![]() A bumptious in-the-know attitude followed-a kind of social capital students embodied with extensive record collections and Dandyish haircuts. ![]() By the time the B-52’s formed in 1976, college radio was gaining greater national influence, creating a network of tastemaking college students, who were often among the first to hear indie music, at a time where there was scarce alternative to the Top 40 mainstream. Stateside indie rock-then known as “college rock”-took off in university towns with an art-school emphasis. In other words: a heterosexual sensibility. Its political disengagement has often expressed itself through a pose of disregard and emotional inertia a self-conscious awkwardness, a restricted sexuality, a ceremonious stiffness. In its most puritan form, indie rock was a genre that took care to conceal its musical lineage, obscuring its Black, queer blues and rock’n’roll antecedents with an aesthetic of neutral authenticity. Historically, indie rock has been the province of white, heterosexual males-a comparatively conservative genre that has kept many of its main players closeted allusive and elusive, as Stipe once was. Stipe answered evasively, nonsensically, queerly: “Look… I yam what I yam.” It’s a noncommittal attitude recognizable to anyone who minored in queer theory: the ambiguity, the absurdity, the refusal to represent oneself in policeable terms. “Is being a rock star the province of white, heterosexual males?” an interviewer asked Michael Stipe in 1992, two years before the R.E.M. ![]()
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