Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dlnhk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T19:52:08.668Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

‘… This little ukulele tells the truth’: indie pop and kitsch authenticity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2010

Emily I. Dolan
Emily I. Dolan
Affiliation:
Department of Music, University of Pennsylvania, Music Building, 201 S. 34th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Indie pop, like rock and other independent genres more generally, has had a complicated relationship with mass culture. It both depends upon and simultaneously deconstructs notions of authenticity and truth. Independent genres have invited scholarly analysis and critique that often seek to unmask indie as ‘elite’ or to show the extent to which indie musics are, ironically, defined and shaped by consumer capitalism. Using songwriter Stephin Merritt's music and career as a case study, this essay explores the kinds of authenticities at work in indie pop. Indie pop, I argue, is a genre especially adept at generating ‘personal authenticity’. It is useful to turn to the concept of kitsch, understood here as an aesthetic and not a synonym for ‘bad’. Kitsch functions to cultivate personal attachment in the face of impersonal mass culture; it is this aesthetic, I argue, that indie pop has cultivated through its lo-fi and often nostalgic sound world and through its dissemination, which has relied upon dedicated collectors. The ‘honesty’ of this music does not arise from an illusion of unmediated communication, but instead from the emphasis on the process of mediation, which stresses the materiality of the music and the actual experience of listening.

Type
Articles
Information
Popular Music , Volume 29 , Issue 3 , October 2010 , pp. 457 - 469
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

References

Adorno, T. 2002. Essays on Music (Berkeley, University of California)Google Scholar
Alberti, J. 1999. ‘“I have come out to play”: Jonathan Richman and the Politics of the Faux Naïf’, in Reading Rock and Roll, ed. Dettmar, K. and Richey, W. (New York, Columbia University Press), pp. 173–90Google Scholar
Bannister, M. 2006. ‘“Loaded”: indie guitar rock, canonism, white masculinities’, Popular Music, 25/1, pp. 77–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barker, H., and Taylor, Y. 2006. Faking It: the Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music (New York, Faber & Faber)Google Scholar
Barthes, R. 1990 [1977]. ‘The grain of the voice’, in On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, ed. Frith, S. and Goodwin, A. (New York, Routledge), pp. 250–55Google Scholar
Baudrillard, J. 1994 [1968]. ‘The system of collecting’, in The Cultures of Collecting, ed. Elsner, J. and Cardinal, R. (London, Reaktion Books), pp. 7–24Google Scholar
Benjamin, W. 1969. ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’, in Walter Benjamin: Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Arendt, H. (New York, Schocken Books), pp. 217–52Google Scholar
Broch, H. 1969. ‘Notes on the problem of kitsch’, in Kitsch: the World of Bad Taste, ed. Dorfles, G. (New York, Random House), pp. 49–76Google Scholar
Butler, M. 2007. ‘“Some of us can only live in songs of love and trouble”: voice, genre/gender, and sexuality in the music of Stephin Merritt’, in Oh Boy! Masculinities and Popular Music, ed. Jarman-Ivens, F. (New York, Routledge), pp. 235–59Google Scholar
Castiglione, B. 2002 [1528]. The Book of the Courtier, trans. Javitsch, D. (New York, W.W. Norton)Google Scholar
Coyle, M., and Dolan, J. 1999. ‘Modeling authenticity, authenticating commercial models’, in Reading Rock and Roll: Authenticity, Appropriation, Aesthetics, ed. Dettmar, K. and Richey, W. (New York, Columbia University Press), pp. 1–35Google Scholar
Fonarow, W. 2006. Empire of Dirt: the Aesthetics of and Rituals of British Indie Music (Middletown, Wesleyan University Press)Google Scholar
Frith, S. 1981. Sound Effects: Youth Leisure, and the Politics of Rock ‘n’ Roll (New York, Pantheon Books)Google Scholar
Frith, S. 1978. The Sociology of Rock (London: Constable)Google Scholar
Grossberg, L. 1992. We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture (New York, Routledge)Google Scholar
Hibbett, R. 2005. ‘What is indie rock?’ Popular Music and Society, 28/1, pp. 55–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jones, S. 2000. ‘Music and the Internet’, Popular Music, 19/2, pp. 217–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keightley, K. 2001. ‘Reconsidering rock’, in The Cambridge Companion to Rock and Pop, ed. Frith, S., Straw, W. and Street, J. (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press), pp. 109–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kruse, H. 2003. Site and Sound: Understanding Independent Music Scenes (New York, P. Lang)Google Scholar
Kulka, T. 1996. Kitsch and Art (University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press)Google Scholar
Leach, E.E. 2001. ‘Vicars of ‘‘Wannabe’’: authenticity and the Spice Girls’, Popular Music, 20/2, pp. 143–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mazullo, M. 2000. ‘The man whom the world sold: Kurt Cobain, rock's progressive aesthetic, and the challenges of authenticity’, Musical Quarterly, 84/4, pp. 713–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moore, A. 1998. ‘U2 and the myth of authenticity in rock’, Popular Musicology, 3/6, pp. 4–24Google Scholar
Moore, A. 2002. ‘Authenticity as authentication’, Popular Music, 21/2, pp. 209–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Olalquiaga, C. 1998. The Artificial Kingdom: on the Kitsch Experience (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press)Google Scholar
Paddison, M. 1982. ‘The critique criticized: Adorno and popular music’, Popular Music, 2, pp. 201–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sanneh, K. 2004. ‘The rap against rockism’, The New York Times, 31 October; reprinted 2007 in The Rock History Reader (New York, Routledge), pp. 351–4Google Scholar
Sheinbaum, J. 2008. ‘Periods in progressive rock and the problem of authenticity’, Current Musicology, 85, pp. 29–51Google Scholar
Sontag, S. 1990. ‘A symposium on kitsch’, Salmagundi: A Quarterly of the Humanities and Social Sciences, 85/86, pp. 201–312Google Scholar
Stewart, S. 1993. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham and London, Duke University Press)Google Scholar
Zanes, R.J.W. 1999. ‘Too much mead?: under the influence (of participant-observation)’, in Reading Rock and Roll: Authenticity, Appropriation, Aesthetics, ed. Dettmar, K. and Richey, W. (New York, Columbia University Press), pp. 37–71Google Scholar

Discography

Beat Happening, Beat Happening. K. Records. 1985Google Scholar
Don Lennon, Downtown. Secretly Canadian Records. 2002Google Scholar
The Langley Schools Project, Innocence and Despair. Bar/None Records. 2001Google Scholar
The Magnetic Fields, Distant Plastic Trees. 1991Google Scholar
The Magnetic Fields, The Wayward Bus. 1992Google Scholar
The Magnetic Fields, The Charm of the Highway Strip. Merge Records. 1994Google Scholar
The Magnetic Fields, I Don't Believe You/When I'm Not Looking You're Not There. 7”. Merge Records. 1998Google Scholar
The Magnetic Fields, 69 Love Songs, Merge Records, 1999Google Scholar
The Magnetic Fields, i. Nonesuch. 2004Google Scholar
Stephin Merritt, Eban and Charley. Merge Records. 2001Google Scholar
The Shaggs, The Shaggs. Rounder/Umgd. 1990Google Scholar
Various Artists, All's Fair in Love and Chickfactor. Enchanté Records. 2002Google Scholar
Various Artists, Songs in the Key of Z: The Curious Universe of Outsider Music. Gammon. 2002Google Scholar