Indie culture is one of those that is undoubtedly rooted in adolescent social ineptitude. While, out of any art obsessions, music is probably the most socially acceptable choice for the young men, it still is essentially "arty" and therefor less prone to acceptance in the typical adolescent world. Furthermore, looking at music from the perspective of a kid who will belong to the indie subculture is to look at music in a way that challenges egos. To say that the music no one around you is listening to is more artistically worthwhile than the music everyone around you is listening to assures a lower place in the young social world.
Indie culture as a whole is distrustful of ego. It was Billy Corgan's ego that the indie culture felt was distasteful, and that strange and - at the time - undeserved stand against the Smashing Pumpkins frontman enabled him to write "Cherub Rock", which if it was a hip-hop song would be a fairly clever diss track.
Corgan's ego caught up with him and eventually his pretensions exceeded his ability (Do we really need to hear another 41 songs before declaring Teargarden By Kaleidyscope a bust?) and it can be viewed as a justification for not trusting Corgan's ego specifically, and ego at large in extrapolation.
Here's the thing, though. Ego can make some spectacular art.
Now, there are basically two different kinds of egotism. The first is genuine egotism, where a person genuinely believes that what they have to say is significant and important. This can be just plain egotism, or it can manifest in pretentiousness, but ultimately it represents a lack of self-awareness or, more specifically, a lack of awareness of how are perceived. As far as on a personal basis, this is a bad thing. But the truth is that the sort of balls necessary to believe that - fuck it all - you're the best fucking thing to walk this earth, can help beget true forward momentum in an artistic enterprise (Think Kanye West).
The other type of ego can be confused for the first, but it's more defense mechanism than true ego. People with this kind of ego have the self-awareness the first group lacks, but they've usually created their ego as a tool to help them fight the doubt that creeps in when they know that they're pushing lines and boundaries. This type of ego also begets true forward momentum in an artistic enterprise. In fact, with that tempering self-awareness, it can do so even more effectively (Think, uh, Kanye West).
Funnily enough, the de facto leaders of a lot of these adolescent subcultures end up cultivating the second type of ego, even as they deride it (which, I suppose, gives it some of the qualities of the first type). It seems as though that if we can trace that ego back to roots within our own subculture we're more comfortable with it existing. But if that ego has come around independent of our understanding (or, more likely, as a result of our lack of understanding) we are innately distrustful of it.
Titus Andronicus' new album The Monitor is pretentious. Pretension, of course, requires ego. It's a pseudo concept album based on the fallout of the Civil War, featuring found sound samples of Civl War-era people giving speeches, five punk rock songs over seven minutes long, and more Shakespearean references than just the band's name. Their first album, The Airing of Grievances was equally pretentious, though without the easily bloggable concept as its follow up.
I haven't seen a huge backlash against The Monitor. I personally love the album. But it's definitely a case of indie culture being more willing to forgive ego and pretension if we can trace its roots to our own experiences. It's about being relatable. Billy Corgan's grandiosity, his rather successful musical father, and his willingness to stand up and say "I'm fucking great" even in the face of, you know, his music of the last ten years, is unrelatable to a group of people who had their faces pushed in the mud for their formative years.
We look for ourselves in art, of course. We listen to love songs with morbid fascination and when a line about a girl leaving a guy in the cold runs through their ears we look at it with spooky relevance, even though that's what about 70% of pop music is about. We read stories about a band's history and place themselves in the timeline. It's natural to want to see ourselves in our musical heroes (or our heroes in general) but what subcultures have a tendency to do is to block out any music in which we can't put ourselves in their story. If we can't relate to the band, the subculture is trained to reject it.
In indie culture, we look for the obfuscation of feelings (which we learned by being ridiculed for talking about our feelings), we look for clever wordplay (which we practiced in ridiculing those who ridiculed us), we look for strangeness (which we ourselves reflect), and we look for just the slightest tinge of self-righteous anger (that we wish we could express ourselves).
But we shun ego - at least the ego we can't understand - because it reminds us of who exactly was preventing us from fulfilling those wishes.
And if all that just seems like a lot of words to say, "I don't care you got shoved in your locker, listen to some fucking Beyonce," well...
What can I say? I guess my ego is big enough to think you want to read a thousand words on that.
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