Kaya Oakes delves into the underground and takes some unique routes
Kaya Oakes was one of the founding editors of Kitchen Sink a San Francisco-area recipient of the Utne Readers Independent Press Award an experience that gave her much of the background for her exploration of the many facets of “indie culture.” Since the magazine folded in 2005 Oakes has been teaching writing at USC Berkeley. Her chapter on the challenges facing small and independent presses is one of the most detailed and heartfelt in the book.
Oakes uses an episodic and loosely chronological narrative to drive Slanted and Enchanted. However unlike many studies into contemporary pop culture Oakes constantly shifts her focus through different realms of esthetic endeavours. Furthermore while many of her examples are drawn from the West Coast they are a welcome relief to the standard timelines and examples. She begins her survey with a look at Frank O’Hara who spent his days working at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and his nights writing and sharing his poetry with a group of friends soon to be associated with the New York School. Oakes juxtaposes the quiet introspective work of O’Hara with that of Allen Ginsberg whose more outspoken poems often find themselves at the centre of similar counterculture surveys. For Oakes though O’Hara’s work is important because it serves as a bridge to the more cerebral indie rock output of bands like Pavement and Dave Berman of the Silver Jews.
Indeed whereas most authors write along a fairly traditional Beat-Hippie-Grunge axis Slanted and Enchanted dwells on the hippies only insofar as basement mimeographs served as precursors to the more prolific flowering of zines such as MaximumRocknRoll and Flipside and independent magazines of the late ’80s and early ’90s. She also uses the ’60s to segue into an exploration of the birth of comix and the struggle some of the independent comic houses. Fantagraphics for example experienced a boom of interest in the late ’90s a relatively understudied echo to what happened in the independent music world.
When it comes to music for that matter instead of covering the familiar territory of the early New York punk scene or even Los Angeles Oakes begins her story in 1977 with Calvin Johnson founder of K Records and his arrival at KAOS in Olympia Wash. Johnson’s experiences form the core of what it meant to be a member of an “independent” community far away from a major urban centre. Examples of the music that Johnson liked were few and far between encouraging him and his friends to make their own in keeping with what was seen as the D.I.Y. spirit of the times and Oakes links this with her overarching idea of “indie.”
Johnson would use the emerging zine network to trade tapes with other bands through the mail. Eventually this postal network became so dense that it allowed Johnson and his friends to organize the International Pop Underground Convention the opening night of which featured an event called Love Rock Revolution Style Now and served as a springboard for the emergence of Riot Grrl.
Kaya Oakes also spends time writing about the role that bands such as the Minutemen (along with Black Flag and D.O.A.) played in developing what is today essentially the national punk-touring circuit. It is somewhat surprising that Oakes does not tie this chapter together with the other pieces on zines since the development of regional touring networks was integral to the flowering of collective underground identities and the “scenes” chronicled in the bigger zines. This is also one of the only significant drawbacks to Slanted and Enchanted. While Oakes outlines all these independent communities and speculates about the existence of an “indie culture” she fails to demonstrate how these different groups overlap or what ties them together.
Instead we have the independent crafters and knitters in one corner the Minutemen Operation Ivy Bikini Kill Sub Pop and K Records in another. The ground in-between ought to be littered with copies of Flipside Love and Rockets Kitchen Sink etc. but Oakes never really gets around to offering a compelling reason as to why these people have steadfastly chosen to come together as communities or why they feel the need to juxtapose this lifestyle with a more straightlaced nine-to-five one.
