Timbre as Differentiation in Indie Music

[1.1] Scholars have long understood the ideology of rock-based Anglo-American popular music genres to be based on difference, whether against generational, political, generic, or indistinct hegemonic forces. This thesis has received special attention in scholarship scrutinizing independent or "indie" music, a motley collection of genres and styles (indie pop, indie rock, indie folk, etc.) unified through associations with small record labels, college or noncommercial radio, and alternative methods of distribution. Numerous studies have demonstrated how Indie music foregrounds discourses of differentiation against mainstream music from social, political, economic, and/or cultural perspectives, while it simultaneously profits from mainstream processes of institutionalized capitalism and social privilege (Lee 1995; Thornton 1996; Hesmondhalgh 1999; Hibbert 2005; Newman 2009; Dolan 2010). Such studies accurately describe the complexities of indie music's claims of differentiation from a cultural standpoint, but they tend to obscure the genre's most salient feature: the music. How does music serve to aurally project "independence" in indie music? How can extramusical differentiation connect with musical sound?[1.2] This article asserts that timbre, more than any other musical parameter, expresses extramusical differentiation in independent music genres. Timbre is the primary vehicle by which indie music is produced and heard as different from its contemporaneous mainstream. Timbral choices intended as different from stereotypes of mainstream sound connect with discourses of differentiation on cultural, political, economic, and/or generic planes. I demonstrate this claim through three analyses that exhibit disparate connections between timbral difference and other forms of differentiation in indie music. I begin with an analysis of the opening guitar riff of My Bloody Valentine's 1991 single "Only Shallow" to connect the sound's inscrutability with an introverted yet aggressive masculinity linked with shoegaze performance. I then discuss Neutral Milk Hotel's 1998 track "The King of Carrot Flowers, Part 1" to link accumulative build of warm timbres with an alternative masculinity and the desire to commune with, comfort, and love the song's intended subject, Anne Frank. Lastly, I discuss the Shins' 2001 album Oh, Inverted World to indicate how timbres are used in diverse ways to replicate 1960s pop, forging a soundworld separate from both contemporary mainstream music and other indie genres.[1.3] Scholars such as Allan Moore and Chris MacDonald have focused on harmony as a marker of generic distinction, but I focus on timbre because harmony is not in and of itself sufficient for understanding extramusical differentiation. The basic chord structure of "The King of Carrot Flowers, Part 1," for example, is I-IV-I-V-IV-I. This progression marks a distillation of the basic 12-bar blues progression heard frequently in early rock and roll, and is also heard in U2's 1987 hit "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" (Moore 1992, 95, 101). While Moore hypothesizes that certain harmonic patterns can differentiate rock/pop/soul music from jazz-derived genres, the vast differences among Neutral Milk Hotel, U2, and, say, Little Richard render the potential for shared differentiation through harmony untenable below this broader level (Moore 1992). Chris McDonald has hypothesized that alternativeness can be forged through "modal subversions," or the crossing of major/minor through mediantly-related power chords (2000). While his study uncovers frequent use of I-III in 1990s alternative and independent music, this progression is not limited to indie music (as any fan of blues music knows), nor do musical instantiations of alternativeness limit themselves to this chord progression.(2)[1.4] Another critique of pitch-based approaches comes from indie music's ontology as a primarily recorded genre circulating through technological mediation. …