In her book ‘Slanted and Enchanted : The Evolution of Indie Culture’, Kaya Oakes sets out to find out exactly what ‘indie’ means these days.
Oakes’ qualifications for this mission are that she teaches writing at the University of California, Berkeley and is a co-founder of the Kitchen Sink magazine (“for people who think too much”) where she is now senior editor.
Oakes’ well honed journalistic skills mean that she is able to give a pretty good, if slightly stodgy, overview of the topic. I think the writing should have been livelier and some of the conclusions struck me as overly clichéd and predictable. When she writes things like how there is a need to find “an identity in the increasingly consumerist and conservative culture of the late eighties“, it reads too much like a sociological text-book.
Also, since most of her examples come from in and around the Bay Area, she doesn’t really give enough insights into how indie perceptions vary throughout America. When she does venture further afield she stays in safe hipster territory of cities like Brooklyn, Portland, Olympia and Seattle. This is a weakness because I’m sure the youth culture in these cities are a world away from that of middle America. Oakes admits herself, for example, that Berkeley has “general tolerance for freakishness in young people” which means the kids regard creativity and experimentation as a right rather than a luxury.
On a more positive note, Oakes deserves credit for broadening the narrative of ‘indie culture’ beyond the already well documented underground music culture. So, whilst the descriptions of Post-Punk, Indie Rock and the Riot Grrrl phenomenon take up over a third of the book, she also covers fanzines, comix and home-made crafts. She shows how fanzines and small presses played a significant role in the creation of independent culture in the eighties and nineties. As one of the main players, Lawrence Livermore, says: “zines were the MySpace of those days”.
And,after a day at the 2008 Renegade Craft Fair in (you guessed it !) San Francisco she concludes that “crafting is a kind of backlash against the accelerated nature of consumer culture in the 21st century”.
At the start of the book, Oakes quotes the assertion by one of her students that “indie’s really just hipsters in skinny jeans”. This she rightly regards as proof that corporate America has effectively co-opted indie values and used them as a basis for niche marketing. Despite this, she argues persuasively that the disdain for the business orientated mainstream and faith in DIY remains as strong as ever.
The resistance to indie as a brand is reflected in the Kitchen Sink magazine section on music reviews (Louder Than Words) where editor Jeff Johnson maintains defiantly that “we resist the commodification of what interests us”.
Oakes ends on the upbeat reflection that despite the exploitation of indie culture there is strong evidence that individuals are able to change and adapt in the present economic climate. She ends by asserting that “independence means rebellion, risk, tenacity, innovation and resistance to convention.”. Amen to that.
