Indie rock questions

1, I consider indie rock began to separate itself from alternative rock when Nirvana tried to have some impact on the mainstream, which later became commercialized and marked a big success and others stayed underground. As Johnson says “Economic profit is normally disavowed (at least by the artists themselves), and the hierarchy of authority is based on different forms of symbolic profit…” (Quoted; Hibbett, 57). However, Hesmondhalgh argues that “the logic of the music industry as a cultural system is towards internationalization, because of the economies which accrue to very big, as opposed to moderate, sales…but such economics are not enough in themselves to explain what happened in indie in the late 1980s”. Is the economic situation of the band can be a criterion to define whether it is in the group of indie rock bands or not? And how can the band keep the balance between the profits from mass audience or just the band itself, for example some from the sales of albums or some just make profit from tickets income? Are there any specific boundaries within all indie rock bands between those bands are commercialized and those are not?


2. As the musicians and fans gradually remolded the alternative rock or rock music into a new form of serious hardcore, the whole process is shaping the music genre which became indie rock more predictable and testosterone-driven. Hibbett also says “indie rock requires its own codes, i.e. cultural capital, and therefore can be used to generate and sustain myths of social or intellectual superiority”. (57) By saying this and gives the example of “Soyouwanna Fake Being an Indie Rock Expert?” , how to connect people’s factual knowledge and their social savvy if the goal is just “faking” rather than Bourdieu’s “being” somebody else? Is the also a way to say that some of Bourdieu’s distinctions between classes are so static that people don’t even have a chance to change or even to fake?


3, In the 1990s, the indie music divided into different subgenres like indie pop, dream pop, math rock, space rock, sadcore and so on. How can those subgenres maintain their own positions and make the underground phenomenon in a balanced situation? In Hongkong, Taiwan and mainland China, the concept of indie was explored too much by those songwriters and audience. A song called The Lament of Indie indicates how embarrassing the place indie music is in the current Chinese music industry and how they are struggling to survive. When talking about the regional identification, does the whole indie music will face the problem of searching “an artistic ‘elsewhere’”(Hibbett, 65) or just indie rock in this case?