There is a large issue within music centred around independence. In punk communities, signing to a major label is seen as 'selling out', a term which is banded around a lot nowadays, in music and other areas of media too, and a 'sell out' can be surmised as "Anyone who sacrifices artistic integrity in an effort to become more successful or popular; someone who forgets their roots" (Urban Dictionary). Often a band can lose almost an entire grassroots fanbase by doing this; sometimes they will gain a larger fanbase of people within the mainstream. I am going to put forward an argument or two on why I think it is important to be independent in the music world today.
When one decides to become a musician it can be for many reasons, or even none at all. Sometimes you are just meant to play music. Some people are born into it, such as movie or pop stars children, some decide to because they specifically want to be rich or renowned. Most of my favourite musicians presumably did it because either they had nothing else to do or because they loved music, and I think it shows in their music. When you listen to a pop star sing about love, are they really being genuine? Most times, certainly not. They are writing a song to sell it to the masses in the form of something sterile and socially acceptable, the topic of love, possibly the most wrote-about topic ever. It's something easy and readily accepted. When a musician sings out against war however, often they will mean it, regardless of their label status, and this kind of ground is where it starts to get complicated. Take Rage Against the Machine for Example. Their lyrics and music are anti-corporate, incredibly so: it was challenging back in the 90's for a band to be signed to a major label and also be totally against mainstream culture and everything it stood for, yet their decision to be on a label that was no doubt part of their aim of hatred says otherwise. While it is undeniable that from a musical point of view, their incendiary debut album would not have had as much impact had it not been as perfectly recorded as it was, when you look at it's overall lasting impact on mainstream culture it can be summed up as one song, Killing in the Name, one of their songs with less deep lyrical content. It's more or less just become an anthem of rebellion for people who don't know how to truly rebel. Politically, the album would have made more ripples had it exploded onto the independent scene, to people who rebel every day of their lives just by being different.
When you look at American music of the 1980's, things were very polarised at the start of the decade and slowly integrated towards the end of it: you had a large, expansive hardcore punk scene that was entirely independent at the start (many bands associated with it would go on to sign to major labels to either much success or none at all) but on the other end of the spectrum there was a huge boom in mainstream music with many bands and artists of that era setting the standard for modern pop music, rock or otherwise. As one decade waned and the next started, one band changed everything: Nirvana. They took the energy and fury of the independent scene and they tried to take it to the mainstream. It was well intentioned, and I could never doubt Cobain's intentions, but when the two things collided, it was proven that the mainstream was far too powerful to be co-opted. Fame destroyed Cobain, and in his wake a huge wave of shitty bands appeared: Creed, Bush, Stone Temple Pilots, bands that took the sound, faked the personality, and made it sterile. The big cheesy rock of the 1970's was back, just with different band names. Nothing really changed; most of the other bands of the independent era had either signed to a major, broken up, or both, the latter often caused by the former. By the start of this decade, even the term 'indie rock' had lost its meaning, becoming a genre name and not a sign of independence. In Britain, the term 'indie rock' is usually given to a kind of band that are almost always on a major label, and sound like incredibly watered down rock. Despite the independent scene in 1980's America reaching a cross-cultural head with Nirvana, it's influence continued into the 1990's, albeit in different forms, most of which got co-opted into the mainstream by the turn of that decade too (such as 'emo' and post-hardcore). In part 2 I will be discussing 90's bands that remained independent and were also successful, as well as bands that ended up signing to majors and how they fared.
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