Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture [Paperback]

Kaya Oakes (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 9, 2009

A lively examination of the spirit and practices that have made the indie movement into a powerful cultural phenomenon

You know the look: skinny jeans, Chuck Taylors, perfectly mussed bed-head hair; You know the music: Modest Mouse, the Shins, Pavement. You know the ethos: DIY with a big helping of irony. But what does it really mean to be “indie”?

As popular television shows adopt indie soundtracks and the signature style bleeds into mainstream fashion, the quirky individuality of the movement seems to be losing ground. In Slanted and Enchanted, Kaya Oakes demonstrates how this phase is part of the natural cycle of a culture that reinvents itself continuously to preserve its core ideals of experimentation, freedom, and collaboration.

Through interviews and profiles of the artists who have spearheaded the cause over the years—including Mike Watt, David Berman, Kathleen Hanna, and Dan Clowes—Oakes examines the collective creativity and cross-genre experimentation that are the hallmarks of this popular lifestyle trend. Her visits to music festivals, craft fairs, and smaller collectives around the country round out the story, providing a compelling portayal of indie life on the ground. Culminating in the current indie milieu of music, crafting, style, art, comics, and zines, Oakes reveals from whence indie came and where it will go next.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this lively and highly literate explication of various American indie scenes and art forms, Oakes argues for the value and importance of a lively, community-based do-it-yourself tradition. In discrete chapters on zines, small presses, comics, independent music labels and numerous other subjects, Oakes focuses on a few exemplary artists or companies that embody the integrity that she lionizes. Her focus on independent publishing and writing—she is a cofounder of the eclectic Kitchen Sink magazine—provides a worthy parallel narrative to Michael Azzerad's essential indie music history, This Band Could Be Your Life, with which her book shares some heroes, most notably the affable Mike Watt of the Minutemen. Oakes begins the book with a much appreciated primer on some of the intellectual forebears of her book's central characters, including the poets Frank O'Hara and Allen Ginsberg and the revolutionary street theater group the Diggers. She ends it with a mournful chapter on the co-opting of indie culture by companies like Urban Outfitters and the TV show The O.C. The complex effect of the Internet on traditional indie culture is given relatively little space, which weakens the book's effectiveness as a guide to current trends and artistic networks, but as an explanation and excavation of the already fading recent past, it is essential reading. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal

Indie culture exists outside of and often rails against mainstream culture—independent record stores in opposition to Best Buy, crafts festivals instead of Ikea, zines as opposed to Rolling Stone. As a corollary, poet Oakes (writing, Univ. of California, Berkeley; Telegraph) reminds us, indie culture has a strong history of reciprocity between producer and consumer; it is a creative community that should produce an equal amount of inspiration and consumption. Oakes locates the evolution of this idealism in the cultural explosion that occurred in the 1950s and 1960s. Covering musicians, zines, comics, independent presses, and homemade crafts and events, Oakes uses the concept of a creative community as a mediating theme to illustrate how indie culture has oscillated between the music and literary scene throughout the last few decades. Ultimately, she questions the future of indie culture in its currently oversaturated and corporate form. Recommended for all public libraries; this will particularly appeal to artists, musicians, writers, and kids with thick-rimmed glasses.—Joshua Finnell, McNeese State Univ. Lib., Lake Charles, LA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Holt Paperbacks; 1 Original edition (June 9, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805088520
• ISBN-13: 978-0805088526
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #849,584 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I'm the author of Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture. The book looks at three eras in the history of what we now call indie, and examines everything from music to comics to small press publishing to zines and crafting, including interviews with more than thirty different artists and indie advocates. My next book, Radical Reinvention, is forthcoming from Counterpoint Press in April of 2012. Since 1999, I've taught writing at UC Berkeley, and I live in my hometown of Oakland, California with a drummer and three cats.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Why you'll love this book, July 18, 2009

By 

J. Ahearn "Joe Ahearn" (Austin, TX, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture (Paperback)

Here are three good reasons to read Kaya Oakes' fascinating new book, Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture:

1. For the history. Slanted and Enchanted contains a completely engaging, informed, and remarkably well-researched account of how independent art and culture have developed in the United States from the 1950s to the present moment. Oakes provides wonderful capsule histories of not only "major" underground art and cultural movements, but also many lesser-known ones. From the Beats to contemporary craft fairs, from punk to modern independent publishing, from the Diggers to Riot Grrrl, Oakes is on the beat with the scoop.

2. For the analysis. Oakes is not only concerned with providing a history of independent culture, but also with trying to understand what that culture means as we try to understand the larger issues of American history and society. Accordingly, she devotes considerable space in her book to questions of how indie culture works, what it means, and how it functions in relation to the larger mainstream culture. Oakes' analysis of how corporate culture uses indie culture as a source of new ideas to rip off, rebrand, and re-sell is particularly illuminating.

3. For fun. Slanted and Enchanted is a lot of fun to read, not least because it clues you in on all kinds of interesting developments in art, literature, cartooning, music, and crafting in literally every part of the country. As I read, I found myself reaching for a pencil to take notes on cool new books to read, music to listen to, films to watch, websites to visit. And I also found myself writing down a lot of quotations from Oakes' interviews and sources. Some of them are hilarious ("Poetry is like putting on a funny suit...") and some are inspiring ("to make something on your own, regardless of the potential to bring in money, lends the end product an inherent sense of value that would be absent if it were a copy of a copy of a copy..."), but continually stumbling upon these little nuggets made the book a joy to read.

I was particularly taken with Oakes' account of the Diggers, the legendary activist and guerrilla-theater cooperative, and with the Riot Grrrl movement that began in Olympia, Washington and then went on to conquer the world. I'd heard of both movements, but always wanted to know more about them. I found Oakes' introductions very useful and also very interesting. (Thanks also to Oakes for mentioning Austin's very own Effing Press. Here in Austin, we know and love Effing and it's nice to see this fine press getting some well-deserved attention.)

If you believe in the possibilities of intelligent work done outside the boundaries of corporate cubicle farms, in the value of the handmade and truly original, and in the importance of not only creative energy but the ethics of careful craft and community building, I think you'll love this book. I know I did.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent and engaging look at indie culture, July 13, 2009

By 

Kaulika - See all my reviews

This review is from: Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture (Paperback)

One of the terrible things that can happen to any vibrant subculture is for it to be dryly dissected in academia, or written about in a fluff piece by someone who knows the culture but doesn't know how to analyze it. Fortunately for indie culture, we have Kaya Oakes, who as a scholar and indie maven manages to write a book that is as fascinating to read as it is enjoyable. Which is to say - very.

I don't know a whole lot about indie culture as a whole, despite having been anywhere from its fringes to deeply embedded in it from my teen years until today. But reading Slanted & Enchanted has been enlightening, as well as entertaining. In current scholarship the trend is to be self-reflective while investigating one's subject, and Oakes does this deftly, weaving in pieces of her own story and experience of researching the book, while including top-notch interviews and analysis of the key musicians, artists, crafters, publishers and other people who made indie what it is and are helping it to evolve. Oakes's writing style is fresh and engaging, taking the reader on a journey through indie culture that is always approachable, never slipping into hipster hyperbole. Her background as a poet makes her writing come to life, and the whole book manages to tell a story as it lays bare the evolution of indie.

If you're at all interested in contemporary culture, in modern music, independent art, independent publishing, or anything remotely related to those things, I think you'll find this book to be enlightening and entertaining. Highly recommended!

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic and approachable, June 4, 2010

By 

Steve Boese (New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture (Paperback)

An excellent review of the development and evolution of indie that was interesting, illuminating, and very accessible for someone like me that was not as familiar with all the artists and movements profiled in the book. Enjoyable and fascinating and highly recommended.