The great thing about coming home from college is seeing how endearingly awkward my best friends’ siblings have become. As an only child, I live vicariously through family shows like “Keeping Up with the Kardashians,” “Run’s House” and “Daria.” Knowing that I can go to my second homes and hang out with (read: slam in DDR) an array of middle and high schoolers gives me the sense of universal connection I’m missing by living only with my mom and our enormous bear-dog.
Over winter break, I happily discovered that like all good southern California teens, one friend’s brothers have blossomed into lanky, hair-flipping hipsters – pipe-leg jeans included. So imagine my delight when my friend presented his 15-year-old brother with a shirt that said, “I listen to bands that don’t even exist yet.”
Obviously this is a joke, a stab at our generation’s manic need to find the weirdest, newest and most avant garde art. Just look at WNUR – what in the world is a “Hidden Form”?
I’ll admit, I was once an “underground” devotee, spending hours scouring the ether for bands no one knew about and then hoarding this knowledge with a ferocity only matched by my consumption of Red Bull. The radio, except for Ryan Seacrest’s morning banter, was essentially dead to me. But when I was in high school, I read an I.D. Magazine interview with street artist Shepard Fairey, and according to him, “that whole mainstream vs. underground thing is a load of crap.”
Before Fairey became a household name, he could have easily held onto the pretension and rugged glamour of being the “next big thing” that only the street art intelligentsia knew about. Instead, he declared that holding on to a covert, underground identity and complaining about going mainstream was selfish. He added that “exploiting a style just because it is popular sucks, and any artist, graffiti or otherwise, shouldn’t participate in a project unless its proponents desire to understand and perpetuate the culture and perspective from which the artist comes.”
Fairey’s words resonated with me. I (and many music snobs I still know) had the concept of mainstream all wrong. In his terms at least, it simply meant popularity, not selling out. Sometimes great artists get popular and do go commercial, but that’s because of their own creative decisions, not the size of their fan bases.
The great thing about underground is that it’s the anti-clone, denoting a kind of artistic originality and unequivocal commitment to the heart. While commercialism might pose a threat to this sensibility, the growth of a culture doesn’t. It allows great work to be enjoyed by more people – people who have the capacity to connect to something true but just might not know where to find it on their own.
Rhymesayers, an independent hip hop label in the Twin Cities that some would call “underground,” makes it a point to be encouraging and approachable without compromising content. Many of its artists bemoan the big music industry and what radio rap has become, but never their growing fan bases.
Gratitude is consistently woven into the verses of my two favorite artists, Blueprint and Brother Ali. In his most recent release, “Radio-Inactive”, Blueprint raps: “So thank God for every fan, every single listener, who told me ‘to make the art you don’t gotta switch it up. You put it out, we’ll pick it up. Do you. Stay strong. You’re the main reason we don’t turn our radios on.'”
So to the music snobs out there, counter-culture doesn’t have to mean fewer than 3,000 plays on Myspace (or lack of a music page, for that matter). If you find something good, share it. You’ll be a better fan.
Alex Hollander is a Medill senior. She can be reached at [email protected].
