as much as they are responsive, providing an occasion for distinction valuable on both ends of commercial and artistic exchange. Like atomic particles, they exist in a paradoxical state of antagonism and interdependence, and allow for varying degrees of separation from and within an implicit whole.
Rather than attempt to provide a stable and decisive definition of indie rock, I want to examine its significance both as a category and within this process of categorizing-of endless differentiation-that characterizes the music industry and its consumers. The term, and others like it, positioned as they are at the intersection of various aesthetic, social, and commercial...