5 July 2009: "Listening to Spoon, reflecting on my indie past…"

This post is about the base-superstructure theory. Or to be more precise, about whether aesthetic tastes are determined by socioeconomic forces, or whether they maintain a degree of autonomy. Carles uses the example of a small-to-middling exponent of pop culture, the band Spoon, to illustrate the ways in which terrain of cultural significance is demarcated, and how that map is perpetually in the process of being redrawn. As Raymond Williams noted in his epochal study Marxism and Literature: "While a particular stage of 'real social existence' or of 'relations of production' or of a 'mode of production' can be discovered and made precise by analysis, it is never, as a body of activities, either uniform or static." That is to say, Carles's governing concepts of "alt" and "mainstream" are not merely reducible to certain a priori universal categories, but instead respond to shifts in the emergant, dominant and residual cultures. The band Spoon is an example of residual culture morphing itself into something emergent at a personal level for Carles:

For a while, I think I would have called people who like Spoon ‘entry level alts’, or possibly ‘mainstreamers who like maltstream products’, but now I think I will just start listening to songs like this, and reflecting on my past. Just don’t have enough time on this Earth to h8 on people just because they like bands that a product that ‘can appeal 2 any 1.’

The songs by this band in and of themselves have little significance outside of whether or not they can be used to include or exclude those who prefer to listen to them -- preferences themselves formed in anticipation of such exclusions and inclusions. The sensual qualities of the music, Carles suggests, are lost in this criss-cross of social strategizing. His tentative solution? Solipsism, using the music as a way of sharpening his focus on his own past rather than on other people and the degree to which he might feel compelled to be jealous of their cultural capital, of their having become more "alt" -- his term for the integrity pertaining to what be termed "social entrepreneurs," those who make a business of elaborating their personality as a brand of broader influence. Carles may have felt obliged to "h8 on" such people because they threaten to devalue the concept of cultural resistance and render it impotent, another hollow pose or pretense. But with this particular rumination, he is prepared to take an introspective turn, develop potential internal resources for continuing the struggle. He remarks, in a self-reflective gesture, "Think I’ve really grown up a lot, and my taste has really evolved into something very authentic." Maturity, he suspects, may be a matter of rejecting the positional paradigms of pop-cultural capital and plumbing the depths instead of one's own experience, the opportunities it had presented for genuine self-discovery, that is, of a self that is not contextually determined by the matrix of social relationships and charisma competitions.