Rise Above: Nostalgia and Authenticity in Representations of 1980s Indie Rock and Hardcore Punk

Abstract

This article engages with representations of 1980s indie rock and hardcore punk in recent publications, namely Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life and Erick Lyle’s Scam fanzine. It asks how to avoid falling prey to the trappings of nostalgia (for example, using quasi-classicist aesthetic standards or one-dimensional approaches towards postmodern art) when trying to come to terms with retrospective accounts of the supposed “golden age” of independent music culture.

Notes

1. A quick note on the terminology: “Indie rock,” of course, carries two denotations. First, the term describes a musical genre that can roughly be characterized by the juxtaposition of experimental/noise-based leanings and more straightforward, melodic rock/punk elements; furthermore, it relates to music that has been manufactured and distributed independently, i.e. outside the corporate system on labels such as SST or Matador. In this text, both meanings of the term will be of relevance at different stages. “Hardcore punk” refers to bands active in the early 1980s (Minor Threat, Black Flag et al.) which can be considered trailblazers for indie culture although they subscribed to a different musical aesthetic (fast, short, loud). They effectively set up a DIY network which later bands could then fall back upon while trying to work outside the mainstream; in addition, many young musicians who started out in hardcore outfits would go on to play in influential indie rock groups (e.g. J Mascis and Lou Barlow’s stint in Deep Wound before forming Dinosaur Jr.).

2. Full disclosure: Speaking autobiographically as someone who came of age in the 1990s, it has been my experience that the previous incarnation of most teenage indie kids was that of the heavy metal fan, and people like Mascis made the transition easier because their music contained elements that were recognizable and easy to relate to for someone who had not long ago listened to Metallica, Van Halen, and the like.

3. With a different emphasis, Simon Reynolds describes similar phenomena in the chapter “Good Citations: The Rise of the Rock Curator” in his seminal work Retromania (for a brief discussion of this text’s more problematic aspects see note 9). It also needs to be stated that especially those forms of current music journalism that consider themselves ahead of the curve are particularly prone to the unwitting reproduction of high-brow conservatism. For instance, David Stubbs explicitly tries to parallel the work of modern avant-garde composers, artists, and musicians such as Aphex Twin or Wolf Eyes in his aptly titled Fear of Music: Why People Get Rothko But Don't Get Stockhausen, which leads to many interesting insights but also at times decries a deep longing for respectability that implicitly signals an embarrassment with popular culture’s unapologetic frivolousness (which, I would argue, is ever present even in the abstract white-noise freak-outs of Wolf Eyes).

4. Since this article deals with phenomena related to 1980s and early 1990s culture, “contemporary” here is meant to refer to this period of time. Whether we now live in a post-postmodern world is a different question, a question that I will not engage with at this point.

5. Tellingly, he considers the works of William Gibson to constitute a positive example of this kind of “properly critical” postmodern art. While it is an interesting fact that Gibson also influenced the lyrics of Daydream Nation (as readily on display in song titles such as “The Sprawl”), this choice is questionable. In contrast to Jameson’s conviction that Gibson's novels are marked by “representational innovations” (39), I would argue that texts like Neuromancer still remain formally committed to the realist tradition, which might also indicate something of a nostalgic longing for less ambiguous, overtly politicized forms of aesthetic expression on Jameson’s part.

6. Unless, of course, one subscribes to the notion that the personal is political, too. But even in this case, Eco’s vision is not tied to a specific political agenda, as it is in both Jameson’s Marxist approach and Hutcheon’s critique of so-called liberal bourgeois society.

7. Credit where credit’s due: This is one of the areas in which Azerrad manages to be more thorough as well, when he for instance quotes Rollins on the band’s relationship to their female followers: “‘We wanted to fuck your women,’ Rollins boasts. ‘If we could, we would. Anytime, anywhere we would try to get laid’” (51). Interestingly enough, though, this passage occurs only at the end of his chapter on Black Flag, where the band has already been firmly established as a group of forthright crusaders committed to the spirit of DIY integrity. See also Butz (92–96) for a detailed discussion of masculinity and hardcore punk.

8. This is the catch phrase of Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, which advocates a mode of inquiry that abstains from preliminarily establishing moralistic criteria by which the words and deeds of participants in the social enclave one strives to describe are then judged and explained away. Instead, the actors themselves should be taken seriously: “The choice is thus clear: either we follow social theorists and begin our travel by setting up at the start which kind of group and level of analysis we will focus on, or we follow the actors’ own ways and begin our travels by the traces left behind by their activity of forming and dismantling groups” (Latour 29). In this spirit, Lyle achieves a remarkable degree of descriptive thickness by simply giving voice to individual actors from the 1980s scene without enforcing a simplistic independent/mainstream explanatory framework.

9. Particularly, an example of a current-day subcultural movement that is actively involved in this very struggle is the much-reviled emo scene. Its early protagonists—Braid, the Promise Ring, Texas Is the Reason, and others—labored in obscurity for a long period in the 1990s, thus effectively helping to preserve the DIY circuit. After some groups loosely affiliated with the scene broke through to the mainstream in the early 2000s (Jimmy Eat World or My Chemical Romance come to mind), most critics could not stand the embarrassment of having overlooked a vibrant and productive subculture for years. Immediately rock journalists started to pour vitriolic hatred onto the bands in question without acknowledging that—despite some aesthetically and politically questionable choices—they did not only dish out ready-made anthems for mall rats across the United States, they also questioned gender stereotypes, served as the gateway to more radical forms of self-determined living for countless kids, and challenged punk orthodoxy by including complex musical elements borrowed from “sissy” groups such as the Smiths. Even more astoundingly, this scene managed to pull off another stunt: After the backlash, it retreated underground and started to flourish in DIY circles again, so that, since 2012, a group of bands sometimes half-humorously referred to as “the Wave” (including Into It. Over It. and La Dispute) has started to gain nationwide and global recognition again—characteristically, of course, after a long period of journalistic ignorance. Hence, this can be considered an example of a vital underground scene, with ties both to the DIY ideal and the mainstream, that is constantly performing a precarious act of balance between embarrassment and empowerment. The music press’s trouble in recognizing this scene might very well be connected to a narrow, essentially conservative focus on “artistic originality.” This is epitomized by a typical passage from Reynolds's Retromania: “[A]rt should constantly push forward into new territory, reacting against its own immediate predecessors in violent gestures of severance, jettisoning its superseded stages like a rocket shooting into space” (404). Thus, an exclusive focus on cutting-edge musical innovation might sometimes blind the observer to the potential of less formally inventive kinds of popular music to nevertheless effect significant changes in the culture at large (of course, for Reynolds, emo is merely “a melodic and melodramatic variant of punk” [Retromania 405]), which is a dramatic over-generalization at best—please see Mierni’s “The Evolution of Emo and Its theoretical Implications” for a more differentiated discussion of the genre’s origins and its constant struggle between conformity and oppositional resistance).