UCLA

Vanishingly little in the way of scholarly work has been done on the concept of “indie,” a ubiquitous (albeit nebulous) term used across the world to describe and categorize music and film. But unlike other means of artistic classification, “indie” does not easily correspond to any singular style—rather, indie practitioners long sought to avoid “style” as a manner through which they might be rendered disarmingly legible and demystified. My dissertation, Indie: Transformations of “Independent” Music and Film, 1959-2021, rigorously inspects crucial periods along a timeline ranging from this movement’s imagined, economically “independent” origins in the 1950s, to indie’s eventual transformation into a musical/filmic genre consumed by its stylistic codification in the 2000s. This dissertation accomplishes this by crafting what historian Hayden White describes as an “ironic” historical narrative, as well as by supplementing this account with a blend of other research methodologies such as critical analysis, socio-economic analysis, oral histories, and archival work.

My dissertation operates on the following conceit: from the 1980s through the early 2000s, eschewing signifiers rooted in stylistic deviation from the norm, “indie” practitioners primarily defined themselves by their structural relationship to dominant (or, put colloquially, “mainstream”) culture, thriving in a shadowy space between the amateur and the professional. But the indie phenomenon and its systems of subcultural capital were subsumed by official culture in the twenty-first century when they came to be defined by the rapid growth of indie’s once-subversive “twee” branch, in fact becoming more acceptable to the mainstream than “official culture” itself.