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The Rules of Indie Rock

Download: Jonathan Richman's "I Was Dancing In A Lesbian Bar"

For those not in the know-nothing, and this will blow your fucking face off, apparently bloggers on the internet who like bands are not only writing about the bands they like and sharing photos, but now they're signing on to do PR for them, and even booking their gigs. Criminy! They might even be making money off all this! They might even be getting some sweet non-blogger tail! Next thing you know they'll be taking The Hun off their bookmarks!

From what I understand, here's what's at stake. If you are a critic, and you talk to a band about their music, you're pretty much shooting yourself in the face five times. What if they tell you things that affect the listening experience? Wherefore the unadulterated critical take! You might end up liking a song because you like the band as people! You might hear things that you wouldn't have heard before! What the fuck!

So now there's this huge effort, partly self-policing, to make sure the PR people stay on one side, the critics on another, the rock bands on the left, and the label guys on the right, and the just regular fans on like this shitty fifth wall that the other sides look down on. Everybody's so skeptical of each other: rockers think critics are failed rockers; critics think PR people are failed critics; label guys think critics play favorites and are buzz-susceptible; critics think label guys are just in it for the money; everybody thinks PR people have questionable taste because they'll say they totally love Band X even when it's impossible for anyone ever to like let alone love Band X; everybody thinks critics are failed rockers; PR people, critics, label guys, and rockers all seem weirdly distrusting of normal fans, annoyed by their babbling, or (more weirdly) validated by them.

It makes sense that a niche DIY community would soon swell into an increasingly lucrative industry, with every person stratified into one role (just pick one), what with how Chris described the 'do what makes you happy for a living' fuck-the-man conundrum many liberal and artsy DIY-type people have obviously gotten themselves into. But the more I see Devendra Banhart types treated/feted/followed about like Where's Waldo characters around New York, the more I see of this everybody-needs-celebrities side to the city, the more of these ridiculous divides between band and non-band, fan and industry mechanisma-- the more of all that, the less immediate of a music this shit has become.

How fucked up is it that in order to get in touch with a guy named Girl Talk, who is a guy with a laptop who does mashups and daylights at a deskjob in Pittsburgh during the weeks-- this totally regular guy if you ask me-- if you want to call him up or email him and ask him about a sample, you have to go through a PR person, who in turn figures out whether or not you're worth his "client"'s time? Don't give me no MySpace shit. And how fucked up is it that if you want to book Girl Talk for a show, just like some fun thing you wanted to do, maybe a private party, whatever it is, you have to go through his booking agent who tries to get $2500 $3500 maybe even $5000 just so his 20% cut is tasty? All this quote critical quote professional distance has created a lot of low-paying jobs for people who love what they're doing, but I'm not really sure if the music's any better for it.

And that's a wrap!



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