Critical Review, Set 1 # 2

Bannister, Matthew " 'Loaded':Indie Guitar Rock, Canonisms, White Masculinites"

This essay centers around a critical engagement with the uninvestigated assumptions in the popular understanding of 1980's and 1980's "indie guitar rock". Bannister begins by stating the prevailing notion of the music's autonomous space in which transcending of forces that commodify or codify music. The article is a systematic breakdown of this narrative through the development of several concepts including the use of "canonism", the reliance on a reference body of work, the issues arising from the paradoxical imperative to establish "purity" in an environment of ostensibly unrestrained creativity. Furthermore, this notion of "purity" is combined with the often contradictory stance of the indie sphere to certain opposing discourses. Bannister expresses this marvelously when he writes that there is a, "dual (paradoxical) insistence on populism ('music of the people') and anti-populism (an Adorno-esque disdain for mass popular taste". (Bannister 86) He furthers his argument, in undeniably the argumentatively weakest portion of his essay, by suggesting that indie rock represents a certain approach to identity politics. He writes unconvincingly and without evidence that this version of "rock history {has} marginalised especially the contributions of African-American music" and that their is somehow a connection between perceived "nerdiness" and the feminine.

A question I am inclined to ask in this article regards the directionality of music creation. Bannister discusses of the tremendous influence of the record-store owners,who by providing an aura of expertise and actively cultivating disciples shaped the music in itself by structuring the palette from which a generation of "indie guitar rockers" drew from. Complementary to this, is his dismissal as lore, or self-serving reified thinking, of the "discourses of spontaneity and originality" so central to the myth of the generative musician, whose creativity is at the center of the musical enterprise. Is this devaluing, or at least decentralizing of the role of the musician, a fair statement? Is it not conceivable that there is a strong reflexive dialectic between these parties?