One interesting part of winter break is poking around
one’s old room and finding things from the past. Typically, I
find old books and pictures, along with Post-it notes on which I
used to write down things that struck me as clever (like trying to
phonetically transcribe “awesome guitar riffs,” most of
which turn out to have been bass lines).
This past break I stumbled upon something bizarre. Being the
pack rat that I am, one of my bookshelves contains hundreds of CDs,
which include anything from old video games to random albums.
Sticking out of this shelf was a CD called “That Virtua
Feeling: Sub Pop and Sega Get Together.”
Suddenly it hit me.
I realized that the failure of the Sega Saturn game system,
released in 1995, had everything to do with the change in
perception of indie music in the last 10 years.
Okay, maybe not everything. The machine was marketed like the
bird flu and weaker than the competition, but the discovery of this
CD gave me a powerful metaphor for financial failure.
On this CD were tracks by 12 bands. I consider myself
well-versed in music, but I had only heard of two: Sebadoh and
Sunny Day Real Estate.
The rest were unknown to me. Red Red Meat, Velocity Girl, Pond
… each earned its own shrug of ennui. Also, on the sleeve after
each song and artist was a comment obviously written by Sub Pop.
Some contained typically snarky hipster remarks (on Six Finger
Satellite’s “Parlour Games” track:
“Don’t say new wave. Don’t even think about
it.”), while others were jokes laughable in the same way that
film strips boasting of vacations on the moon in the year 2000 make
us laugh now. (“From a Fastbacks record that should be out
… eh … 1996 is a good bet.”)
To someone used to video game marketing post-2000, this probably
seems brilliant. After all, Sub Pop is arguably the largest and
most respected “indie” label. Everyone’s favorite
band from “Garden State,” the Shins, calls the label
home, along with every college student’s favorite
three-year-old side project, The Postal Service. Looking at those
names alone, teaming up with Sub Pop would seem like a great idea
for promoting video games to teens and twenty-somethings. Pure
gold, right?
However, the music industry was far different in 1995. This was
long before games such as “Grand Theft Auto: Vice City”
had accompanying sound tracks and Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails
was composing original music for Quake; pairing rock music ““
much less indie ““ with video games was apparently a few years
ahead of its time. Then came the indie trend.
These days, more music than I’ve personally ever observed
in the mainstream attempts to position itself as indie, because
that’s the cool aesthetic to aim for. For example, bands like
the Killers, who are on the major label Island Records, are listed
on Wikipedia as being from the “indie rock” genre. Now,
you can be indie without even being on an independent label. What
was once a financial state of being is now an aesthetic to strive
for.
The explosion of file sharing likely plays a large role in the
proliferation and newfound popularity of the indie aesthetic, and
this technology didn’t exist 10 years ago. Had such a culture
existed back then, I believe that Lou Barlow of Sebadoh would have
appeared in a Sega commercial holding a Saturn in one hand and an
acoustic guitar in the other while saying, “Hi, I’m Lou
Barlow. Buy a Sega Saturn … please?” Then he’d start
composing a song on the spot about his inadequacies as a product
pitchman.
The lesson here is that in an age of mainstream dominance, Sony
annihilated Sega’s indie-music marketing strategy with a
campaign involving a computer-animated dominatrix and Xtreme
Sports. Now, Sony dominates the market by showing up at Coachella
to sell their products to indie kids.
Sony has reaped the benefits of Sega’s marketing
experiment in a culture for which the term “indie” has
been hijacked by the record industry, like old-school rock
‘n’ roll and punk before it. What does indie even mean
anymore?
… But that’s a can of worms to be opened some other
time.
Think it would have been amusing if Nintendo had partnered with
SST
Records, home of Black Flag, in the ’80s? E-mail
Humphrey at mhumphrey@media.ucla.edu to brainstorm more bizarre
indie record label marriages.