Professsionalization

There's been some talk about "professionalization" lately, and at the risk of being overly "me-too," allow me to point you to a couple of antecedents: the Pazz & Jop '06 comments (near the bottom, Barthel to Weingarten), and an article I wrote for Flagpole about the professionalization of indie. I point this out not just because of narcisscism, but because the Flagpole article puts a decent amount of blame on the bands themselves, which the current discussion seems reluctant to do. It's something I harp on, and maybe I'm coming from the wrong perspective, but the state of criticism has an effect on the choices bands make, especially in a genre driven by criticism like indie. Bands aren't affected by blog-hype only after they become the subject of it. They're aware of it when they're forming, when they're starting to play, when they send out their demos. The presence of a brass ring makes everyone lean out farther, you know? It's too easy to paint this as victimization.

Here's a selection:

What this means is that "indie musician" is now a viable temporary career
choice. If you're willing to play it safe and hew to a certain sound, you can
tour nationally, put out a record or two, and have a not entirely uncomfortable
life. Being in a band seems to have become the modern equivalent of the Grand
Tour: something superficially cultured and bohemian that represents a deliberate
step on the path to moving to the suburbs, raising a family, and having a steady
job. It fills up one's 20s....

Indie is derided as a middle-class pursuit. (But that was what made it so
great in the first place! In finding a middle path, indie-rock combined things
in new ways.) Now, though, it's become thoroughly professionalized. "Musician
wanted" ads might as well include a list of the position's duties, opportunities
for advancement and preferred resumé formats.

Interestingly, this shift has also produced a corresponding
professionalization in the apparatus surrounding indie music, which is even more
surprising: indie's whole ethos was Do It Yourself. But now, you can hire
publicity companies (staffed by cool people who graduated from a liberal arts
college, so you don't feel weird about it) to promote your music, graphic
designers to make your album packaging (so when people get your album it doesn't
look unprofessional), and get your picture in magazines catering to the hipster
demographic because you got style. Whereas indie outfits used to be staffed by
weirdoes and misfits with the time to devote to boosting the music they were
passionate about, now your parents will fund your internship with Nasty Little
Man so you can get +1s at the best shows, find yourself chumming it up at South
By Southwest and go on to make $30k a year doing marketing at Matador Records,
even though your degree was in Environmental Studies.

The weirdest thing, of course, has undoubtedly been the blogs. Arguing
about bands and making mixtapes used to be something you did with your friends,
or maybe on online message boards. But now advertisers will pay you to do this,
and bands and labels will send you free CDs, and this professionalization of
argumentation has produced a certain amplification...

The result, as with the mainstream incursions, has been a distortion in the
discourse surrounding indie. When bands are careers rather than artistic
pursuits, they're dumpable as soon as they become unproductive and unprofitable,
and the same thing goes for writing. Professionalization necessarily entails a
loss of community - you are competing against these other bands and publicists
and bloggers for the small share of money available to you, after all - and so
where there was once an awareness of the sound left unexplored, the band left
undiscovered, and an effort to fill that slot, now there's either grasping for
the last piece of cake by going with the tried and true or total disengagement
by retreating into distancing abstractions that no one can really call good or
bad.

Indie has been entrepreneurial in the past, but now it's codified so much
that it's become a profession; even experimental music on the national stage now
feels like a series of rote gestures you can see coming a mile away. No longer
are we contributing to the whole by contributing something new. We're merely
claiming our share, our reward for a short, short lifetime of loyal fandom.

Labels: blogtalk, critics, indie rock, professionalization

posted by Mike B. @ 8:13 PM 14 Comments