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. Continue reading
