Kaya Oakes
Holt Paperbacks, Henry Holt and Company, LLC
June 2009
223 pp.
$14.00, paperback original
Skinny jeans are not just for chubby pre-teens with side-swept bangs and a sad-sack attitude—they are for indie kids too. Or should I say, skinny jeans are not just for indie kids—they are for chubby pre-teens with side-swept bangs and a sad-sack attitude? Either way, the point still stands: somewhere down the line indie went mainstream and skinny got fat.
Kaya Oakes is no stranger to indie culture. In fact, she is as indie as they come—indie writer, indie musician, indie crafter, comic book insider (make that indie comic book insider). One gets the feeling that if anyone were to know what they are talking about when it comes to independent culture and lifestyle it would be Oakes. (She even teaches an undergraduate course on indie music at University of California, Berkeley.) So, when you pick up a copy of her first book of nonfiction, Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture, you trust that she knows her stuff.
Slanted and Enchanted takes the reader on a semi-chronological journey through the evolution of the independent movements. I say movements because, according to Oakes, indie is a fluid, constantly changing and adapting cultural phenomenon: “Indie never really dies,” she says, “it continues to reemerge in repeated surges.” (17) Oakes begins to penetrate indie culture in the fifties and sixties when poets like the New York school’s Frank O’Hara and beat poet Allen Ginsberg revolutionized the scene. She takes us to Los Angeles (and later NYC) in the eighties where we “[jam] econo” (48) with the Punks of the do-it-yourself (DIY) era, then to the early zine and comics movement before landing the reader smack dab in the middle of the “often misunderstood” (124) nineties Riot Grrrl movement. (Misunderstood not because riot grrrls were wannabe hardcore musicians, but because riot grrrls were female wannabe hardcore musicians.) Now firmly situated in the Pacific Northwest, we travel to Seattle just in time to meet indie-turned-mainstream grunge rockers Nirvana who headlined the transition from punk-rooted indie to meathead grunge. Even if “…punk and indie style, reinvented as grunge, became just another identity for people to try on and reject,” (134) Oakes still makes the distinction that grunge did not kill indie—it transformed indie, again.
This theme of reinvention reappears in a chapter dedicated almost entirely to Stephen Malkmus and his band Pavement, whose critically acclaimed 1992 album release titles the book. Oakes’ book, with its done-by-myself tone is consistent with the album's makeshift musical melding and together they share the title well. Once we have hit the pavement with Malkmus and the gang, Oakes travels to contemporary indie publishing, to craft fairs and the indie design movement, and ultimately to the corporate branding of indie as, well, Indie. Given all the possible routes Oakes could have taken in navigating this scene, her choices here—everything from music to publishing to comics and crafts—add breadth and purpose to the book.
Oakes packs this breadth of information into a relatively slim two-hundred-and-ten page indie resource. The evolution of this cultural resource manual is not just a one-stop guide to punks and zines and too-tight, tapered trousers—it is a peek into a lifestyle that cannot quite be pinned down. Right from the start Oakes poses the questions: what is indie and what does it mean to be indie? (Ooh! Ooh! Me! Is it skinny jeans? No? Um, Chuck Taylors? Still no? Hmm, unwashed dreadlocks and unruly facial hair?) While these all-too-obvious defining characteristics might seem like all it takes to call yourself indie, the truth is, they are just the effects of the ultimate cause—they are the accessories and apparel aftermath of an attitude that stems from something deeper: the political.
Oakes reports that the cause of the original independent movement and the sub-movements that are constantly evolving today began in retaliation against growing political discontent. WWII, the Cold War, Vietnam, Eisenhower, Bush—all, according to Slanted and Enchanted, pushed freethinking, anti-establishment artists into a corner collectively known as independent. Though, I might add, even without political repulsion (or revulsion), artists might still desire the freedom and—dare I say independence—that comes with DIY culture. Historically, as Oakes exhibits, this just is not the case: independent counter movements have almost always been driven by political revulsion. She writes:
[When George W. Bush took office and the Iraq War began] bands rediscovered politics and the overtly politicized lyrics of earlier acts like Gang of Four, the Minutemen, and even Credence Clear Water Revival returned with a vengeance. Independent publishers began putting out anti-Bush screeds so rapidly it was hard to keep up. Zines and indie magazines chimed in on politics and encouraged the growing antiwar movement. Even crafters got in on the revolution, creating guerilla knitting collectives and subversive craft networks. For the first time since the eighties, indie artists had something to rage about. (15)
Fueled by political “rage” and assumedly, a penchant for something Oakes calls “otherness,” these soon-to-be-labeled indie artists, writers, and musicians began and proliferated a lifestyle all their own. The theme of this lifestyle: Fuck you—I am going to do this my way. Oakes writes:
…[I]ndie culture…always stands in opposition to something (independent record labels in opposition to major labels and manufactured musicians, crafting in opposition to generic products offered by chain stores like IKEA and Target, independent comics in opposition to shiny superheroes, and so on). (158)
As time proceeded, so did the number of people willing to flip society the bird. So many in fact that the line between the truly independent—those fighting for the cause (read: for the cause = against society)—and those just truly interested in its effect (kitschy eyewear) became blurred. The result: angst teens in too-tight tees who equate “indie” with style and musical genre, missing entirely the movement’s original intent: to move.
But, moving is something indie has always done. It has been reinvented and rebranded so many times that in order to keep indie fresh and new for future generations it must stay on the go. Oakes writes that “just as the idea of ‘alternative’ music and culture began to seem dated and clichéd after marketers seized it in the nineties, the term ‘indie’ today has been stripped of much of its original meaning” (207). But, it is this original meaning that keeps independent writers like Kaya Oakes in business, scouring the streets of Berkeley, Portland, Brooklyn, and beyond, searching to define the meaning of a word like indie, which can hardly be defined. Yet, she still searches, and with each chapter we get closer and closer to the meaning of the word until finally, it is all laid out in a neat little bound package. Well, it is almost complete.
With all the topics Oakes tackles, there is one seemingly missing piece to the indie puzzle: the Internet. Though it is mentioned here and there in passing, it just is not given its due respect. If there is going to be a chapter specifically dedicated to craft fairs, fully equipped with a human-in-homemade-greeting-card-dispensing-robot-suit example, then please, humor us with a chapter on the Internet. After all, Myspace burgeoned a whole new community by tearing down the barriers between unknown musicians, writers, artists and their future obsessively devoted fans.
Despite not unpacking the Internet’s role in the indie movement, Oakes accomplishes what Slanted and Enchanted originally set out to do: answer the question about the meaning of the term itself. Indie, though overused to the point of distortion, still maintains more than just its fleeting connotation—and aptly so: the term that means no label, itself cannot be labeled. But, that is just the sort of chubby-kid-in-tight-pants irony indie hipsters’ love.
So what does it mean to be “indie” today? The answer Oakes provides is simple, but I am not going to give it away. Read Slanted and Enchanted yourself—because doing-it-yourself will bring you that much closer to the “indie” movement.
