Postmodern Indie Rock is Killing Musical Invention

For the last two weeks I've been watching a very interesting conversation on K-punk and other blogs concerning the meteoric rise of the hopelessly derivative Arctic Monkeys, the latest band-of-note in a newly ascendant indie rock. Now, part of me is tickled pinkish-brown knowing that bands that sound like the bands I listened to growing up are supplanting the aesthetic twin horrors of Nu Metal and Teen Pop that have plagued our airways for almost a decade. But that's the problem, according to K-punk: I should demand more.

What fascinates me about the White Stripes, the Strokes, the Killers, etc. is not really the sound of these bands themselves, but the context in which an old sound now finds itself: mainstream popularity. In college, I would have scoffed at this as a sure sign of selling-out, but now I find some comfort in knowing that the indie rock "sound" I dig is available for free on the airways. And again, that's the problem.

Pop has not advanced any: it moves now laterally, endlessly rehashing the past (the aforementioned bands are rotten with replicant-references to bands 20 years their senior), a "wheel of non-life" more viewfinder than ant farm, a loop of fashion that breaks no new ground and never demands to change things as they exist, but only to "express itself" within the accepted boundaries pop once raged against. "Everyone gets a chance to sound like their favorite band," goes the thinking, and popular music will oblige you with your chance in the 3-chord spotlight and a Myspace page.

So what about genres, subcultures? Would not these provide ample future-fodder? Not so, K-punk reader Alex Williams would argue. The problem is an economic one: with so many "genre" publications covering micro-scenes, mainstream publications shrink to their "core values" of 4-man guitar rock, over and over and fucking over again. This self-ghettoization, while fostering the further development of the genres, allows for very little cross-breeding.

Postpunk... continually put into question the very notion of what a record is and what it could be. Each new band, or each new record by a band, each new style, posed that question differently and made new posings of the question possible. [T]he postmodernity to which the Arctic Monkeys belong is delimited-defined by a series of closed prescriptions. They belong to a stable genre which forms part of a resolved cultural scene in which the status of cultural objects like records is (ostensibly) settled.

K-punk's solution to this rancid self-immolation is a revisitation of the Modernist concept of the radical "break" from the current situation, where "the Possible shatters into a million previously unimaginable possibilities. There is nothing determinate 'in' this moment; it is a kind of pure emptiness, a nihilation."

This may break down into a new exploration of cross-genre splicing and breeding (much the way Gang of Four brought dub reggae into punk) with contemporary genres in a way that avoids the usual "throw a beat on top and call it remix" way of generic, meatheads-with-turntables electronica. The endless sonic invention of grime, for instance, provides one promising line-of-flight. Another is the burgeoning noise scene of Lightning Bolt, Erase Errata, etc. Where might a two-man band go with 108 bass pedals and stack full of Dizzee Rascal CDs?

Let's try it and see.