The Dream of the Nineties

"The best work of that indie heyday—and 1997 alone offered Elliott Smith's Either/Or, Stereolab's Dots and Loops, Whiskeytown's Strangers Almanac, and Teenage Fanclub's Songs From Northern Britain—compares well to any year. And while every band was different, the world that had been opened up by Nirvana, Sonic Youth, and the Smiths meant an ocean of succinct, structured songs complicated by feedback, overdrive, odd guitar tunings, feminism, Gen X irony, and intense emotion that would never have suited the macho 'classic rock' paradigm of Album Oriented Radio. Behind it was an anti-commercial ethos that made an unsteady peace with commerce.
"Bands built whole careers on oddball, not terribly commercial niches, with the Apples in Stereo crossing Pet Sounds with the Silver Apples, Velvet Crush splicing power pop with introvert Byrd Gene Clark, and Luna finding the hidden possibilities in the Velvet Underground's poorly selling self-titled LP. There was a 'beautiful losers' ideology to indie, but in a parallel to what was occurring with American independent cinema, some of this was happening on big corporate labels or quasi-indie imprints; Matador, Elektra, SubPop, and 550 Music all had ties to either Warner Bros. or Sony.
"So art and money came together: Never again, it seemed, would routine blues progressions, hair metal, or corporate pap rule the charts."

Scott Timberg at Vox recalls "Peak Indie."

"The Digital Age Has Crushed Creator Wages"

"Some of the statistical stuff is wonky and hard to explain succinctly. But one of the key objections comes from Johnson's claim that more people are making their livings as musicians. But since the statistical categories were changed midstream to accommodate school teachers, the early numbers and the later numbers become an apples-to-oranges comparison: the numbers of working musicians, it appears, is not going up but down.
"The story also falls back on one of the most common tech-apologist clichés: That while musicians are making less money selling recordings, they are earning a lot of money on the road. It's nice to think so. But while concert revenues are indeed up, bands rarely make a fortune touring–the big money goes to a few superstar acts, and enormous expenses for the musicians mean many groups just break even. Is a constant sequence of vans and Motel 6's really a feasible way for a musician over the age of 25 to make a living? 'I can't stop touring because I will die,' surf-rock legend Dick Dale, who is raising money to cover his health problems, recently said. 'Physically and literally, I will die.'"

In Salon, Scott Timberg responds to Steven Johnson's New York Times Magazine article, "The New Making It."

"Cornerstone of an Underground Renaissance"

"Beck told the history of 20th-century America from the dark margins of society. The story of our prison system, illegal sex trades, and mean streets is not a pretty one, but he made it unforgettable. His books inspired the creation of a shadow canon that is indispensable to any conversation about African-American literature, contemporary popular culture, and especially the messy relationships among race, class, and gender politics."


Justin Gifford in The Chronicle of Higher Education recounts the life of Iceberg Slim.


Scott Timberg in Salon interviews Gifford.

The Way We're Droppin' Hamiltons

"What to make of all this? Well, people are complicated, and don't always line up along the conventional left-right axis. Hamilton has an especially unstable background, especially compared to Virginia planters who dominated the founding generation: Born in the British West Indies and orphaned, Hamilton had an early history so sketchy, we're not even sure of his birth year.
"But part of it is that we've gotten Hamilton wrong over the decades, perhaps thanks to high school history classes that framed Hamilton as the father of American conservatism and Jefferson as the founder of U.S. liberalism, with Andrew Jackson as his inheritor."


Scott Timberg in Salon looks at reactions to the announced elimination of Alexander Hamilton from the $10 bill.


Ron Chernow at Politico pleads to keep Hamilton on the bill.


Binyamin Appelbaum and Josh Barro at The New York Times discuss the issue.


And David Greenberg at Politico defends Andrew Jackson.

Mike Love Not War

"Californians get tired of hearing their state described in dichotomous terms of sunshine and noir. But if there was ever a band with a stark contrast between clean-cut innocence and nasty stuff beneath the surface, it's these guys. Compared to them, the Stones are art-school poseurs dabbling in Satanic imagery.
"And if you look closely, you can see the weirdness from almost the very beginning."


Scott Timberg in Salon considers the Beach Boys.

"Cheerleading for Spotify Doesn't Quite Get Us There"

"This echoes what we've been hearing from the Silicon Valley crowd about disintermediation and how the collapse of the old system would be great for the artist. We know how well that's worked out. And it ignores the process of re-intermediation, as the Internet companies consolidate into a few corporate behemoths even worse than the old major-label structure, and keep the artists locked out of all the dealmaking.
"There were certainly exploitative label deals and record company execs in the old model. But, the old-school, analog-age middlemen–not just people who work at labels, but record store clerks, editors at book publishers, journalistic critics–are rarely the people who get rich in the culture world."


Scott Timberg in Salon looks at music-streaming companies.

"A Dissenting Voice in a Swirl of Enthusiasm for Pop Culture, Electronic Media, and New Technology in General"

"Postman was politically liberal in most ways but by today's standards, something like a cultural conservative: He wanted a common culture, was suspicious of much of popular culture, opposed multiculturalism--at its worst, he wrote, 'a psychopathic version of cultural pluralism'--and found the assault on 'dead white European males' silly. He returned repeatedly in his work to the importance of schooling and to an un-commodified childhood, in books like 'Teaching as a Subversive Activity' and 'The End of Education.'"


Scott Timberg in Salon looks back to Neil Postman.