Writing a reference volume for any music genre can be a thankless task. No matter how comprehensive it is there will be obsessive fans policing perceived boundaries to complain about what it contains and what it excludes. However, that observation is starting from the premise that a reference volume has been published in good faith which ‘The Encyclopedia of Indie Rock’ clearly has not been. This insubstantial volume does not meet even the most minimal requirement to be to entitled encyclopedia. The entries read as inadequately composed Wikipedia submissions that have not yet been vetted by the Internet masses. This poorly written, barely researched, non-fact checked publication is the apotheosis of professionals and scholars' fears of the literacy of the Internet generation. The only thing it is missing is the lol.Footnote 1
The volume has one author and it shows. Smith may have genuine enthusiasm for the music, but does not have expertise in the field. This text comprises an alphabetic list of various bands, labels, festivals, publications and sub-genre definitions with some nominal connection to the contemporary American notion of Indie Rock. Yet what criteria were used to determine this connection is unfathomable. It has the Ramones, called ‘the seminal punk band of all time’, but not the Sex Pistols, the Clash or the Buzzcocks (often referenced as a benchmark of the modern independence movement). Sire Records is given as an example of a record label, despite functioning under the umbrella of Warner Brothers and working out of the industry hubs of London, New York and Los Angeles. Yet, there is no Factory Records, the staunchly independent Manchester label holding mythological status in the indie scene. There is no Joy Division either, one of the most influential bands in the history of the genre. On the US side, why have the unknown and insignificant Boatzz, but not the prolific and essential Magnetic Fields or Flaming Lips? Perhaps it would be better to call this ‘A List of Bands I like and Some Other Stuff’?
That ‘Other Stuff’ would include an introduction that takes the eccentric stand that indie rock should be classified as before and after Zappa and a joke timeline marking significant events in the genre's history such as Pete Doherty's former girlfriend Kate Moss getting caught doing coke in a studio where he was recording. There is a full page devoted to ‘The Top 10 Indie Rock Artists (in no particular order)’ followed with a list of 10 band names and no explanation. It is a paradigmatic depiction of fanzine rhetoric where the idiosyncratic tastes of a singular fan are elevated to canonical fact merely by the fan's absolute belief in her individual preferences.
The Encyclopedia of Indie Rock is riddled with errors of every type, from the mundane to the material. This includes typos such as the misspelling of band names (My Blood Valentine instead of My Bloody Valentine, p. 247). Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat and Fuzagi is listed as having founded Dischord Records in 1970 just after of the summer of love when Ian was a ripe eight years old. This mistake is not merely in the entry for Fugazi, but repeated in the timeline. In the item on Lou Barlow, the author states that J Mascis stopped working with Dinosaur Jr. (p. 47), rather than the cruel and novel way that Mascis ousted Barlow from the band. Mascis called Barlow to tell him that Dinosaur Jr. were breaking up, only for Lou to subsequently open the paper to see Dinosaur Jr. was touring without him. The majority of citations come from online sources and while the bibliography references some scholarly work, the imprint of these peer-reviewed sources is difficult to discern.
The writing is characterised by hyperbolic fan prose where every act is imputed grandiose significance. It would not pass muster for a newspaper or magazine where an editor should at least nominally review the work. The writing is a puddle of run on sentences. For example ‘Ambulance LTD built a solid fan base in and around its home base of Brooklyn before heading out on the road in 2004 as the opening act for groups such as The Killers and Guided By Voices, before the group hit the“it”music event South By Southwest (SXSW) in Austin Texas, in 2005, and before the group appeared on the popular late night television programs Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Late Show with David Letterman, and Late Night with Conan O'Brien as the featured musical act’ (p. 14). There are three befores and two bases in a single sentence. The content seems arbitrary and trivial. What is the relevance that Franz Ferdinand's bassist Bob Hardy missed a few dates of their 2004 tour because of stomach flu (p. 170)?
If one was genuinely interested in the topic and wanted to get a sense of the players and movements, one would be better served by getting any of Colin Larkin's Encyclopedias or Who's Who of Indie Rock. Even Wikipedia is a better option where fans devote themselves to fact checking the minutiae of bands' histories.
With the Internet offering this information more accurately and for free, it is hard to understand the rationale for this text until one sees the price. At $75 (dollars) (approximately £41.95), this compendium of mistakes is designed as a faux-reference volume in the hopes that unsuspecting ethnomusicology libraries will blindly add it to their collections. It really is an affront to the legitimacy of music scholarship that a publisher would be willing to issue such poor work under the guise of a reference volume. The shoddy quality of this haphazard collection of non-fact fails at the minimum one expects for publication, namely, that professionals have vetted it for factuality. If by chance, it has been purchased by an institution it should be returned to the publisher on the grounds of misrepresentation. Greenwood Press, shame on you.
