Indie Rock Questions

Ryan Hibbert suggests that to consumers of “high art,” which according to Bourdieu would presumably be the legitimate art consuming members of the bourgeoisie, “indie rock would be relegated to the nebulous and ‘inferior’ world of popular mass culture.” But to indie rockers, high art would likely be relegated to the doldrums of the meaningless dominant culture. Hibbert goes on to explain that while indie rock and high art may have different meanings to very different people, and may have stemmed from different circumstances, they both operate on the same functional logic, i.e. both indie rock and legitimate art (or any other “indie culture”) set out to shun large audiences in favor of smaller ones, sacrificing economic capital in exchange for cultural capital in the process, in order to be recognized as “not A”? (Hibbert, 57). Are the arguments posed by both Hebdige and Bourdieu the same, only focused on different subcultures? Are all indie cultures and subgroups interested in obtaining exactly the same recognition from different people?

An important concept discussed by Hibbert is his interpretation of cultural capital, which as far as I can tell is translated into hipness, the currency of cool. Hibbert acknowledges that there is something inherently monetary about being cool. “Cultural capital can cease to have value as it becomes increasingly accessible” (Hibbert, 64). By this principle of rudimentary economics, the more concentrated the cultural capital is in one small group, the more it is worth. But if it becomes widely used or accessible, and the market becomes flooded with one kind of cultural capital, then it loses its value. Considering that there is no physical representation of this currency, how can the solvency be determined? Is obtaining cultural capital really a job, with hard work transformed into acceptance and popularity in a group that values it? Bannister comments on this as well, detailing the work and reward that goes into finding an obscure record (Bannister, 81). But the record is inherently worthless unless a group of people has determined that it has indie cultural value. So is it worth anything to people who don’t care about its cultural value, or is the value of cultural capital relegated only to the indie communities that covet it?

There is an interesting logic that we must buy into in order to place indie music in a different category than popular mainstream music. All bands, indie or mainstream, have a desire to get their music out to the largest number of appreciative fans as possible. So inevitably, the determination to create a dearth of indie talent free from the control or influence of the mainstream public will only end up creating a new indie mainstream that will then be subjected to the same indie/mainstream dichotomy that produced the initial separation. I suspect this is why I get frustrated when dealing with members of an indie crowd, because there seems to always be some person who knows more about the indie music than anyone else, and considers everyone else a mainstream indie fan. There is mainstream indie, and there is indie indie, and so on. So is there something contradictory, or outright irrational about determining the value of an intangible object by its “scarcity”?