THE ÆSTHETICS OF THE
underground
By Shyam Krishna
T
he underground may be defined loosely
as that music which hasn’t widespread
listenership. Perhaps more characteristic is
what this entails: such music is generally not
commercialized, and there is relatively greater
freedom on the artist’s part, leading to bolder
innovations and also a sense of sincerity and
intimacy. The birth of these scenes is generally marked by the coming together of a
small number of like-minded people exploring and expanding musical boundaries, in a
similar direction. Thereafter, the subculture
can take two main courses: it might either
get appropriated or become widely popular, or it might forever stay a niche movement. However, even these niche movements tend to exert continuing influence
on the more popular forms of music.
When speaking of underground, the
scene that first flashes into mind is punk.
It displays the characteristics typical of the
one eventual path that leads to fame and
mainstream appropriation. Emerging in the
mid-’70s, it was the revolution against musical and social structure. It embraced a minimalist approach to music as opposed to the
then-current vogue of increased technicality:
a famous cartoon in a punk fanzine depicts
three chord-diagrams on the guitar and suggests you could form a band with only so
much. As a social revolt, especially in the UK,
it came during a time of high unemployment
and amidst discontent in the working class.
It worked as a subversive agent, with bands
seeking to question, and ridicule, everything
from record companies, the police, and public
apathy, to even the Queen herself - recognizing the blindness in revering a hollow symbol
of misplaced nationalism in a time of internal
economic crises. Acting as a moral fuse, its
notorious and very public transgressions had
a role in the general relaxing of social norms.
As the movement progressed, its ideas, both
musical and otherwise, went through a stage
of transformation and acceptance, turning
punk into the genres post-punk and New
Age, the latter of which went on to become
hugely popular. Other harsher subgenres exerted their influence on metal forming the
genre thrash, which had a role in rejuvenating
the entire metal scene in the ’80s.
When a genre breaks through, however,
the inherent commercialization that occurs
is often regarded with much hostility by its
older fans, who term the whole process as
‘selling out’. This results in a portion of the
scene playing the forms that existed before
the transition, and remaining ‘old school’, or
‘cult’. Fading away of genres is also inevitable,
after a point people run out of new things to
say or do and the inflow of ideas dries up.
The genre might still survive by undergoing
huge transformations, even to an extent of
becoming something unrecognizably different, though this would mean continuity in just
naming. A very similar chain of events as happened to punk occurred with other erstwhile
niche scenes: be it ’00s dubstep, ’80s hip hop
or ’70s electronica.
The other path is where such forms of
music never catch on though they still tend
to have diverse effects on music, sometimes
much after they have faded away. Acid folk
artists of the late ’60s and early ’70s were rediscovered by indie musicians in the US in the
’90s and had a role in the formation of Freak
folk as pioneered by the likes of Animal Collective. An example of the uncertainties in the
path of musical influence is Vashti Bunyan,
who had released just one album in 1970,
which was largely forgotten for nearly three
decades, before the effect of that album on
the nascent freak folk scene, during the turn
of the millennium, led to her being dubbed
its ‘Godmother’; she even went on to release
material she had written in the form of a second album in 2005, a full 35 years after her
first. Another group in this movement, the
Incredible Strings Band, had a role in popularizing the use of African, Middle-Eastern and
other exotic instruments in popular music and
can be considered to be the first in the genre
‘World Music’. They also influenced famous
bands like Led Zeppelin, and allegedly were
the inspiration for the sound of the Sgt. Pepper’s album of the Beatles. From just these
two examples of genres, it becomes fairly
obvious that the two outcomes as outlined
before do not exclude one another, and the
massive and complex ways by which the underground effects changes in current music is
evident.
While comprehending such developments in music, one cannot avoid the subject of grading musical output. The necessity of this is due to the seemingly endless
amount of music that has been and will be
recorded, and hence, in its barest form, it is
a need to classify music into at least two categories: music that is worth listening to and
music that is not. How does one definitively
assert the superiority of a certain individual,
“
Punk worked as a
subversive agent,
with bands seeking
to question, and
ridicule, everything
from record companies, the police,
and public apathy,
to even the Queen
herself
”
Shyam Krishna is a final year
undergraduate student of Civil
Engineering. His taste in music ranges
vastly across genres, and he believes in
embracing every facet of an artform.
The Shoreline
21