In popular culture, terms are tossed around like musicians
bouncing from one town to the next in an effort to get their voices
heard. When something new appears, the public often feels a need to
assign a label to it to come to terms with something it can’t
immediately explain.
“We have a habit of taking words and phrases that describe
one thing and using them to describe something else entirely, and
they end up not meaning anything at all,” said Calvin
Johnson, the founder of the Olympia, Washington-based independent
record label K Records and a member of the influential independent
band Beat Happening.
In today’s cultural landscape, this sentiment can be
applied in many ways, but perhaps few are more noticeable than the
current use of a word with a long past: independent.
Of course, the term “independent,” or
“indie,” can mean being
“independent-minded,” an artist signed to an
independent label with independent distribution, or an independent
filmmaker working outside the studio system. Yet in today’s
marketplace, due to factors including, but not limited to, shifting
interests and changing technology, it has become increasingly more
difficult to define in a concrete fashion just what the term
“independent” really means in the realms of film and
music.
The term has a storied history in music, gaining particular
notoriety during the 1980s through bands such as Fugazi and Sonic
Youth. Through the touring efforts of these bands and their
contemporaries, a national underground scene began to slowly build
up as different regional music scenes, like Washington, D.C., and
Minneapolis, began to interact with one another.
“It was an accumulation over the years, which you could
trace back to the emergence of punk rock,” Johnson said.
“It was a time when people decided that they were sick of
being force-fed rock and said, “˜Let’s take it down a
notch.'”
In today’s industry, rock ‘n’ roll is
dominated by bands which are presented by themselves and their
labels as edgy, left-of-mainstream indie rockers. Starting in 2001
with the emergence of The Strokes and The White Stripes (on major
labels RCA and V2, respectively), popular bands have included Franz
Ferdinand, Bloc Party, The Killers and Death Cab for Cutie, of
which only Death Cab spent any time on a U.S. independent record
label. Yet, all are listed by various publications, from Spin
Magazine to online databases like Allmusic.com, as being from a
genre called “indie rock.” Furthering the existence of
this designation are forms of media such as “The O.C.”
television series and the film “Garden State,” which
use independent groups such as The Shins alongside the more
mainstream Coldplay and The Killers as a crucial aesthetic
device.
In film, the issue of independence has a similarly extensive
history. Denise Mann, an assistant professor in the UCLA School of
Theater, Film and Television as well as the head of the
Producers’ Program, breaks the history of independent film
into three eras. The first of these, the “Hollywood
Renaissance” period of the late 1960s, involved studio films
targeted at youth audiences like “The Graduate,”
“Bonnie & Clyde” and “Easy Rider,”
which dealt with themes that more mainstream movies ignored.
The second occurred in the 1980s with the emergence of videotape
and the success of truly independent fare like Stephen
Soderbergh’s “sex, lies, and videotape” and films
by David Lynch and Jim Jarmusch. Today, Mann says, the industry is
in another state of flux, with DVD, the Internet and new
distribution systems changing the way studios do business.
“When audiences embrace new technology, it creates a
window of opportunity for greater experimentation and independence
because the marketplace is unstable,” Mann said. “The
studios are often taken aback by new technology and shifting
audience patterns, and in that interim period … they are more
inclined to embrace changes in content.”
Of course, states of flux also lead to different business models
and bold new steps. In the mid-1990s, as the Disney-owned art-house
movie studio Miramax began to score big with films such as
“Pulp Fiction” and “The English Patient,”
other studios took notice and formed or purchased their own
specialty divisions.
“The truly independent production companies that
flourished in the 1980s have for the most part disappeared,”
Mann said. “Now, these specialty divisions like Warner
Independent Pictures and Fox Searchlight have a certain amount of
autonomy but are maybe feeling the indirect pressure of meeting the
needs of their parent companies.”
While independent companies like Lion’s Gate still release
films like “Crash” and the “Saw” franchise,
the majority of independent or art films, such as “Brokeback
Mountain” and “Good Night, and Good Luck,” are
released by these studio specialty divisions.
When it comes to actually defining what it means to be
independent in either medium, however, the issue gets fuzzier.
“(Indie rock) is some kind of genre that doesn’t
even exist, and that sort of thing happened in the ’90s with
the term “˜alternative,'” Johnson said.
“Once people heard that term they could easily pigeonhole
things and dismiss them.”
Johnson specifically mentioned the “Riot Grrrl”
movement of the early 1990s as an example of a musical genre being
fabricated out of something that was anything but. Riot Grrrl was a
social movement dealing with female empowerment over male misogyny.
While the movement used a form of punk rock to help further its
message, the term eventually became an easy label for that type of
music, leading to the appropriation of the term “Riot
Grrrl” to describe an actual genre.
Reasons for the increased popularity in recent years of music
and films deemed independent, however, are debatable.
“Technology exists today to create music and get it out to
people who want to hear it in a much more direct way than ever
before,” Johnson said. “People can make their own music
and completely bypass the whole process of record labels, allowing
their music to circulate worldwide without even touching a record
store.”
In music, this concept of ready availability is reinforced by
the ubiquity of portable MP3 players like Apple’s iPod. With
more people listening to music on the go than ever before, it would
make sense that users would want to acquire as much music as
possible, not only because of its instant availability, but also
because the portable nature of this music creates more time for
people to listen to it.
“If you’re listening to music all the time, then
you’re going to need even more music to fill up that
time,” Katz said.
In film, the issue is more complicated. Like music,
technological advances have made it possible for anyone to make a
film, but logistical issues set it apart.
“While we now see less-expensive production and
post-production processes now available, this doesn’t tell
the whole story,” Mann said. “Just because someone has
the means of production available doesn’t mean they have
access to the Hollywood system; access to Hollywood is not as easy
or transparent as it seems at first glance.”
This is mostly due to cost issues, which plague aspiring
filmmakers more than they do musicians. While music can be
distributed across file-sharing networks and easily recorded on a
home computer, the most basic film can cost several thousands of
dollars. Plus, even if aspiring filmmakers make films digitally,
they’ll want to transfer their footage to actual film stock
to get their film noticed at a film festival, a process which can
exceed $10,000 for a film as short as 15 minutes.
“We’ve seen concrete evidence of (the belief that
anyone can make a film) with the doubling and tripling of the
number of submissions to Sundance each year, but the number that
come out the other end stays the same,” Mann said.
Regardless of changing perceptions of what it means to be
independent or whether the original term’s integrity is still
intact, the effect of artistically minded music and film still
resonates regardless of how it is packaged and presented.
“I always disagreed with people during (the Riot Grrrl
movement) who didn’t want to be written about in Rolling
Stone,” Johnson said. “That’s where the kid in
Nebraska is going to find out about you, not in the cool fanzine
your friend made. No matter how mainstream the source is, it still
speaks to you.”