The Aleatory Dynamics of Independence: An Analysis of 2 West Coast Music Lables by risa
Poneman and Pavitt’s road to success was littered with mishaps. Back in 1987, not long after having recorded their first album with Subpop, Soundgarden decided to move to A&M Records. Soon thereafter, Soundgarden released the album Badmotorfinger and it sold 900 000 copies worldwide. To their disappointment, Poneman and Pavitt discovered that—because of their initial naïveté concerning contracts, they would not receive any profit from the album’s success. From then on, Poneman and Pavitt took a more diligent approach to setting up contracts with their artists. Therefore, when Nirvana wanted to buyout of their contract and move to Geffen, Poneman and Pavitt were in a much better position. When the deal was finally reached, the agreement was that Subpop would reap an immediate $72
000 buyout fee along with an additional royalty of 2% of all of Nirvana’s future record sales. 22 For Subpop, the practice of having successful bands move on to bigger labels became a natural and profitable phenomenon.
The early 1990s were Subpop’s burgeoning years. Along with fiscal success, Poneman and Pavitt concomitantly developed a better understanding of business. In fact, one could argue that Poneman was perhaps too explicit about their increased perspicacity. Interview comments, like the following, reveal how Poneman’s unabashed business-talk could have been potentially frowned upon:
It’s been a conscious decision for us to tap into other regions that are less exploited. 23
Whenever you have a successful marketing campaign, a host of imitators spring up—copycats.24
In his article The Production of Belief: Contribution to an Economy of Symbolic Goods, Bourdieu also explicates how, within the art business, there are customary practices of practical negations,25 whereby there is—on the part of the art dealers—a:
‘Symbolic capital’ [that] is to be understood as economic or political capital that is disavowed, misrecognized and thereby recognized, hence legitimate, a ‘credit’ which, under certain conditions, and always in the long run, guarantees ‘economic’ profits.26
The realm of independent music—it can be argued, tacitly operates in an analogous manner. Clearly, when an independent does well economically it reflects their good judgment vis à vis the bands they endorse. However, when the label openly acknowledges that financial success, unease is generally fomented. Among the numerous balancing acts that independents are called upon to perform, walking the tight rope between being devoted to creative music and remaining business-minded, is an important one. Thus, the independent has to recognize the success of their artist’s creative work, while at once, disavowing the financial reward typically associated with it. When mastered properly, it can be a profitable act. When it is not mastered, it can be damaging. For example, in 1992, when Subpop’s Poneman and Pavitt allowed themselves to be featured in Forbes—the rightwing business magazine, that was, perhaps, the epitome of bad moves. We will see why further on.
Gravity soon caught up with Subpop’s meteoric rise, but before it did, something called grunge had been born. In fact, the emergence of grunge was in part thanks to a shrewd move by Poneman and Pavitt. Back in 1987, Poneman and Pavitt flew Everett True, a well-respected music critic and writer for England’s Melody Maker magazine, into Seattle to witness the musical scene that was taking shape.27 Everett was very impressed with what he saw and immediately began rousing equal interest all across Europe with his rave reviews; Seattle was declared as being “the next Liverpool.”28 The enthusiasm from abroad facilitated the recruiting of American interest. Seattle soon became the universal capital of grunge. It was also an important element in the development of a number of musical scenes in major cities across North America. A musical scene, as advanced by Will Straw, is distinct from rigid terms like musical communities. Straw posits the musical scene as a term which might better account for the fluxional and multifarious ways in which numerous musical practices come to exist and continue to develop. He defines a musical scene as a:
Cultural space in which a range of musical practices coexist, interacting with each other within a variety of processes of differentiation, and according to widely varying trajectories of change and cross-fertilization.29
The sense of purpose of a musical scene, Straw argues, is manifested through the “building of musical alliances and the drawing of musical boundaries.”30 In order to describe the alliances that are constituted and that perpetually develop in a multitude of ways, the term circles is offered—and will be adopted for the remainder of this analysis. Grunge—because it was a hybridization of rock, punk and heavy metal, serves as an example of how certain musical alliances were created and new boundaries were subsequently drawn. One important distinction that Straw makes is how each musical scene will develop “musical vernaculars,” (and, of course, different circles will develop) due to their local space and despite this somewhat context-specific plurality, there will nevertheless be “a stable set of musical languages and relationships between them.”31 One group that resonated among a number of circles—and served as an icon of Subpop’s success (and that of grunge in general), was Nirvana.
Nirvana presents itself as a very intriguing object of inquiry, because it had initially developed a following among independent circles, but then gained an even greater popularity within commercial music scenes. However, it is not sufficient to explicate Nirvana’s success by merely stating simple arguments such as:
The alternative and the mainstream have converged. The pop mainstream is whatever is hot at the moment, and what’s hot right now is alternative music.32
The mainstream and the alternative—or at least what was once considered alternative, have not converged. However, the fact that there was some discontent about the way Nirvana catapulted into the mainstream reveals that there is a palpable tension that exists between independent and popular music.33 Nirvana’s popularity reveals that invariably there will be moments—just as there certainly have been in the past, where the musical judgments of independent music amateurs could be or will be shared—perhaps in different ways—but shared nonetheless, by the various circles that constitute popular music culture in general. In his seminal essay Encoding/decoding, Hall articulates how all television broadcasting necessarily passes through the “discursive rules of language”—which itself serves a context that makes interpretation possible. Within the process of interpretation, Hall urges us to see how audience interpretation occurs in a multitudinous manner. Hall explains:
The typical processes identified in positivistic research on isolated elements—effects, uses,
‘gratifications’—are themselves framed by structures of understanding, as well as being produced by social and economic relations, which shape their ‘realization’ at the reception end of the chain and which permit the meanings signified in the discourse to be transposed into practice or consciousness (to acquire social use value or political effectivity). […] The codes of encoding and decoding may not be perfectly symmetrical. (130-31) (My emphasis)
Essentially, one of the things that is most important to realize is that within an audience there will be different structures of understanding, which are themselves based on different structures of interpretation. Now, even though Hall is using this theoretical model to understand how televisual media operate, we can imagine how an analogous model might be applied to music production and reception. This model would necessarily be predicated on different aesthetics (sounds, rhythms, etc.) that strike certain chords—many of which are emotive—within the listener and which also lead to varying structures of interpretation and appreciation. Moreover, with music, visuals are nonetheless part of this communicative process. Taking Nirvana as an example, part of their success—and the success of grunge in general, was the fact that style—as manifested in the casual and disheveled look, was both a very visual and integral part of it. Both in sight and sound (lyrics, riffs, attitude, etc.) Nirvana—and grunge to varying extents, came to represent a number of things; in one instance, it was a rebellious, non-conformist and nihilistic stance, in another, it was a reminder, an echo of rock and its history.34 For this reason—and certainly others, Nirvana attracted a sizable independent fan base. Just as Hesmondhalgh describes how the
“‘cross-over’ of forms of black musical production and consumption—most notably disco in the mid-1970s—to the white mainstream” is only one example of many that reveal “the longstanding importance of the relationship between specialized niche markets and the mass pop market in that particular industry;”35 Nirvana’s success—and that of grunge in general, can be understood in a similar manner. Sometimes the tastes within independent circles or niche markets are transposed to that of the broader popular music listeners. Even though there is always an uncertainty as to what will be the next dominant musical form, we should realize, as Straw does, that the moments of transformation within cultural industrial production nevertheless create discernible cycles of change.36 It is certainly difficult to determine how and why these formations of taste occur, however, Frith suggests that the only way we can “make sense of musical value judgments […] [is] if we understand the circumstances in which they are made—and what they are made for.”37 Thus, the task of disinterring the dynamics of both the encoding and decoding of music texts might prove helpful in this regard. By fleshing out the discursive rules of musical language, as it exists within a particular society, one can thereafter begin identifying the clustered circles that constitute the varying structures of interpretation and appreciation.
It is important to recognize that when bands, like Nirvana, (with a significant independent following) are appropriated by major labels largely for commercial ends, a tension is exposed. This tension reveals independent music circles’ general aloofness towards major labels. This aloofness is rooted in the fact that the members of these circles listen to independent music for a number of reasons, some of them being: that there is a greater sense of communal value, authenticity/artistry, it offers a means in which to carve out one’s identity—and quite often, it is simply because it is not associated with a major label or the commercial music industry. This kind of resentment towards majors and the commercial music industry in general stems from the fact that they represent dominant cultural institutions that often enjoy a parasitic relationship with independents. Amateurs of independent music generally treat these institutions with scorn because they are seen as being part of an industry that “systematically exploits rising music centres.”38 The contempt held by many towards major labels is such that is not uncommon to read portrayals of them through sinister metaphors (e.g.: “corporate tentacles”).39 Is this hyperbole warranted? Perhaps. When examining the relationship between majors and independents, it is often a case of the fox threatening the hare. Majors have more capital at their disposal, and are thus better positioned to deal with the contingencies of business than most independents. That is why the notion of struggle is such an apposite description of independents’ existence. For a great many independents, a single unwise business move could very well be their last. That is why each business decision is thoroughly considered; as Chris Lombardi, the co-founder of Matador Records says “at Matador, we spend the big money—but we have to be really careful about the timing because we can’t afford to lose—and neither can the band.”40 All of this is part and parcel of a basic cultural logic: majors, because they enjoy a far greater audience for the texts that they produce, will garner more profit and power, and will thus occupy a more dominant position in the overall realm of culture—they will, nevertheless, struggle to retain or better that position; independents, because of their inferior margins of profit, will have less power, and thus occupy a far more marginal position within the field of culture and will have to struggle to maintain it. That much is simple. The aleatory manner in which this process of struggle transpires, on the other hand, is not. It is perhaps Hall who best describes why culture is such a vibrant and fluxional phenomenon, he
says:
[…] I think there is a continuous and necessarily uneven and unequal struggle, by the dominant culture, constantly to disorganise and reorganise popular culture; to enclose and confine its definitions and forms within a more inclusive range of dominant forms. There are points of resistance; there are also moments of supersession. This is the dialectic of cultural struggle. In our times, it goes on continuously, in the complex lines of resistance and acceptance, refusal and capitulation, which make the field of culture a sort of constant battlefield. A battlefield where no once-for-all victories are obtained but where there are always strategic positions to be won and lost.41
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