Vox Box: The End of an Edge

LCD Soundsystem recently played a sold-out final farewell concert at Madison Square Garden in NYC, after releasing three of the best-crafted and most poignant electronic albums of the decade. The band's frontman, James Murphy, announced that 2010's This Is Happening would be his final album as LCD Soundsystem, stating in an interview with NPR, "I thought like three albums, a nice trilogy, a decade. I started when I was about 30. I'm 40 now. It feels like a good time to stop being a professional band."

Murphy still plans to keep producing and staying creatively active through his own label, DFA Records, but his decision to retire at a career-point where many other musicians might keep shamelessly touring well into their senior years demonstrates a restraint and respect for ephemerality that is often the too-bitter pill of the music industry.

When I turned 25 last month, I found myself becoming increasingly anxious and aware of time. Suddenly, I was older than half of the artists I listen to, and starting to feel like I had not only disappointed myself in terms of accomplishments (or lack thereof), but that I had missed the window of establishing creative success altogether.

In Murphy's lyrics, he shrewdly demonstrates his own cognizance of the fact that youth is fleeting and creative validation often illusory. In his 2002 breakout hit, "Losing My Edge", off of his eponymous debut album, he neurotically explains how he is being displaced by the younger, hipper generation while making hilariously outlandish claims to attempt to prove his credibility, "I've never been wrong/I used to work in the record store/I had everything before anyone".

The song was more about Murphy's own self-deprecation and neuroses than satire. But for all of us who have ever engaged in indie-penis measuring contests and various levels of "mainstream" condemnation - it still stings a little. But, as Murphy stated, "this is what you do when you know things. Knowing things, knowledge, or like your attachment to them or your self-association with other bands or with books or whatever is usually like this, often this weird amulet that protects you. Like, you're, like, no, I am serious. Look at my library. Listen to this. Like, I'm going to list all the books I've read, and now you know I'm a serious person."

When you are a creative person competing with the struggle for authenticity against the unconquerable current of time, it can feel like you are striving to inhabit a space that does not even exist.

Murphy masterfully navigated these waters with a conscious effort to stay away from "the scene" and therefore above the fray. It indicates a sort of wisdom that seems implausible for any 20-something musician having achieved the same sort of critical acclaim and commercial success. If you "hit it big" before turning 25, the landscape of ass-kissers and endless nightlife inevitably unfolding before you is both irresistible and potentially your own irrevocable downfall. But being post-25 and still trying to catch your "big break" quickly becomes the living pipe dream.

Jennifer Egan has been receiving considerable praise for her 2010 novel, "A Visit From the Goon Squad" which follows the lives of characters connected to the music industry and the people around them, over the course of several decades. In most cases, the passing of years is cruel to the characters who either never attain the success that seemed so indicative during their youth, or their aspirations do come to fruition only to be met with nagging feelings of disillusionment followed by incendiary downward spirals. Characters are left wondering where their lives switched from "A to B" - from relentless ambition to a cavity of regrets, and the tiredness of middle age.

For those of us who perceive ourselves to be on the ascent of our creative careers, it is not a comforting image.

Murphy, despite his lyrical fixation with the intangible nature of both time and veritable "coolness", has always toiled over music about the physicality of the present. Anyone who has ever listened to "Daft Punk Is Playing At My House" on a treadmill knows the feeling of being possessed by his quintessential forwardly-lurching basslines and repetitively pulsing percussion. It's music that is about being.

Perhaps at age 40, Murphy has realized that life is about putting away the measuring stick and giving in to the tangible moment. Those of us still blinded by our own determinations are just frantically fighting to stake our place atop an untenable sand-dune.

Vox Box: Indie Exterior

I'm fairly certain that blogging about indie music makes me somewhat obnoxious. It's rather presumptuous of me to think that I'm an authority on the subject - enough so to feel like my thoughts and advice are worth sharing. I'm not even a "real" hipster. Or am I? I'm pretty sure that calling myself a hipster automatically invalidates my indie credibility, but denying the designation of "hipster" merely confirms my membership to the subtly not-so-sub subculture.

There is a lot of indignation surrounding indie/hipster culture considering that every other social demographic also has it's own stylistic nuances. It is a generally good thing that different categories of people can be distinguished by their clothes and other visible lifestyle choices. But in the case of those of us who consider ourselves legitimate devotees of the alternative arts, what was once, "Oh look, that man is in a police uniform, he must be a cop," has become, "Oh, that guy in polo shirt is obviously a preppy brainwashed asshole... but that girl in the jorts with the owl tattoo on her arm looks like she would be into the same music as me, even though I still probably know more about cool bands than she does... so I'm going to go over and impress her with my knowledge of Saddle Creek Records."

The definition of "Who is a hipster?" is both a hackneyed subject and yet constantly shape-shifting and ripe with layers of social barometers that are worth unpacking. The question famously prompted a popular blog, Look at This Fucking Hipster, where pictures of decidedly quintessential hipsters were posted to not only skewer the youth culture, but to also serve as examples of how to identify said hipsters based solely on appearances.

But is there more to the hipster identity than a recognizable veneer? Is the personality defined by the exterior, or is there a deeper commonality of real convictions driving the outer aesthetic?

Indie music is a huge component of typical hipster culture. People who claim to love indie music seem to be annoyingly ostentatious about their enthusiasm for it (to the point of even starting a blog...) and are eager to share their opinions. Beliefs about music are externalized in the form of t-shirts, tattoos, and blatantly contrived "favorite music" lists and music related status updates on facebook.

It can seem so artificial as to prompt the old question, "If a hipster listens to the new Animal Collective album, but doesn't tweet about it, is he/she really an Animal Collective fan?"

Of course, it is important to keep in mind that hipster culture is a construct of teens and 20-somethings, and that a major part of finding who you are as a young adult is first recognizing and then distancing yourself from who/what you aren't. Perhaps that is why there is a palpable undercurrent of anger among hipsters - teens who were once pressured to conform into traditional life paths are finally pushed to the point of decrying, "Fuck you! I hate the suburbs, I hate American Idol, I hate your expectations, and I hate you!", and so hipsters especially are defined as much by what they hate as by what they actually like.

But for a culture that so strongly dissociates itself from "mainstream consumerism" and a common lack of autonomy, several corporations continue to make billions of dollars using "indie" as a marketing tool. Urban Outfitters has probably been the most successful at this while remaining intuitive enough to the hipster sensitivity towards being officially labeled to know to avoid using explicit marketing terms. The brand (along with it's sister store, Anthropologie) has been malleable enough to adapt to the cycling inventions and reinventions within trends, and recently launched an online wedding shop, BHLDN, in order to, "help a woman create an event that reflects her own unique perspective," and to further demonstrate the company's ability to grow with it's aging consumer base.

I'm ashamed to admit that I'm a sucker for all of it. When BHLDN launched this past Valentine's Day, I found myself immediately taking the, "What Kind of Bride are You?" quiz (I'm "neo-sophisticate" by the way) and thinking of all the things I could purchase to establish my uniqueness at my wedding... someday...

What the success of companies like BHLDN really proves is that as good as they are at marketing products towards us, they are still no where near as good as we are at marketing ourselves. We are the perpetual bridezillas of identity externalization with our carefully constructed "About Me's" and online obsessions with "liking" and "disliking" things.

Maybe we will all grow out of it once we turn 30 and (presumably) figure out who we are. Maybe we will still dress our babies in American Apparel onsies and raise them in a "cool but family-friendly" Brooklyn neighborhood to the soundtrack of vinyl records by "real" indie bands so that they can grow up to attend the progressive colleges of our choice and we can vicariously live through them as they carry on our hipster torch.

Or maybe we will start making decent salaries, buy a house with a yard, and only come into the city on occasion, to end up walking past a group of nihilistic-looking 20-somethings in their sloppy-chic clothes - and find ourselves mumbling under our breath, "look at those fucking hipsters."

Vox Box: The Bearded-Boys' Club

During my senior year of college I bought a crappy single speaker CD player for $22 just to play a dance mix I had made for a house party that night. I already owned a nice set of speakers for my iPod, and only wanted the CD player for one solitary reason: I was fucking tired of boys compulsively switching out of my playlist and taking over as the house DJ.

Never mind that it was my house and my iPod; it wasn’t about that. It was about the way that even some of my closest guy friends seemed to completely disregard my ability to put together something as straightforward as a dance mix for drunk people. And I had to ask myself, was it because I’m a girl?

Female music journalists are used to being overlooked. We are also used to being the “only girl in the room”.

It’s hard to find your voice when you’re surrounded by guys with tendencies to discuss music by rattling off entire catalogs of album release dates and sub-genres of sub-genres as though they are baseball statisticians. And even if you do manage to find your voice, it’s hard to make them listen.

Women have an industry reputation as being predisposed to discuss music from a personal perspective, with criticism regarding emotional responses rather than the mechanical aspect behind the types of pedals or amplifiers or synthesizers that went into creating the actual sound. Whether or not this is true, I don’t think that an interpretation of music must be technical in order to be valid. In a 2010 interview with NPR, James Murphy, of LCD Soundsystem discussed his preoccupation with the pure physicality of rhythm in dance music and punk. Regardless of lyrical composition and instrumental arrangements, he understood that a critical part of describing music entails understanding how it feels.

Therefore, it seems only fitting that female artists appear most prominently and attain the most success in pop music. The physicality of infectiously repetitive melodies and melodramatic choruses seem appropriate for such overtly sexualized bombshell songstresses. But in spite of the marketable success (and the subsequent gender discourse surrounding their ultra-vixen portrayals) of power pop princesses like Rhianna, Katy Perry, and the ubiquitous Lady Gaga, it is contradictory to regard their celebrity as any sort of triumph for feminism. These women, thrusting around in various hues of lycra and moaning out the lyrics to songs often written by other men, are all in their mid-20s, strikingly beautiful, and ultimately sexual props.

Ostensibly, the culture of indie music would be different. Hipsters take pride in their androgynous style and self-proclaimed enlightened sensitivity. But when you look at the artists with the most credibility in the indie scene, they (and the journalists praising them) are still mostly white men - just skinnier and with facial hair.

I’ve often wondered if the indie-male artistic and compassionate persona is a subtle visage to quietly disguise real sexism. Even the most progressively literate guys become disengaged when contemporary sexism is brought up, and especially within the sacred confines of their own alternative culture. If you are a guy and still reading this editorial right now, I can probably assume that you are either defensively dissecting every aspect of my argument that annoys you, or you are only skimming this as you simultaneously watch porn.

So are female indie musicians doomed to an identity-purgatory of "edgy" pin-up versions of themselves and restricted to cooing back-up lyrics while playing bass guitar behind the guys?

For me, the alarming proof of sexism in idie rock was revealed after a simple Google search of “Women in Indie Rock”. I was jolted to see that most of the results were from articles listing the “hottest” or most “strangely attractive” women in indie music. Even our own local WKNC 88.1FM college radio station in Raleigh appeared at the top with a “Hottest” list.

I can’t help but to feel like women are just as objectified in indie rock and that the pop music's seductive siren aesthetic has been exchanged for fringe bangs and loose-fitting tank tops exposing side-boob.

Female musicians and music journalists are forced to overcompensate and strive to establish authenticity based on their creative work apart from appearances and gender stereotypes. Still, our contributions to music and music journalism are utterly invaluable. Where would the world be without Karen O or Ann Powers?

Maybe we can’t control our own feminine visibility, but our abilities and opinions matter, and demand equal respect by men. We know what we’re doing, and we can in fact make a damn good dance mix.