Sinister: i'm just indie for the clothes

[Marcus Omond]

hi there everyone,

dave complained about the "i'm more indie than you" mentality that he's
noticed.  um, what follows may in fact be utter bollocks, as most of what i
write is complete crap.  if i sound like an unbelievably pretentious snob,
and i stamp all over everyone's fragile sensibilities, then please forgive
me.  that's not what i'm trying to do - i'm not that nasty really...

right... i was thinking about 'scenes', such as the indie scene, the drum 'n
bass scene and all the other scenes that i've fluttered around the
peripharies of, and it seems to me that in any scene you get the
'believers' - the people to whom the music, art, whatever is more important
than life, and who (to paraphrase iggy pop) give 'the energy, and the
bodies, and the hearts, and the souls, and the time and the minds' to that
scene.  then other people look at these people, and admire them, and then
listen to the music and think it's okay - nothing special, mind - and then
when the scene becomes more accepted and 'cool' these people try to get into
it - maybe they'll buy 'the best trip hop album in the world... ever!', or a
pair of baggy jeans with a picture of someone smoking a spliff on them - and
then it gets watered down and major record labels come in, and dumb it down
so that it can be more populist, and so therefore mainstream, and then lots
of money can be made.  and as more and more people get into the scene for
the wrong reason, and so eventually the indie scene gets reduced to hepburn,
and the dance scene gets reduced to the vengaboys.

when natasha and i went to see godspeed you black emperor!, the music was
unbelievable, and the atmosphere created by looking down at these nine
misfits from a balcony in a dank church was rather amazing.  until the cool
islington media types who wanted to 'check out' this 'post-rock thing'
because *wallpaper, THE FACE and i-D have said it's the next big thing got
bored with the subtle harmony and started shouting things like 'sing
something'.  which totally fucked up the whole atmosphere.  thankfully,
almost everyone there was heavily into the music and so the media darlings
were shhhhed down.  but it shows how shitty it is when people go to
something because it's 'cool' and they're looking for the image kudos at
work the next day rather than because they're interested in the art itself.
at most gigs i go to in london it seems that the people who are really
interested in the music are outnumbered by those who just want the cred they
can get by being 'indie'.  this isn't isolated to the indie scene - it's
much worse in the world of theatre and classical music, i find.  but then
they're traditionally more snobbish areas, so i suppose that's to be
expected.

a lot of the time i think stuart from mogwai is a stupid prick (his comments
about john peel, for example), even though he writes amazing tunes but
something i admire in him is that he wears kappa clothes - the uniform of
what many of his fans consider 'the enemy' - townies and the such.  this, it
seems to me, mocks those who are just indie for the sake of being teenage
rebels for a bit, rather than because of the music.  surely if the music's
that good, he seems to be saying, why does it matter what i wear?  at least,
that's what it seems to me.  reading interviews with him, though, i'm not
convinced i've got it quite right.

 i've only ever come across two utterly genuine 'scenes' as such, and
one of them - the sinister mailing list - isn't really a scene, just a
collection of (fairly) likeminded people stretched out across the globe. but
everyone (or everyone i've met) isn't here because they think it's a cool
scene to be 'in' on - it's because they love the music of belle and
sebastian to death.  the other scene i found was a small section of the
dance community in prague.  people had almost no money at all, and the very
little money they had they spent on admission to clubs, trying to save
towards decks so that they could dj themselves and so on.  one of my friends
in prague had a czech boyfriend for a bit, and he worked cleaning glasses in
a tourist pub all week so that he could buy three pills and the tickets for
two clubnights at the weekend.  because there was no money, people weren't
interested in showing off their matching labels, as happened in the more
american ex-pat dominated area of the dance scene, they just wanted to get
high and dance for hours and hours.

anyway, enough of that - now for university challenge.  my sister and i run
up to my room for every episode, and bitch at each other about who got the
question right first.  lst season i supported bangor, because they had a
crazy lady who spewed out kinks lyrics at an astounding rate.  but i'm sure
that this season i'll support trinity cambridge.  next season i might even
be on it ;)  but then that wouldn't be very cool, when i'm a multinational
rock star, and then one of those shows like 'before they were famous' come
back and find me and then no-one will buy my records anymore because they'd
see that in fact i'm not a rock god, but in fact a speccy spotty geek ;)

righteho, maybe i might see some of you at the picnic tomorrow, or maybe at
the poetry cafe tonight,

love

Marcus XXX



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