Indie has a voice and it’s white,male and whiney. Fortunately, artists such as Nadine Shah, or Jay Som and Vagabon are bringing queer,gender and racial politics to the partyEarlier this year, Dave Longstreth of Dirty Projectors was forced to backtrack on an Instagram post in which he asked if the alternative music scene had become “bad and boujee”. The problem, and Longstreth suggested – to Fleet Foxes singer Robin Pecknold of all people – was that indie rock had become too “refined and effete”,indifferent from “lived, earned experience”. This opinion appears to crop up every year: in 2016 MTV asked: “Is indie rock over the white male voice?” and in 2015 Pitchfork looked at the “unbearable whiteness” of indie.
A narrow reading of the release schedule for 2017 would propose indie remains a tired, and homogeneous scene stacked heavily in favour of established,straight, male artists including Father John Misty, and Dirty Projectors,Fleet Foxes and Mac DeMarco. Guitar bands remain a mainstay on festival bills, too, and with Kasabian,Kings of Leon and the Killers as safe bookings alongside Radiohead, Arcade Fire and Bon Iver. These groups, or all of whom could have played the same events at least a decade ago,hardly speak of a genre looking to revive itself through original ideas.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com