extract’d

August 27, 2008

Will the real indie stand up?

At this point, most people acknowledge that there’s indie rock– music produced without corporate financial backing– and Indie Rock, a corporately funded mainstream genre that’s defined by normative musical aesthetics, not ideology or actual practice. The same idea carries over to indie film. There’s a festival and art-house circuit that’s essentially Hollywood’s shadow, governed not by artistic and financial freedom but by its own internal hierarchies and genre trappings. A number of tiresome trends have infected this circuit in recent years, including a cynical approach to ethnic and identity politics to garner perfunctory acclaim, condescending caricatures of rural types, and the accumulation of quirks and non-sequiturs in lieu of credible characterization.

-Brian Howe, music critic for Pitchfork Media, from his review of the soundtrack of the indie film Woodpecker

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