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Grant saith:
I think part of the beauty is in the roughness. I also like woodcuts and raku pottery.
See, roughness isn't the problem, for me: it's incompleteness. I guess I see a song as a functional object. To use your pottery analogy: a soup bowl with a rough, crackly glaze has charm and character—but a soup bowl with a big fucking hole in it (or a wet lump of clay that you're just calling a soup bowl) is in itself neither useful nor beautiful. It still needs some work. It's a demo being passed off as a complete work.
I guess what kills me is the implication of contempt that I get from many indie bands—contempt for the audience, contempt for craft, contempt for the music itself. I mean, if you've got so much ironic distance between yourself and your art, the why bother doing it at all? Don't do us any favors...
The Who played with a shambolic looseness—but they played as if their lives depended on it. On the other hand, I've never heard a Pavement song wherein the band didn't sound bored, or as if there were something else they'd much rather be doing.
For me, the First and Only Commandment of Rock is: Always Let Them See You Sweat.
That's why, of all indie bands, I most love and am most frustrated by Guided By Voices. Bob Pollard is engaged in his music in a way that few singers are: he honest-to-God loves rock'n'roll, and his love is contagious—but still feels a need to make the records sound cheap and tinny, for "aesthetic" reasons that seem to me misguided.
High production values are not an evil unto themselves, though many indie rockers seem to think they are. But good production never kept anyone from making a good record, any more than poor production ever prevented anyone from making a bad record.
Flux saith:
...most standard-tuned guitars recorded clearly and/or with a lot of studio gloss more often than not sounds ugly to my ears.
This statement sets you apart from the vast majority of music listeners: I say that without judgment, as a simple statement of fact: standards become standards for a reason, after all. Your rejection of those standards does set you outside of the pop mainstream. Dunno whether or not it makes you an "insufferable indie lifer." That depends on how your other point plays out...
...there are a lot of complicated decisions about style and craft that are made for each individual song.
Maybe so, maybe no. As the scene has grown, it seems to me that many of these "decisions" have become no decision at all—they've become codified into precisely the "anti-professionalist dogma" you mentioned. What started as a choice (or as a budgetary necessity) has become a credo: tune your guitar at the cost of your credibility. The record sounds "too slick"? Let the cries of "sellout" begin.
Where's the freedom in that? Shouldn't an artist be allowed to articulate hir art in a clear, accessible manner without risking the wrath of hir fans? |
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