Frank Kogan

Yes, I didn't talk about class. It's certainly a factor, as is ethnic community (which also affects class, and so on). Part of it is the music addressing things that make sense to you, so that it's natural enough for black, urban, poorer people to be interested in hip hop - but of course this is immensely more complicated than that, since there are non-poor black people who want to be the kind of people who like 'real' 'street' music, and those who don't, and white people who want the coolness of being urban black, and those who don't want that, but like the danger of this music, the voyeurism of looking into lives unlike their own, and countless other reasons in some way related to class.

There are also odd delusions around this. I've been all over the class spectrum in my life, from (to use a US term) trailer trash to riding in a Rolls with a TV in the back, and what people identify with often has an element of fakery. Pulp made a big deal of class some years ago, with most of the Different Class album, and while they may have grown up working class (I don't really know), their fans, who were singing along to Common People, were mostly middle class. In my experience, your indie fans are mostly that, whereas the working class here is much more likely to be listening to metal or dance music. (I'm not sneering at Pulp fans here - I'm totally middle class now, and I adore Pulp.)

I think defining yourself against others is part of this. Indie fans don't promote themselves as more middle class than rock/dance fans, they promote themselves as smarter, more able to see through the commercial front and so on, but all that kind of becomes another way of saying the same thing - you're an advertising executive rather than the sucker that believes the ads. There's also a cool outsider thing, at a fairly weak level, about indie that isn't there for metal or house. There is a wanting to be better than these other fandoms, and it maps pretty easily to class. Metal's self-image is a different one, promoting hardness and so on, whereas dance fans see themselves as hedonists, and so on. If you want to see yourself as a fun-loving high-living hedonist, it's a hell of a lot easier to sell that, and to live it (I'm not saying this is fake) and to find likeminded people if you are into house and so on rather than country or jazz.