Sunday, July 18, 2004
(1:13 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
On the elusiveness of credibility, and how to attain it easily
I was working up some indie cred for a while there. I had given up being a Radiohead fan; I was starting to move toward thinking that Slanted and Enchanted was Pavement's best; I am one of the Internet's foremost advocates of the Shins; my favorite album is Godspeed You Black Emperor!'s Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven; etc., etc. Admittedly, a lot of this was the product of just leeching off Robb's years of research, but if you had that resource at your fingertips, wouldn't it be immoral not to take advantage?But then one day it was all gone in a flash. I needed a break -- I needed desperately to listen to something accessible and popular. Like the fool I am, I put in Is This It?. For those of you with real indie cred, that's by The Strokes. Halfway through, my roommate Justin, a man of true indie cred, a hipster/scenester/anti-vegetarian extraordinaire, walked in, and I was exposed: I am no better than a 14-year-old girl. Yet through the magic of the Internet, while reading a comment section in Crooked Timber, which incidentally really used to be good when they first started, until they sold out and went mainstream, I found the intellectual toolbox I needed. And wouldn't you know it? I already like Neutral Milk Hotel! I'm halfway there!
On to academic matters: if you want to succeed as a postmodern demagogue, you could certainly do worse than "Pose As A Poseur! -- essential handhelds". Arguably the best Amazon Listmania! list composed by anyone other than me, and certainly the most amusingly titled, it provides a crucial run-down of the texts that you will need in order to make your way through the intellectual thicket that is graduate studies/taxi driving. Again, I'm ahead of the curve here, since I'm already critiquing most of the books on the list. (I also most likely coined the term "Hardto-Negrian.") Add the appropriate accent, and you'll have that adjunct position at Podunk Community College before you know it.
Now I'm starting to wonder if it's possible to have blogging indie cred. I know that Adam Robinson, with his past denunciations of those sell-outs who link to mainstream bloggers such as Atrios or Talking Points Memo, might have some insight into this topic, and it's also clear that à Gauche has some kind of unmediated access to cool philosophically oriented blogs, such that I am able to check his blogroll every two weeks and steal links from him without attribution (indeed, often without so much as reading the blog in question -- such is my confidence in this Best of All Possible Bloggers). His best finds so far are clearly Spurious, A Tiny Revolution, and The Young Hegelian. (I always get a little bit upset when I see that The Young Hegelian and A Tiny Revolution don't have 45,000 comments on each post, while every five-word post Atrios shits out gets 672,350 comments, so I try to leave my insightful remarks there every so often.)
(A brief excursus on weaning oneself from reliance on mainstream blogs:
I would quietly note that Unfogged has become more than adequate as an Atrios-replacement, fulfilling the function of a link-rich, frequently updated blog and doing a much better job of it, frankly!
A Tiny Revolution, already mentioned above, is plausible as a replacement for Talking Points Memo -- although Jonathan Schwartz, the author, does not seem to have the same "contacts" that Josh Marshall cultivates the air of having, the fact that he actually refers to things that happened in the past gives him an air of authority. Not only is he funny, but he also succeeds, unlike most of the "lefty blogosphere," in not being a soulless hack for the Democratic Party [viz. Matt Yglesias].
Finally, The H is O is a fine replacement for Andrew Sullivan's site.)
So, your thoughts? Is there a blogging indie cred? If so, who is the mediator of this cred? I nominate wood s lot personally -- even if he is linked by a thousand blogs, it's structurally impossible for him to sell out, especially with such an impossible-to-remember URL.
(All blogs referred to are linked in my blogroll.)
