Dan DiPiero, *Gender, Genre, and the Shifting Meaning of Indie Rock*

Indie Rock In Print

In both music journalism and academic scholarship, the term “indie rock” has been overdetermined by associations with men and masculinity for so long that it has apparently become difficult to disentangle them. For example, on October 2 of last year, The Atlantic published a profile of MJ Lenderman, calling him “indie rock’s golden boy,” a label that itself echoed Rolling Stone’s coverage of Bright Eyes’ Connor Oberst throughout the 2000s, back when he was the “king of indie rock.” Then this past August, the New Yorker wondered aloud if Mac DeMarco might be “the last indie rock star” despite the fact that Mitski and Japanese Breakfast have both seen massive success in and beyond the music industry, despite the fact that DeMarco’s music fits into the genre only to the extent that it involves guitars.

Much more reflective of interesting and important developments in the genre are artists like Soccer Mommy, Indigo De Souza, Mitski, Blondeshell, Momma, Jay Som, Rosie Tucker, Trophy Wife, Great Grandpa, Daffo, SASAMI, The Ophelias, or indeed Wednesday—the band that put MJ Lenderman on people’s radars in the first place, groups who have been quietly re-making indie rock since at least 2017, when many of their first records dropped. But while such artists frequently receive glowing reviews, they have not been subjects of the kind of front-page headlines that cement certain ideas in people’s minds about an entire genre of music, the kind of declarations in mainstream outlets that establish such and such artist the “king” of anything at all.

The single exception that proves this rule may be the band boygenius, which formed and named itself as an explicit indictment of the way that men get treated as indie darlings by a rock press that can’t seem to figure out what to do with women or nonbinary performers unless those performers form a supergroup in order to force the conversation. Prior to boygenius’s 2023 explosion, the splashiest, most front-page treatment any women indie artist received was a 2019 media package in the New York Times called “Women are making the best rock music today. Here are the bands that prove it.” As much as this publication may have brought overdue attention to pioneering musicians in the field, this framing also reprised a decades-old trope in rock journalism that effectively functions to keep women siloed in a separate sphere of popular music writing: the “women in rock” framing implies that the presence of women is unusual in the space of (ostensibly male-dominated) rock, and thus in need of special attention and labelling when they turn up there.

There are other tropes of rock journalism (the idea that “rock is dead” is a persistent anxiety, for example) and sometimes they combine themselves into supertropes, as was the case with a follow-up to the Times 2019 media package called “Rock’s Not Dead, It’s Ruled By Women.” To a certain extent, then, we can understand such problematic framings as driven by convenience and market considerations, where it’s easier to sell journalism that adheres to extant and widespread common-sense. But this is precisely the problem: stuck in a recursive feedback loop where the press relies on the common-sense that journalism itself helped create, no one is apparently all that interested in getting the story right.

The problem is all the more pervasive when reinforced and implicitly validated by academic scholarship on the topic. The two major scholarly monographs on indie music—Matthew Bannister’s *White Boys, White Noise* and Wendy Fonarow’s *Empire of Dirt*—were both written in 2006 and both position indie rock as, to one degree or another, “a post-punk subgenre of independent or alternative rock, featuring mainly white, male groups playing mainly electric guitars, bass and drums…to primarily white, male audiences”—this being Bannister’s framing. On the question of definitions, Fonarow seems to agree, writing that “Indie music is generally played by slender young white males in their late teens to early thirties.” Despite the fact that these books are now some twenty years old, the point I want to make is that their characterization left out important context and history even when they were written, erasing the trailblazing history of women and queer musicians in indie scenes both in the US and throughout Europe. But how did this happen? What intellectual trajectories made it so easy to overlook them?

Pop vs Rock (and other Bad Binaries)

Much of this story hinges on the now antiquated distinction between rock and pop. In the 1960s, rock music was still fighting for a place in the critical discourse, still struggling to be validated as an interesting and even serious art form in a sea of commercial music. As feminist media scholar Norma Coates shows, early rock critics attempted to lift the music up as authentic and worthwhile by drawing a distinction between modernist bands like the Beatles and ostensibly superficial bands like the Monkees. Such categorizations were oriented around the art/entertainment binary, which eventually became thoroughly mapped onto others: not only rock/pop but also men/women.

By the time indie music was starting to form in the UK of the 1980s, these taste hierarchies were firmly entrenched in the minds of rock critics: indie press publications like New Musical Express and Melody Maker thoughtlessly reproduced the logic that indie pop bands (which had tuneful melodies, often clean or “jangly guitar tones” and not coincidentally regularly featured women bandmembers) were and should be treated as fundamentally different from indie rock bands with louder, more distorted guitars and many fewer women involved, if any.

Where many of the most famous indie bands (e.g. the Smiths, My Bloody Valentine, Hüsker Dü) took inspiration from punk’s militant irreverence, overlapping scenes within the indie movement took an emphatically different musical approach, resisting what Amelia Fletcher (Talulah Gosh, Heavenly) called the scene’s “really macho and really noisy” orientation in favor of short, ephemeral pop songs about love and longing and tenderness. Such bands (e.g. the Pastels, Blueboy, Black Tambourine) were labeled “indie pop” by the press in part because they took direct influence from the kind of 1960s pop music its progenitors had grown up loving, the same ones associated with women and girl fans and therefore dismissed by the inchoate rock press of that era. Even though both indie rock and indie pop bands played guitars, hung out in the same bars, and made energetic, and often catchy songs, bands marked by femininity or queerness were slotted into the pop category and all but dismissed.

Big Feelings and Contemporary Indie

Today, indie rock is conversely defined by women, queer, and minority musicians. Men are definitely present, but most often in the background, playing supportive or communal roles in diversifying scenes. Trans and nonbinary artists have a notable presence; queer artists of some kind or another are the norm. Some of the scene’s early players—Mitski, Japanese Breakfast, and beabadoobee—have broken big. Any of these developments on their own should warrant massive, sustained attention from academics and journalists alike. Some are doing that work; but we still too often see writers stretching the bounds of credulity in order to write about single white men, ignoring broader contexts that have been around overlooked at this point for decades.

What will it take to finally shred the assumption that indie music is the purview of masculinity? More likely than not, it is the brilliant and profusive music in today’s vibrant indie scenes that will do this work in time. Today, I’m happy to say that there is also a budding wave of scholarship paying attention to the underside of that mainstream indie rock story, the overlooked by no less critical fact that women, queer folks of all kinds, and non-white musicians have been in (indie) rock scenes all along, and in fact have been some of the music’s most revolutionary architects. 

My new book Big Feelings: Queer and Feminist Indie Rock After Riot Grrrl tries to contribute to this effort, drawing from thinkers like Hanif Abdurraqib, Morgan Bimm, Jessica Hopper, Runchao Liu, Ann Powers, Alyx Vesey, and many more. In it, I turn attention to the surge of grunge-inflected indie music that has proliferated in the past decade, re-defining what rock music means as well as who it is assumed to be for. Significantly, the bands I write about are doing so by turning self-reflexive and critical attention to the subject of feelings, emotions, and other affective experiences, doubling down and turning up associations between women and over-emotionality. Taking patriarchal criticism and throwing back tenfold, these bands deliberately make mountains out of molehills, insisting on the validity of having strong feelings, of being in tune with one’s experience of the world. In doing so, they implicitly argue that tending to our own emotions is more critical than it has ever been in the context of our politically-informed polycrisis, which sees young people of all sorts uniformly hammered by climate grief, impossible costs of living, the evisceration of social safety nets, the perpetual fear of gun violence, and more. By foregrounding the affective lives of its practitioners, contemporary indie rock artists are opening up the genre to new generations of listeners and modelling what it means to survive and even find joy in capacious communities of difference.