kinda long, but its something to read...

The CMJ Big Break? Not Such a Big Deal

By JON PARELES
Published: November 6, 2006

Bands aren’t waiting for their big break anymore. Or if they are, they’re keeping mighty busy in the meantime. That was the gist of this year’s CMJ Music Marathon, the showcase for independent music that expanded to five days this year, presenting music day and night from last Tuesday through Saturday.

Since 1981 CMJ’s gatherings have been offering a dual message. (CMJ originally stood for College Media Journal; it’s still a trade magazine that monitors college radio.) The marathons encourage the small-scale, do-it-yourself approach that has been enshrined and maintained by punk and indie rock. At the same time they tease with the prospect that being chosen to perform on a club bill assembled by CMJ — which winnowed 1,000 bands from 4,500 applicants — and being heard by the people who come to New York for the convention could lead to anything from a shared tour to a recording contract. This year the mass market seemed further away, while the indie circuit was bustling.

The lineup, as always, was overwhelming. There weren’t many large shows with bands that have escaped the club circuit, although the thoroughly independent Swedish electronica duo the Knife chose CMJ to make its North American debut with a moody, high-tech production. The dance-rock band the Rapture played CMJ’s opening-night party with a set of pure funk that showed how years of touring can make a band trade arty indulgences for muscle. And the Fall, which was formed in 1976 by Mark E. Smith and has influenced countless indie-rock bands, played a perverse half-hour set on Saturday night. Although the band riffed clean and hard, with two bass players, half of the brief set was other bands’ songs.

Recording contracts aren’t as glamorous as they used to be, not with major labels floundering. MTV and commercial broadcast radio haven’t helped by narrowing their offerings to a few nearly incompatible genres: self-pitying emo rock, bump-and-grind rhythm-and-blues and catchphrase hip-hop. At the CMJ showcases, some bands were still aiming for careers in current mass-market rock. They were the ones slavishly imitating Fall Out Boy’s punk-pop hooks and making music-video rock-star faces.

Of course hardly a band at CMJ would turn down a Top 10 single or a gold album on principle. Nor will any rule out other possibilities: a spot on a video-game soundtrack, in a commercial or on television, all of which can be hyperlinked back to the band. Most of the performers I heard — which were of course only a small fraction of the showcases — were making their way without Top 40 expectations.

The do-it-yourself circuit was once a patchwork of live shows and sporadic college-radio exposure, but the Internet has changed that. Now, the most obscure band can put up a page on myspace.com and have its music streamed on any Internet connection, any time. So a showcase at CMJ or its springtime counterpart, South by Southwest, is no longer such a make-or-break moment.

But a live performance, something more tangible, hi-fi and sloppy than a faceless MP3 file, can still make a band vivid. Born Ruffians, a band from Toronto, writes crisp, staccato songs about awkward feelings, harking back to the early Talking Heads. The songs can easily stand on their own. But onstage the band’s lead singer, Luke LaLonde, brought an extra dollop of endearing, unabashed nerdiness to the music.

Monsters Are Waiting plays stubbornly midtempo, neatly constructed pop songs featuring Annalee Fery’s breathy, girlish voice; onstage her gawky art-girl cool was counteracted as the band started with terse little riffs and stirred them into postpunk jitters. And it takes a live performance, pulsating in a room full of head-bobbing listeners, to appreciate 120 Days, a Norwegian band that takes the throbbing repetition of rave music and German synthesizer rock and adds some fervent vocals.

As big-time commercial pop rushes headlong into just a few niches, that leaves just about everything else for independents. They can try revivalism or avant-gardism, hugely ambitious concepts or cagey shtick, painstaking sincerity or elaborate artifice, verse-chorus-verse pop or amorphous noise. Styles discarded by the pop mainstream survive in the indie sphere. Underground hip-hop, which has pretty much settled for the college crowd while complaining (in rhyme) about how “the real hip-hop” has been abandoned, maintains the ambitious wordplay and political intentions rarely heard from hitmakers. Performers like Cadence Weapon — from Canada, which he proudly rhymed with “janitor” — and Darc Mind made the syllables fly. Commercial hip-hop hooks were exploited in meta-style by Girl Talk, the one-man laptop band, who mashed up samples from hits — dispensing a new hook every 10 seconds — for a knowing but still dancing crowd.

There are times at CMJ when it seems that just one band is playing set after set: a band with four guys in T-shirts, two of them strumming a slow-building guitar drone. Not that drones are so bad. The Archie Bronson Outfit, an English power trio, turns bluesy one-chord riffs and reedy, yelpy vocals into ominous, violent visions. Chin Up Chin Up stacked minimalist guitar lines and matter-of-fact vocals into intricately driving songs; Silversun Pickups merged swelling, droning psychedelia with grungy resentment.

But indie rock knows better than to settle into its own stereotypes. Across CMJ were bands sprouting extra instruments — cellos, accordions, trombones, glockenspiels — and coming up with songs that weren’t content to stay within one style or half a dozen.

In a short set on Saturday afternoon, for example, the Annuals, from North Carolina, encompassed the rippling introspection of the Beach Boys, the anthemic power of U2, the busy arpeggios of Yes and the lurching momentum of the Replacements — and topped one song with a slide whistle. Quirky, heartfelt and a little messy, it was indie rock with boundless ambitions, few of them commercial.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Here's another article on CMJ and all things 'indy' in the times last week:

In a World of Cacophony, Experience for Sharing

The rock critic Robert Christgau gave an interview last month to the Web site popmatters.com. Mr. Christgau, who was recently dismissed from The Village Voice after 37 years, talked a little bit about recent history. But he also talked about an old obsession of his: the decline of truly popular music.

“When I grew up, there was a monoculture,” he said. “Everybody listened to the same music on the radio. I miss monoculture. I think it’s good for people to have a shared experience.”

This week especially, the old musical monoculture seems more obsolete than ever. The annual CMJ Music Marathon started on Tuesday and runs through Saturday. Attendees can — or, more accurately, can’t — see more than 1,000 bands crammed onto stages in Manhattan and Brooklyn, along with the usual unsanctioned events. Even more than usual downtown Manhattan is full of bands most people have never heard of, hoping to emulate the success of other bands most people have never heard of.

This mess isn’t quite as messy as it first appears. The explosion of music Web sites has had a surprising effect: the CMJ festival seems more coherent than ever. There are a few outliers, rappers and metal bands and D.J.s. But much of the week is dominated by earnest young indie-rockers, and many of the names will be familiar to anyone who follows MP3 blogs. Annuals, Birdmonster, Cold War Kids, Division Day, the Little Ones, Oh No! Oh My!, Ra Ra Riot, Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, the Silent Years, Voxtrot: they’re all here.

And if you’d like to sample their music, all you need is an Internet connection and 20 minutes. Aggregator sites like elbo.ws (which publishes a useful blog popularity chart) make it easy to figure out exactly how many blog links a band has; MySpace makes it easy (and free) to hear four songs from just about any band at CMJ. At this festival indie-rock looks less like a wide-open space and more like a well-organized market.

It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this. Only a few years ago, the Internet threatened to blur boundaries of genre and culture making it easy for listeners to fill their iPods with whatever caught their fancy.

But listeners of all sorts like having what Mr. Christgau called a shared experience. That’s why the old monoculture flourished in the first place. And today’s indie-rock fans have something that’s smaller yet similar: a mini-monoculture. That is, a robust infrastructure of Web sites and blogs, along with a (necessarily vague) consensus about what indie-rock sounds like.

After Robert W. Pittman and others invested in the indie-rock blog Stereogum, The New York Post quoted an anonymous source who promised that the site would become “narrower and deeper.” That phrase is a pretty apt description of online indie-rock culture, and of this year’s CMJ too. And it’s not necessarily a criticism.

You could catch a glimpse of this “narrower and deeper” world at Piano’s, on the Lower East Side, on Monday night, during a pre-CMJ showcase featuring Division Day. The members came together in Santa Cruz, Calif., and eventually moved to Los Angeles, home to one of the country’s most productive indie-rock scenes. And the band’s Web site, divisionday.com, helpfully categorizes all the “blog love” bestowed on Division Day so far, with links to every quotation. (There are dozens and dozens.)

It was an all-right set with some better-than-all-right moments. A dreamy, gusty version of a song called “Tigers” began with the singer, Rohner Segnitz, murmuring, “I want your blood inside my head.” Soon enough he was yelping those words as a drummer thrashed behind him. There will be plenty of crashing indie-rock climaxes this week, many worse than this one and (here’s hoping) many even better.

There will also be, as always, a handful of heavyweights: bands like the Shins (Bowery Ballroom, tonight) and the Decemberists (Hammerstein, tomorrow) that have gotten about as big as indie bands can get. The Decemberists now record for Capitol Records, but they aren’t exactly Coldplay. In this deep-and-narrow world, lots of young bands seem to envy the career of Tapes ’n Tapes (Bowery, last night), a proficient but somewhat dull Minneapolis band that made a splash at this year’s South by Southwest festival in Austin, Tex. That’s a modest goal, and certainly, for at least one band this week — maybe Annuals, with their grand, disheveled songs? — an achievable one.

Mr. Christgau is right: the days of the monoculture are gone, if they ever existed. And much of the old goofy optimism is gone too; most bands at CMJ don’t aim to change the world, or even to irritate it. They can survive, even thrive, in their own mini-monoculture.

That’s the mixed blessing of a “narrower and deeper” age. For listeners willing to dive in, CMJ is probably easier to enjoy than ever before. And for listeners who don’t take the plunge, it is probably easier to ignore.