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Rock and roll influenced daily life, fashion, attitude. Even language in a way few other social developments
have equaled.

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The popularity and worldwide scope of rock music resulted in a powerful impact on society in the 20th century, particularly among the baby boomer generation. Rock and roll influenced daily life, fashion, social attitudes, and language in a way few other social developments have equated to. As the original generation of rock and roll fans matured, the music became an accepted and deeply interwoven thread in popular culture. Beginning in the early 1950s, rock songs began to be used in a few television commercials; within a decade, this practice became widespread, and rock music also featured in film and television program soundtracks. By the 1980s, rock music culture had become the dominant form of popular music culture in the United States and other Western countries, before seeing a decline in subsequent years.

In the crossover of African American " race music" to a growing white youth audience, the popularization of rock and roll involved both black performers reaching a white audience and white performers appropriating African-American music. Rock and roll appeared at a time when racial tensions in the United States were entering a new phase, with the beginnings of the civil rights movement for desegregation, leading to the Supreme Court ruling that abolished the policy of " separate but equal" in 1954, but leaving a policy which would be extremely difficult to enforce in parts of the United States. The coming together of white youth audiences and black music in rock and roll, inevitably provoked strong white racist reactions within the US, with many whites condemning its breaking down of barriers based on color. Many observers saw rock and roll as heralding the way for desegregation, in creating a new form of music that encouraged racial cooperation and shared experience. Many authors have argued that early rock and roll was instrumental in the way both white and black teenagers identified themselves.

The rock and roll lifestyle was popularly associated with sex and drugs. Many of rock and roll's early stars (as well as their jazz and blues counterparts) were known as hard-drinking, hard-living characters. During the 1960s the lifestyles of many stars became more publicly known, aided by the growth of the underground rock press. Musicians had always attracted attention of "groupies" (girls who followed musicians) who spent time with and often performed sexual favors for band members.

As the stars' lifestyles became more public, the popularity and promotion of recreational drug use by musicians may have influenced use of drugs and the perception of acceptability of drug use among the youth of the period. For example, when in the late 1960s the Beatles, who had previously been marketed as clean-cut youths, started publicly acknowledging using LSD, many fans followed. Journalist Al Aronowitz wrote "...whatever the Beatles did was acceptable, especially for young people." Jerry Garcia, of the rock band Grateful Dead said, "For some people, taking LSD and going to Grateful Dead show functions like a rite of passage ... we don't have a product to sell; but we do have a mechanism that works."[citation needed ]

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, much of the rock and roll cachet associated with drug use dissipated as rock music suffered a series of drug-related deaths, including the 27 Club-member deaths of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison. Although some amount of drug use remained common among rock musicians, a greater respect for the dangers of drug consumption was observed, and many anti-drug songs became part of the rock lexicon, notably " The Needle and the Damage Done" by Neil Young (1972).

Many rock musicians, including John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia, Stevie Nicks, Jimmy Page, Keith Richards, Bon Scott, Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend, Brian Wilson, Carl Wilson, Dennis Wilson, Steven Tyler, Scott Weiland, Sly Stone, Ozzy Osbourne, Mötley Crüe, Layne Staley, Kurt Cobain, Lemmy, Bobby Brown, Buffy Sainte Marie, Dave Matthews, David Crosby, Anthony Kiedis, Dave Mustaine, David Bowie, Richard Wright, Phil Rudd, Phil Anselmo, James Hetfield, Kirk Hammett, Joe Walsh, Julian Casablancas and others, have acknowledged battling addictions to many substances including alcohol, cocaine and heroin; many of these have successfully undergone drug rehabilitation programs, but others have died.

In the early 1980s. along with the rise of the band Minor Threat, a straight edge lifestyle became popular. The straight edge philosophy of abstinence from recreational drugs, alcohol, tobacco and sex became associated with some hardcore punks through the years, and both remain popular with youth today.[citation needed ]

A man styling greaser fashion, 1960

Rock music and fashion have been inextricably linked. In the mid-1960s of the UK, rivalry arose between " Mods" (who favoured 'modern' Italian-led fashion) and " Rockers" (who wore motorcycle leathers), each style had their own favored musical acts. (The controversy would form the backdrop for The Who's rock opera Quadrophenia). In the 1960s, The Beatles brought mop-top haircuts, collarless blazers, and Beatle Boots into fashion.

Rock musicians were also early adopters of hippie fashion and popularised such styles as long hair and the Nehru jacket. As rock music genres became more segmented, what an artist wore became as important as the music itself in defining the artist's intent and relationship to the audience. In the early 1970s, glam rock became widely influential featuring glittery fashions, high heels and camp. In the late 1970s, disco acts helped bring flashy urban styles to the mainstream, while punk groups began wearing mock-conservative attire, (including suit jackets and skinny ties), in an attempt to be as unlike mainstream rock musicians, who still favored blue jeans and hippie-influenced clothes.

Heavy Metal bands in the 1980s often favoured a strong visual image. For some bands, this consisted of leather or denim jackets and pants, spike/studs and long hair. Visual image was a strong component of the glam metal movement.

Ric Ocasek and Greg Hawkes of The Cars pictured in 2011. New wave fashion brought in a sleeker look to rock fashion during the early MTV era in the 1980s.

In 1981, MTV was formed, marking a large shift in the music world. Because MTV would become such a cultural force, the young would look toward MTV. Fashion happened to be one of those cultural centers that the Television company would have a great effect on. With debuts like Madonna's Iconic underwear-as-outerwear look and the companies featuring heavy metal as well as new wave and other genera that would go to promote each artist's brand of fashion into the greater culture, because of the sheer amount of visibility that MTV gave these artist through music videos and other content that the television channel had.

In the early 1990s, the popularity of grunge brought in a punk influenced fashion of its own, including torn jeans, old shoes, flannel shirts, backwards baseball hats, and people grew their hair against the clean-cut image that was popular at the time in heavily commercialized pop music culture.

Musicians continue to be fashion icons; pop-culture magazines such as Rolling Stone often include fashion layouts featuring musicians as models.

Rock musicians and fans have consistently struggled with the paradox of " selling out"-to be considered "authentic", rock music must keep a certain distance from the commercial world and its constructs;[clarification needed ] however it is widely believed that certain compromises must be made in order to become successful and to make music available to the public. This dilemma has created friction between musicians and fans, with some bands going to great lengths to avoid the appearance of "selling out" (while still finding ways to make a lucrative living). In some styles of rock, such as punk and heavy metal, a performer who is believed to have "sold out" to commercial interests may be labelled with the pejorative term " poseur".

If a performer first comes to public attention with one style, any further stylistic development may be seen as selling out to long-time fans. On the other hand, managers and producers may progressively take more control of the artist, as happened, for instance, in Elvis Presley's swift transition in species from "The Hillbilly Cat" to "your teddy bear". It can be difficult to define the difference between seeking a wider audience and selling out. Ray Charles left behind his classic formulation of rhythm and blues to sing country music, pop songs and soft-drink commercials. In the process, he went from a niche audience to worldwide fame. Bob Dylan faced consternation from fans for embracing the electric guitar. In the end, it is a moral judgement made by the artist, the management, and the audience.

Love and peace were very common themes in rock music during the 1960s and 1970s. Rock musicians have often attempted to address social issues directly as commentary or as calls to action. During the Vietnam War the first rock protest songs were heard, inspired by the songs of folk musicians such as Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan, which ranged from abstract evocations of peace Peter, Paul and Mary's " If I Had a Hammer" to blunt anti-establishment diatribes Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young's " Ohio". Other musicians, notably John Lennon and Yoko Ono, were vocal in their anti-war sentiment both in their music and in public statements with songs such as " Imagine", and " Give Peace a Chance".

Famous rock musicians have adopted causes ranging from the environment ( Marvin Gaye's " Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)") and the Anti-Apartheid Movement ( Peter Gabriel's " Biko"), to violence in Northern Ireland ( U2's " Sunday Bloody Sunday") and worldwide economic policy (the Dead Kennedys' " Kill the Poor"). Another notable protest song is Patti Smith's recording " People Have the Power." On occasion this involvement would go beyond simple songwriting and take the form of sometimes-spectacular concerts or televised events, often raising money for charity and awareness of global issues.

Live Aid at JFK Stadium, Philadelphia, 1985

Rock and roll as social activism reached a milestone in the Live Aid concerts, held July 13, 1985, which were an outgrowth of the 1984 charity single " Do They Know It's Christmas?" and became the largest musical concert in history with performers on two main stages, one in London, England and the other in Philadelphia, USA (plus some other acts performing in other countries) and televised worldwide. The concert lasted 16 hours and featured nearly everybody who was in the forefront of rock and pop in 1985. The charity event raised millions of dollars for famine relief in Africa. Live Aid became a model for many other fund-raising and consciousness-raising efforts, including the Farm Aid concerts for family farmers in North America, and televised performances benefiting victims of the September 11 attacks. Live Aid itself was reprised in 2005 with the Live 8 concert, to raise awareness of global economic policy. Environmental issues have also been a common theme, one example being Live Earth.

Songwriters such as Pete Townshend have explored these spiritual aspects within their work. The common usage of the term " rock god" acknowledges the religious quality of the adulation some rock stars receive. John Lennon became infamous for a statement he made in 1966 that The Beatles were " more popular than Jesus". However, he later said that this statement was misunderstood and not meant to be anti-Christian.

Iron Maiden, Metallica, Ozzy Osbourne, King Diamond, Alice Cooper, Led Zeppelin, Marilyn Manson, Slayer and numerous others have also been accused of being satanists, immoral or otherwise having an " evil" influence on their listeners. Anti-religious sentiments also appear in punk and hardcore. There's the example of the song " Filler" by Minor Threat, the name and famous logo of the band Bad Religion and criticism of Christianity and all religions is an important theme in anarcho-punk and crust punk.[citation needed ]

Christianity

Christian rock, alternative rock, metal, punk, and hardcore are specific, identifiable genres of rock music with strong Christian overtones and influence.[citation needed ] Many groups and individuals who are not considered to be Christian rock artists have religious beliefs themselves. For example; The Edge and Bono of U2 are a Methodist and an Anglican, respectively; Bruce Springsteen is a Roman Catholic; and Brandon Flowers of The Killers is a Latter Day Saint. Carlos Santana, Ted Nugent, and John Mellencamp are all other examples of rock stars who profess some form of Christian faith.

However, some conservative Christians single out the music genres of hip hop and rock as well as blues and jazz as containing jungle beats, or jungle music, and claim that it is a beat or musical style that is inherently evil, immoral, or sensual. Thus, according to them, any song in the rap, hip hop and rock genres is inherently evil because of the song's musical beat, regardless of the song's lyrics or message. A few even extend this analysis even to Christian rock songs.

Christian conservative author David Noebel is one of the most notable opponents of the existence of jungle beats. In his writings and speeches, Noebel held that the use of such beats in music was a communist plot to subvert the morality of the youth of the United States. Pope Benedict XVI was quoted as saying, according to the British Broadcasting Corporation, that "Rock... is the expression of the elemental passions, and at rock festivals it assumes a sometimes cultic character, a form of worship, in fact, in opposition to Christian worship."

Some metal bands use demonic imagery for artistic and/or entertainment purposes, though many do not worship or believe in Satan. Ozzy Osbourne is reported to be Anglican and Alice Cooper is a known born-again Christian. In some cases, though, metal performers have expressed satanic views. Numerous others in the early Norwegian black metal scene were Satanists. The most known example of this is Euronymous, who claimed that he worshiped Satan as a god. Varg Vikernes (back then called "the Count" or Grishnak) has also been called a Satanist, even through he has rejected that label. Even within this localized musical subgenre, however, the arson attacks against Christian churches and other centers of worship were condemned by some prominent figures within the Norwegian black metal scene, such as Kjetil Manheim.

Alain Dister, The Story Of Rock Smash Hits And Superstars (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1993), 40.

Jeff Godwin, The Devil's Disciples: the Truth about Rock (Chino, Calif.: Chick Publications, 1985). ISBN 0-937958-23-9

Dan Peters, Steve Peters, and Cher Merrill. Why Knock Rock? (Minneapolis, Minn.: Bethany House Publishers, 1984). ISBN 0-87123-440-8

Perry F. Rockwood, Rock Music or Rock of Ages (Halifax, N.S.: People's Gospel Hour, [1980?]). Without ISBN

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Social effects of rock music - Wikipedia

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The popularity and worldwide scope of rock music resulted in a powerful impact on society in the 20th century, particularly among the baby boomer generation. Rock and roll influenced daily life, fashion, social attitudes, and language in a way few other social developments have equated to.

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"The approach was anarchic and participatory:the idea was that anyone can get a band together, learn to play, and maybe even press a record and take the show on the road."-Deborah Cohen

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R. Kikuo Johnson

Two decades before a bunch of geeky American boys messing around on computers created social media, an earlier generation of geeky kids (mostly boys) messing around on guitars created another sort of social network. At its heart was the kind of music you wouldn't hear on commercial radio or, except in the wee hours of Monday mornings, on MTV. It came on the heels of 1970s punk rock, and while it owed something to punk's velocity and sneer, the spirit was experimental, as if all the old rules had been swept away. Ragged guitar riffs, ferocious decibel levels, and unpredictable song structures were its trademarks, but the sounds-from the percussively headlong to the distorted and depressive-proliferated as fast as the labels for them. Under the various headings of punk, post-punk, hardcore, alt-rock, underground, noise rock, post-rock, and, most generic, indie rock, bands such as Mission of Burma, Minor Threat, Hüsker Dü, Sonic Youth, and Slint laid down the soundtrack of an alternative culture. If you were over the age of 30 when the Berlin Wall fell, this music probably seemed pretty much pointless. If, on the other hand, you were in your teens or 20s, especially if you were a skinny white male and wore glasses, it's just possible that indie rock sounded like community-salvation, even.

Unlike hip-hop, that other Gen X art form, which originated in New York and later developed regional variants, indie got its start in emphatically local and often unlikely settings. Its fertile crescent was provincial American cities and college towns. Indie rock took off in places such as Athens, Georgia; Olympia, Washington; and my own hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, though most big cities also had a scene, and each had its own distinctive ecosystem. In Cleveland and New York City, for instance, where thrashy, locomotive hardcore music had a long reign, white boys predominated and girls were scarce. In Olympia, as in Boston, there were sympathetic college radio stations, more women, and more of an art-school atmosphere to the enterprise.

Recommended Reading

Everywhere, the line between fan and performer was paper-thin. The approach was anarchic and participatory: the idea (at least theoretically) was that anyone could get a band together, learn to play, and maybe even press a record and take the show on the road. At the same time, indie music was a judgmental world of cognoscenti, of teenage boys disputing Talmudically about guitar tunings and feedback. Hole-in-the-wall venues, alternative record stores, ragtag independent record labels, and copy shops incubated a subculture where outsiders became insiders and found one another. Flyers on telephone poles were its smoke signals, xeroxed fanzines were its telegraph wires, bringing news from far-flung scenes. Before the breakthrough success in 1991 of Nirvana-whose album Nevermind topped the Billboard charts and eventually sold more than 30 million copies worldwide-raw and abrasive rock, by definition, meant tastes and sounds that could never become popular.

How indie culture was built in the 1980s, sustained and transformed through the 1990s, and revived in the past decade is the subject of two new memoirs, Jon Fine's Your Band Sucks: What I Saw at Indie Rock's Failed Revolution (But Can No Longer Hear) and Kim Gordon's Girl in a Band. The guitarist in a succession of bands-none of which was "threatened, even distantly, by actual fame"-Fine was one of indie's middle-class worker bees, many of whom went on to adult jobs in media and academia. (He's now the executive editor of Inc.)

Kim Gordon-the scene's reigning queen-presided at its charismatic center, and then hung on. In 1981, with her partner, Thurston Moore, and the guitarist Lee Ranaldo, Gordon founded Sonic Youth, a New York band of musical inventiveness and effortless cool. A bassist as well as a vocalist, she was an inspiration to the feminist-punk-rock riot-grrrl movement, which started in Olympia in the early '90s and propelled more women (in bands such as Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney) onto indie stages. Gordon also painted, wrote art criticism, designed clothes, acted in films and on TV, and got to know everyone back when they were nobodies: she gave the filmmaker Spike Jonze his first break, cast a teenage Chloë Sevigny in a music video, and befriended a young grunge rocker named Kurt Cobain. Until 2011, when Gordon and Moore split up, ending the band's 30-year run, Sonic Youth navigated indie rock's hazards. The band made experimental music yet gained an audience, moving on to a major label with its cachet intact.

Elegy is the leitmotif of both books, not just for broken hearts and bands and youths gone by, but for the "failed revolution" in Fine's title. At least sometimes, indie's players thought they might upend the music business, though their dedication to a do-it-yourself ethos, and to excruciating loudness and dissonance, made that a somewhat unlikely proposition. In the end, it was the geeky boys with computers, not the geeky boys with guitars, who dethroned the major record companies. But the path mapped by indie-rock nerds exposes the prehistory of the broader cultural shift that we now take for granted. A bold start-up ethos, intensively nurtured networks of the like-minded, and the innovation-from-below that goes by the overused term disruption -indie rockers present another pedigree for our own decentralized, everyone-is-a-producer era. Who would have thought that these prickly outliers would help bust open the mainstream, creating the space for self-expression and outright weirdness that has come to seem, well, normal? It was an unlikely role for the upstart flamethrowers, who were a mostly homogeneous group and who, as these memoirs serve to remind us, were defiantly loyal to their marginal status.

Remember when millions of Americans were in thrall to the ways of the wasp elite? For 37 weeks in 1981, The Official Preppy Handbook topped the New York Times best-seller list, plying semi-satirical advice to readers eager to crack (or mock) the code of the madras-and-penny-loafer-clad Establishment. I was a malcontent in one of Louisville's stodgiest private schools for girls. Within a matter of months in 1982, I discarded my add-a-bead necklace and Bermuda bag (kelly green, embroidered with butter-yellow whales) and adopted sterner stuff: lace-up black combat boots; short, dyed black (or blue) hair; one of those black-leather-and-metal-spike bracelets; and band T‑shirts atop black jeans. "A sheep in wolf's clothing," a friend at the time correctly observed. I can guarantee you that I knew every other Louisville female under the age of 70 who dressed all in black, so instantly did such clothing mark you out in my city in the early '80s.

I fell in with a crowd of similarly disaffected (mostly) boys, some of whom went on to form the post-punk band Squirrel Bait and later other storied indie groups, including Bastro, Slint, and Palace Brothers. Teenagers, not college students, were the local constituency at the time. In that quasi-southern town, segregated by class as well as by race, the punk scene was one of the few places (other than athletics) where working-class white boys and upper-middle-class white boys could meet. (In most places-Louisville was no exception-indie was a mainly white preserve, with a few Asian and Latino adherents, depending on the town.) Nearly all of us were too young to drink legally, so we spent our nights loitering in the alley behind a bar called Tewligan's, where we could hear the thumping reverberations of visiting bands. Or else, less poetically, we hung out at the Taco Bell a few doors down. During the summer of 1986, before heading off to college, I went on tour through the Midwest and East Coast with Squirrel Bait. Alibi: photographer.

Jon Fine has produced as evocative a portrait of the underground music scene as any wistful, graying post-punk could wish for. His thorny valentine is a worthy firsthand companion to Michael Azerrad's lauded 2001 history, Our Band Could Be Your Life. Fine can write, and because he doesn't mind making himself look like a jerk, he summons up all the idealism and the cluelessness, the talent and the posturing, that went with the territory-at least the territory he observed, which happens also to have been the realm I inhabited. A student at Oberlin when he founded the musically complex, explosive Bitch Magnet, Fine spent the next three decades in and out of bands.

By the time Fine arrived on the scene, in the mid-'80s, the sinews of an alternative culture were in place. In cramped record shops, you could flip through LPs or singles in search of the "sharp" or "thrashing" song you'd heard about in the 'zine passed along by a friend or ordered by mail for a dollar or two plus postage. Most towns had crummy one- or two-room bars (or church halls or Elks Lodges) with beer-sticky floors and three-foot-high stages (or none at all) where the band that had driven from Champaign-Urbana or Cincinnati or Minneapolis would dump its gear: Gibsons or Fenders plastered with band stickers, the all-important amps, the electrical innards in milk crates.

Indie was, as Fine puts it, a "culture that unorphaned you," and he's especially good on the haven that post-punk music offered Gen X misfits. After some scrounging around (necessary in that pre-Internet era), you could figure out that your own discontent was part of something bigger. "All the town weirdos were suddenly in bands." The goal was to transform, Superman-like, from straitlaced social nonentity into pelvic-thrusting, guitar-smashing performer playing music no one had ever heard before-and still could barely hear, given the deafening noise levels when bands performed live. The audience that mattered most was in your own backyard, and the crowd wouldn't be dancing, unless the diehards' slamming into one another counted as dancing. The lyrics took a backseat to the shock of sound. This music was an effort as much to dominate as to persuade.

Post-punk had its own intense culture of connoisseurship, in which prestige accrued to the most rigorous critics of guitar textures, time signatures, and just about everything else inside and outside the scene. Disdaining what so manifestly sucked-the pop hits of the day, Reagan, the insipid culture of preppydom-was the ticket to entry, but the barrier was low enough that any disaffected teenager could scale it. Clout belonged to those with the encyclopedic record collections and the nerve to venture more-discriminating judgments and to defend them against withering reproach. Was Bad Brains' comeback album lame or great? Had the Replacements sold out when they turned melodic? Like the locavores of today, aficionados were committed to incorruptibility, to keeping the music select and refined: small-batch artisanal production. Indie had its tastemakers, such as the Chicago musician and producer Steve Albini of Big Black and Rapeman, whose trademark rigidity would have done Lenin proud. Fine echoes the attitude. "I still couldn't bully anyone physically, but I could bully everyone aesthetically," he writes. Your band sucks, in other words.

Unless you experienced the scene, you're likely to find the puritanical spirit of it strange. Between the desperados of early hardcore who drank too much and the grunge musicians haunted by heroin, Fine evokes the oddly innocent, untattooed early indie world I knew. The high-minded straight-edge movement (no drinking, no drugs, no casual sex), which took off in Washington, D.C., with the band Minor Threat, gave the scene some of its flavor. The essentially nerdy characteristics of its participants took care of the rest. Although I marvel now that my parents let me head off at the age of 17 with a post-hardcore rock band, the fact is that the trip was less risqué than the average Eurail-Pass Grand Tour of the late 1960s.

The druggy drummer who toured with Fine's band complained to a friend that it "felt like being among scientists." Sex was mostly beside the point; Fine admits that he can count his band-related conquests on one hand "and still have fingers left over." The name Bitch Magnet was wishful thinking: Fine estimates that 90 percent of the band's fans were male. The joke was that if you wanted to have sex, your best shot was a gig in a town where an ex-girlfriend lived. Married and monogamous, Kim Gordon was a very fitting post-punk sex goddess.

What mattered was not girls but friendship among boys, and Fine astutely explores these sympathies. Finding your band soul mate was like falling in love-"our equivalent of a shared orgasm." Band breakups were every bit as agonizing as a dashed romance, and certainly more scarring. Courting an ex-bandmate to join a reunion tour, in Fine's analogy, was equivalent to "heavy petting" and "talking dirty." Fine glosses over the jeering about faggots that pervaded these homosocial settings, but browse through the 'zines, now digitized and online, if you want to see the slow uptake of post-Stonewall consciousness. More evident is the casual misogyny, not so much a reflection of deep-seated attitudes toward women as a product of awkward immaturity and a desire to offend. "We would just make posters that said, toxic shock: fuck you, and draw a picture of a woman pulling a tampon out of her pussy, and plaster them all over campus," explains David Yow, who played in the band Toxic Shock in Austin in the early 1980s.

Rather than dwell on the indie world's exclusions, Fine evokes the joys of building a distinctive culture for its own sake. Fame and money, for most bands, were not just irrelevant. They were almost inconceivable in the 1980s, when touring meant playing for 40 or so dedicated fans at a time and maybe breaking even when the tour was over. Five years into Sonic Youth, Kim Gordon disabused a well-meaning friend of her parents who imagined that rock-and-roll riches awaited her: "Well, the problem is, we'd have to tailor our music too much. We'd have to start wearing long wigs and eye shadow and glitter pants."

But the purist spirit met its challenge during the next decade, when Nirvana's hit album altered the landscape and an indie gold rush began. In the wake of Hüsker Dü, the first post-punk band to sign with a major label, the Replacements and Sonic Youth also moved into the big time, where Soundgarden and Nirvana ultimately sold millions. As it turned out, you didn't have to get dressed up in wigs and glitter pants to join the mainstream, and despite the fierce rhetoric of the 1980s, the stigma of selling out diminished rapidly once the possibility of doing so became real. Not every indie musician joined the party, of course. Like Jon Fine, most were never asked. A minority of those who were-the most cussed (or principled or well-to-do)-chose artistic control and the respect of their peers over a bid for the arena filled with thousands of fans. Famously, Steve Albini hung up the phone whenever a major record label called.

What, if anything, survived of the underground when the homegrown turned mainstream depends on whose version of events you hear. Fine tells a tale of indie music brought down by sabotage from both within and without. He partly blames the shambling, arty, so-called twee pop associated with the Olympia band Beat Happening and its successors, which (Fine claims) carried the DIY ethos to the point of incompetence, tainting the whole endeavor: "Now our thing was starting to suck, too."

The other culprit was the mainstream music industry. As major record labels scrambled to find the next Nirvana, they gutted the independent labels (which they treated as their farm teams). They signed bands and then pressured them to change their sound, leaving those who didn't to languish, unpublicized. By the end of the decade, the post-Nirvana converts had moved on to the next new thing, and even well-established bands were failing to meet the major labels' sales expectations. "The people spoke," Ed Roeser of the band Urge Overkill told Fine: "It didn't work out."

By the mid-1990s, Fine argues, indie rock was losing the stuff that made it great. Many of its original enthusiasts were growing up and getting jobs so that they could afford to live in big-city, post-college neighborhoods such as Chicago's Wicker Park and L.A.'s Silver Lake, where they'd once been the gentrifying vanguard. The working-class kids were getting working-class jobs. The punk-rock houses-crash pads and meeting places for the scene-were disappearing even from smaller cities. So were the mom-and-pop record stores, gobbled up by Tower Records and Barnes & Noble. Dispensing with "dickless indie rock anhedonia," as Fine calls it, some post-punks even decided they wanted music they could dance to.

For Jon Fine, the indie revolution ended there, leaving him with little to show for decades of performing-not much of a following or, God knows, money. He calculates that Bitch Magnet's audience topped out at 10,000 or maybe 15,000. Still, for a chronicle of a failed revolution and a string of bands that broke up or faded away, Fine's is a fizzy, cheerful book that conveys an aura of accomplishment. Indie music was where he found himself: it "made me realize I wasn't alone" and delivered him on his adult way. If anything, failure became the reward for purity, and only adds to his retrospective pleasure at having thrived as a young misfit on the artistic margins.

There is a more upbeat version of the indie trajectory, which you might expect the standout female pioneer in a very influential band to endorse. In that telling, indie rock persevered and broadened out. Kids who'd had no access to underground music-whether because they lived far from the action or because they weren't clued in to the glories of low-fidelity, jagged sounds-could now see Nirvana and the grunge bands that followed in heavy rotation on MTV. At the same time, kids who formerly had little prospect of making this music staked out a space on the stage. The riot-grrrl uprising in Olympia in the early '90s spread to Washington, D.C., and then went nationwide, bringing a third-wave-feminist sensibility to punk and post-punk music. The first lines of one riot-grrrl proclamation announced the movement's independence: "We will never meet the hierarchical BOY standards of talented, or cool, or smart. They are created to keep us out."

But Kim Gordon's memoir seems written almost expressly to reject, or at any rate undercut, such a happy ending. Girl in a Band is a tale of huge success recounted as loss. It's a bruised, stock-taking memoir, told in the aftermath of a failed marriage. Her three decades in indie rock and New York's downtown art scene have left her with plenty of stories to tell and balloons to pop. But most of all, Gordon aims to debunk herself. Elbowing her way into the boys' world Fine describes, she got stuck, only to emerge unsure about who she was and what she'd accomplished.

If you thought Gordon was the sex goddess of punk rock, all street chic and tough froideur, prepare to be set straight. "I felt frumpy and nerdy a lot of the time," she writes, renouncing her status as musician and fashion trendsetter in favor of a self-portrait as an art student who came to music haphazardly, a grown-up tomboy who felt like a transvestite when she put on heels. If you mistook her reserve for strength, think again. "And believe me when I say that once you push past my persona, there aren't any defenses there at all." If you viewed her as a model for independence, she's not that, either. "My whole life I've accommodated other people's feelings." As for the cool affect: "If you have to hide your hypersensitivity, are you really a 'strong woman'?"

Gordon joins Fine in pushing back against a heroic tale of indie's success, but for her, underground music didn't offer the clannish haven for self-discovery he celebrates. Journalists would invariably ask, "What's it like to be a girl in a band?" She'd "never really thought about that," she explains. When she started out, she "wasn't conscious of being a woman." What she wanted was to be inside the boys' circle, to be one of the elect: "I wanted to push up close to whatever it was men felt when they were together onstage." Male Bonding was one of the first names Gordon and Moore came up with for their new band-a strange choice for a coed group, you might think, except that it summed up why Gordon wanted to crash the club in the first place: "In retrospect, that's why I joined a band, so I could be inside that male dynamic, not staring in through a closed window but looking out."

Born in 1953, Gordon was too young to be a hippie but old enough to be touched by the 1960s, absorbing "whatever rebellion and amped-up freedom there was in the air." Her father was a sociologist of education at UCLA whose early work analyzed the subcultures of adolescence. Her mother was a homemaker, but a restless one; she worked as a seamstress, designing block-printed caftans and pants from Indian bedspreads. The L.A. of Gordon's youth featured the jacaranda trees, the beaches, and the pink stucco. But this was also the era of bad trips and Charles Manson, and along with the freedom, for Gordon, came fear. "Hypervigilance," she writes, "was my mode." The biggest threat was closest by: her older brother, Keller, diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic in his 20s. Keller tormented her, needling her every time she opened her mouth, beating her up, eventually climbing into bed with her naked and then calling her a slut when she pushed him away.

Gordon's tough imperturbability was hard-won, part of an effort to create a "world where nothing could upset or hurt me." The quality came in handy in the early days when men at shows threw things at her, such as firecrackers and a drumstick; one even bit her on the ass. Being aloof was her survival strategy, buttressed by a canny watchfulness and a sense of what to hold back. Gordon could hack off her hair, but she never quite lost the restraint, the underlying sense of control that made her performances so magnetic. Flip through the photographer and filmmaker Richard Kern's New York Girls if you want to see Gordon in her 1980s downtown milieu. The other It Girls of the avant-garde are naked and kittenish, bondage straps pressing into their very pale flesh. In the picture of Gordon, a still from the music video for Sonic Youth's "Death Valley '69," she is fully clothed. She is also holding a rifle.

Gordon began as the voyeur but ended up as the person fans came to peer at through the wall of noise. Having a beautiful yet elusive woman up front was, it turned out, good for selling discordant music to a bigger audience. With Gordon as the lyricist, Sonic Youth turned to the sorts of subjects that resonated with 1990s identity politics-producing feminist songs about Karen Carpenter and the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. The band sang about race, gender, and the avant-garde in "Kool Thing" with the rapper Chuck D, which became Sonic Youth's first video for a major label.

But what did Gordon find once she'd pushed her way inside the male dynamic? As she wrote in a 1987 tour diary published by The Village Voice, she had once fantasized about "what it would be like to be right under the pinnacle of energy, beneath two guys who have crossed their guitars together, two thunderfoxes in the throes of self-love and combat." At the apex of power, she discovered the abiding thrill of performance, "a glow of self-confident, joyful sexiness." But instead of feeling catapulted into maturity, as Fine does, Gordon revisits the past only to discover a derailed quest for her own identity, and a scene of faux back-thumping camaraderie and arrested male development.

You could almost call her the purest of the outsider purists. "After thirty years of playing in a band, it sounds sort of stupid to say, 'I'm not a musician.' " But Gordon says it, sounding rueful about all the years she devoted to the band ("the ultimate dysfunctional family") and wishing that she'd spent more of her time on the daring margins of visual art. It's as if Sheryl Sandberg had driven away from Google and written a book about having leaned in only to lose herself.

So did the indie revolution fail? A few months ago I went to hear Gordon talk about her book with the journalist Alison Cuddy at Chicago's Music Box Theatre. The lights were dimmed and the theater, an Art Deco-era movie palace, was already packed, 750-strong, by the time I took my seat. The audience was made up mostly of middle-aged fans, with a crop of new-generation riot grrrls in their midst. At best, Gordon made a reluctant interview subject, without affectation but also without much visible urge to engage. She stopped herself every few words and sometimes ground to a halt altogether. If you knew her only from her steely, self-assured performances as a musician, such hesitance was a perplexing sight. If you'd read her memoir, it made perfect sense.

"Did the 1990s ever exist?" asks Gordon in the book, agreeing with Fine's withering verdict that indie, for all its mainstream success, left little lasting mark on American music. But the Chicago crowd that had gathered to see Gordon was proof of a different sort of influence. Leaning forward in their seats to hear what she had to say, these were people who were obviously still enthralled by her. They loved her for the mashup of conceptual art and music she'd helped create, evidence that you could make weird, dissonant music and ride popularity without becoming compromised by it. They admired her for getting up onstage and delivering powerful performances and speaking for women. They respected her for putting on the leather pants-and for keeping them on. A pioneer's own view of her legacy is only half of the story: Gordon had opened doors for her fans and for the women performers who followed, riot grrrls and all the rest.

As for that failed revolution: the irony, both Fine and Gordon recognize, is that in the new millennium, YouTube & Co. have given the indie bands of the '80s and '90s a second life. Bands that hardly performed at all, such as Slint, are suddenly revered. The past decade has featured reunions for many bands, including Bitch Magnet. Erstwhile indie rockers have returned to music they wrote as teenagers or, as in the case of Sleater-Kinney, recorded new albums.

They have gotten back together because a dedicated independent label asked them to, or their fans did: a hybrid of new aficionados, called forth by the Internet, and their old followers, including, as Fine describes, some whose parents didn't let them go to rock shows 25 years ago. Maybe the bands have even hoped to make some money, though the struggling music industry is no better-equipped to serve them now than it was two decades ago. Like Bitch Magnet, most haven't done more than a tour or two; the real purpose, as Fine explains, has been "to write a different and better ending for the band, and with these guys."

But indie's legacy is more than nostalgic reunions, and more, too, than the mainstreaming of tattoos and skinny jeans. Indie's founding premise-that anyone could be a producer of art and culture, the more inventively off-center the better-is now a staple of the new media of the information age. Here is where the line between the audience, the performer, and the critic began to unravel and wear away. The blog is the 'zine made immaterial. The start-up peddling the latest moneymaking app has roots in the nonremunerative start-up that took cutting-edge dissonance on the road. Silicon Valley didn't invent the notion that decentralized social networks could disseminate new forms of culture generated in garages and kids' bedrooms. That notion percolated out of America's heartland.

And the indie story, as Fine and Gordon tell it, reminds us that even the most inclusive DIY vision has its insiders and outsiders, its purists and compromisers, its pressures and its disenchanted pioneers. If nerdy boys still reign supreme in Silicon Valley and venture capitalists overshadow artistic adventurers, that goes with the territory: revolutions often confound their creators. For a movement born in basements and powered by the geeky and the self-taught, indie did pretty well. Whatever you may think of the bands, the revolution didn't suck after all.

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Two decades before a bunch of geeky American boys messing around on computers created social media, an earlier generation of geeky kids (mostly boys) messing around on guitars created another sort of social network. At its heart was the kind of music you wouldn't hear on commercial radio or, except in the wee hours of Monday mornings, on MTV.

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Indie labels still have a place in this world, absolutely, and they can still be influential. The difference now is that if a band is born out of an indie environment , it can become a massive band.

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Music genres these days are tricky to define. Pop lurches from chewy bubblegum to artfully polished gloss. Rock can be dirty or slick, electronica minimal or maximal. And along then comes indie, and your dictionary explodes.

BBC4 is coming to the rescue with a new, three-part series, Music for Misfits: The Story of Indie. It explores how artists broke away from the majors in the 1970s, and starting doing it themselves, setting up new avenues of production, distribution and artistry. It investigates whether that spirit has changed (short answer: true indie will never die), what happened when its makers went mainstream, and what form independence takes now in our digital century.

Some facts remain unshakeable. At the beginning were Buzzcocks, with their made-for-£500 Spiral Scratch EP. Labels like Factory, Postcard, Rough Trade and Domino all played a huge part in the continuation of that energetic spirit. But other interesting voices appear in this documentary, too. Take the cutting-edge attitudes of Throbbing Gristle. Or James Dean Bradfield of the Manic Street Preachers, a band who kept their independent ire despite becoming a huge stadium act. Even colossal industry figures like Pete Waterman feature: after all, Waterman once briefly managed the Specials, and his shiny 80s label PWL was the indie success story of the 80s. Indie, then: always interesting. And constantly surprising. We asked some of those featured in the series how indie has changed - and if it's still something to be celebrated. Jude Rogers

STUART MURDOCH
The frontman of Belle and Sebastian, the band credited with starting a new wave of indie in the 90s. Labels: Electric Honey, Jeepster, Rough Trade
Belle and Sebastian never considered ourselves an indie band. It's a label that was made up by the press. All those groups in the 80s that I liked, like the Go-Betweens, Felt and the June Brides, considered themselves pop acts. They were chasing after a hit, although nobody was buying. But the good stuff has lasted, passed down on shadowy social club dancefloors - a bit like northern soul. There was also a load of bad indie: bands that see the label and think, "I want a go at that".

As a fan of music, I was an indie kid big time in the 80s: me and a couple of my pals were into this jangly-guitar, independent music. The first time I felt that real vibe was at a club called Rooftops on a Sunday night; it was rammed with like 1,000 people. The girls were wearing granny anoraks; some were knitting at the club. And per head, there were more beautiful girls than I'd ever seen. The guys wore chinos tucked up at the bottom, Doc Martens, stripy tops and, of course, the pudding-bowl haircut.

In the 80s there was this very definite independent scene, and it didn't mean you played guitar - you could be punky, or hip-hop, or be making electronic records. And by the 90s that jangly guitar sound - with the Happy Mondays, the Stone Roses and Primal Scream - became mainstreamy, it became popular.

I don't know what indie is any more. I see it crop up in my Spotify playlists: "Darker indie for your moods". But it's nothing like what I used to think of as indie. To be honest, I think it's anything with a guitar or a slightly softer sensibility.

I like that band Real Estate; their guitars seem to shimmer and they have nice melodies, but at the same time there's a modern sheen on their records. There's a band called Alvvays, from Canada. Their debut album was pretty good: guitar rock with a female vocalist, pretty melodic, with poetic, wordy, clever sensibilities. Girlpool and Hinds are good. And there's this great band from Finland called Cats on Fire: really nice, cultured, guitar pop music and some really well-written tunes. If it was the 80s I'm sure they would be venerated. KB

COSEY FANNI TUTTI

A member of Throbbing Gristle, Carter Tutti and Carter Tutti Void, and an industrial music pioneer. Labels: Mute, Industrial
We formed our own independent label, Industrial Records, in 1976, after going along to meetings with major labels to see how the industry worked. The labels met us because there was still a hippy approach to some of them, left over from the late 60s, that liked the idea of bands doing what they wanted to. This wasn't long before labels went out there completely just to make money. Anyway, we found they really weren't worth our while.

Independence, to me, is about having total control of your work. We've always kept that. When Throbbing Gristle started out, there were far fewer indie labels, but they were much more eclectic in their rosters, releasing music of very different genres. Most people have really inquisitive, eclectic minds when it comes to music, anyway. Today independent labels often specialise in genres. When you say "indie band" now, you know what that music's going to sound like, and that's a real shame.

The independent artists that excite me today are people who stay true to themselves, who make music that is personal, guttural and unapologetic. Like [electronic musician/producer] Gazelle Twin, who's great. She makes work that's about those moments when people need to sit and figure out things about life. It gives me something, from someone who wants to communicate. That's what music is all about, to me: a conversation, a dialogue.

I also love Carsten Nicolai, who records as Alva Noto, and runs the label Raster-Noton [an electronic music label that does multimedia projects in pop, art and science]. It's a fantastic independent label because they're very specific about what they do. That's the spirit I look for in an independent artist: someone who has a particular approach to their work and in how they want to be presented and distributed, and remains true to that. JR

JAMES ENDEACOTT
Formerly of Rough Trade, the man who signed the Libertines is now manager of 1965 Records (founded 2006, relaunched 2015)
In the 80s, indie meant the independent charts. It was just about distribution, not a style; Yazz's The Only Way Is Up was No 1, and that was an indie record. Bands that we'd call indie now called themselves "alternative" back then, as they were still to the left of the norm. But then came Britpop, which was the death of it, really. By the time I was in the eye of the storm at Rough Trade with the Strokes and the Libertines, indie was a genre. By then, it meant white boys with holes in their jeans playing guitars, which was great for us at the time, but I became disillusioned with that meaning pretty quickly. Indie for me has always been more about an energy, a spirit and an attitude, about what you're doing right now, rather than where you're going. Both bands had that. It's also about music not being a career path, but something you just have to do - you just have to get in the van and drive to Leeds and bloody play! I think the fact that most people in bands have to have jobs now, that actually helps indie. It means you've got to love it to want to do it.

Bands now who have that indie spirit, for me, include Whyte Horses, who are linked to Finders Keepers, a proper independent label. They've made a single themselves cheaply, pressing 200 copies, and that's that. It's brilliant. I've also signed Lusts, who made their record themselves at home, and Wesley Fuller from Melbourne, who writes powerpoppy, glammy, catchy music. I found him while flicking through the internet one night. His demos sound like a band, but it's all just him in his bedroom. That's indie to me: having that drive, on your own, to just make fantastic music. JR

Lead singer of the seminal ska band the Selecter. Labels: 2 Tone Records, Chrysalis
PAULINE BLACK

There's no way the Selecter could have done what they did were it not for an interest in indie music. Here we were in Coventry, when [Specials founder] Jerry Dammers, who negotiated all of the 2 Tone deals with independent labels, came along. We went to the studio with the £1,000 he gave us and recorded our first single, which went top 10 and got us away.

Back then, indie was an ethos: what 2 Tone stood for was more important to me than anything else. It was being able to put your music with everything you talked about on stage: anti-racism, anti-sexism. It was being in charge of your art: you decided what you wanted to put out, how you wanted to put it out, who you wanted to produce it.

I do think indie still has meaning now. As an artist, with the software that's available, you can pretty much make music on your laptop, do the artwork, put it out there, and hope for the best. That really is the spirit of indie. If you're willing to be patient, to build your audience gradually, you can remain independent. If you're in it to make huge quantities of dosh, you'll probably be disappointed.

I see plenty of new indie artists coming through: in terms of the spirit of what she does, FKA Twigs is bloody brilliant. Everything about her is independent: the way she's incorporated performance art into her music, the complete autonomy she has over her videos. I only wish I'd been so savvy at that age. Ghostpoet, who like me has links to Coventry, is also great.
Singer and guitarist of the Manic Street Preachers. Labels: Damaged Goods, Heavenly, Columbia/Epic
Both FKA Twigs and Ghostpoet have something very solid to say. For Twigs, it's how women are seen, what sex is, and how women relate to that. That feeds into the anti-sexist ethos I started off with, that as a woman on stage you could do what you liked and dress how you liked. For Ghostpoet, it's how as a black person you fit into an urban society, and the alienation you feel. The spirit of indie is still there in them: of wanting to do and say something different. RB

JAMES DEAN BRADFIELD

Indie labels still have a place in this world, absolutely, and they can still be influential. The difference now is that if a band is born out of an indie environment, it can become a massive band. That old indie belief that you don't sell out has gone. Like Arctic Monkeys going on to become one of the biggest acts in the world... that is the well-trodden route now.
Music for Misfits: The Story of Indie, BBC4, 2 October, 10pm
But if you actually have some kind of currency as an indie act and get played on the radio a lot, it means that you're probably going to go on to sign to a major label. Bands tend to just move along, whereas bands that used to be on indie labels were very much more institutionalised, they wanted to stay [on their label]. Now an indie label is seen as a stepping stone.

I don't know if indie labels have the same impact that they used to. I have a lot of indie records now but they tend to be little imprints - you're not so aware of the label's identity. A band I love, Deerhunter - Bradford Cox, he's a fascinating bloke - they're on an indie label but I can't remember its name! You tend not to think that an indie label now is a kind of a sign of quality. Whereas with a label like Creation you used to. That's not a bad thing, it's just the way it is.
Topics

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Sound, style or spirit - what does indie mean today?

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Music genres these days are tricky to define. Pop lurches from chewy bubblegum to artfully polished gloss. Rock can be dirty or slick, electronica minimal or maximal. And along then comes indie, and your dictionary explodes. BBC4 is coming to the rescue with a new, three-part series, Music for Misfits: The Story of Indie.

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Indie Rock is free to explore sounds emotions. Also lyrical subjects that don't appeal to large, main stream audiences

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Indie Rock Music Genre Overview | AllMusic

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Find Indie Rock Albums, Artists and Songs, and Hand-Picked Top Indie Rock Music on AllMusic

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Alternative Rock, pop music style, built on distorted guitars and rooted in generation discontent. That dominated and changed rock between 1991 and 1996.

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Alternative rock, pop music style, built on distorted guitars and rooted in generational discontent, that dominated and changed rock between 1991 and 1996. It burst into the mainstream when "Smells Like Teen Spirit"-the first major-label single from Nirvana, a trio based in Seattle, Washington, U.S.-became a national hit. Suddenly, older, difficult, and even anarchic movements, as well as a previous decade of do-it-yourself college rock, acquired a flashy beachhead on pop radio.

© Ed Sirrs/Retna Ltd.

Ironically, most alternative rockers were born between the late 1950s and late '60s and grew up during the '70s amid the head-spinning studio refinement and growing social acceptance of the earliest rock music. Whether the richly accessible melodies of the Beatles or the free jams of Led Zeppelin, all music seemed conventional to alternative rockers. They yearned for something different, something apart from what was too accurately called, by the mid-1980s, classic rock. They therefore believed that their interest in such departures would be, by definition, unpopular.

On the face of it, their deduction seemed reasonable. Alternative rockers, after all, looked for inspiration to an earlier generation of cranky stylists in the United States and Britain. Of 1970s musicians, they revered the rough aggressiveness of the Sex Pistols and the Clash and the arty formal daring of, among many others, the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, and Patti Smith. Among 1980s musicians, alternative partisans sensed kinship with American upstarts like the Replacements and Hüsker Dü, bands that had operated out of their own garages and, later, as part of an ever-expanding network of labels and clubs that shared their staunch independence. Both generations of alternative role models had enjoyed very little, if any, pop success. The exception was R.E.M., viewed to have bridged the admirable values of both decades and slowly built broad-based success on the band's own special terms.

© Armando Gallo/Retna Ltd.

By the late 1980s, however, music scenes in Seattle, Los Angeles, and Chicago gave rise to younger alternativists who wanted to balance maintaining stylistic independence with reaching larger audiences. Moreover, the record industry, always hot for something new, began to invest in such goals, thus boosting production values. In Hollywood, Jane's Addiction signed with Warner Brothers Records and made Nothing's Shocking (1988), an album on which they offered odd guitar tones and disrupted metres as clearly and forcefully as had been done on any classic rock recording. Just as the 1990s dawned, the Smashing Pumpkins began their ultimately very successful quest to make what their bassist, D'Arcy, called "beautiful music that varies" out of many-hued guitar tones that cracked and frazzled. In 1991 Nirvana and producer Butch Vig released "Smells Like Teen Spirit," from their epochal 1991 album, Nevermind. The sheer immediacy of its expert guitar distortions and layered orchestrations-influenced by the organized noise of British pop groups such as the Cure and My Bloody Valentine-assured that "grunge," as the music based on those feedback sounds was called, would become an international pop phenomenon.

What alternative rockers hadn't counted on was that, by the time Nirvana released Nevermind, the young rock audience had tired of the same sounds the musicians had rejected; a few exhilaratingly growled notes from Nirvana, and suddenly the previous decade of slick, digitally metallicized "hair rock"-the sound of such million-selling bands as Warrant and Poison-seemed as hopelessly passé as the spandex pants worn by such bands. No matter how loudly some alternative rockers professed to despise the classic rock that preceded them, bands such as Soundgarden and Screaming Trees did in fact echo their childhood memories of the Beatles and Led Zeppelin. Alternative rockers had intended to make music for themselves; in the end, the movement created the sound of a resentful and distressed generation.

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Alternative rock: Alternative rock, pop music style, built on distorted guitars and rooted in generational discontent, that dominated and changed rock between 1991 and 1996. It burst into the mainstream when "Smells Like Teen Spirit"-the first major-label single from Nirvana, a trio based in Seattle, Washington,