2010: No. 1
“Take That (Or, Why I Am Not an Indie Rocker)” 

If you’ve never invested some part of your identity into a musical genre or scene ideology, you probably don’t think about credibility very much. In fact, if you’re anything like the overwhelming majority of people who listen to music on any level, questions of credibility are somewhat of a nuisance. A song is either good, or it’s bad. This shouldn’t be math.

If anything, this is our musical preset. We don’t come into the world with notions of authenticity and credibility; no five-year-old walks into kindergarten and asks their teacher if they got into education for the “right” reasons. Credibility is an adopted construct that, if we really want to break it down, serves an extremely useful function in some areas of life (as in choosing a healthcare provider) and a terribly useless function in other areas (as in arguing over whether or not Tim Armstrong lost any punk credibility for co-writing an album with P!nk). But even in those spheres of life where it actually matters, so-called credibility is not an absolute arbiter of judgment. It is arbitrary, unevenly applied, and awarded with only the available information at that particular moment.

Which means that our symbols of authenticity are owned by a dominant fiction. They are as relativistic and unreliable as our symbols for beauty, morality, or aesthetics.

And yet, when we talk about music, credibility still matters. It has been, on some level, factored into our estimations of Coldplay (whose work with Brian Eno spares them from the scorn reserved for Keane), Robyn (whose co-sign from The Knife weakened initial suspicion from electro and techno purists), and even Kanye West (who scored a mutual cred-boost from his collaborations with Bon Iver). It’s sometimes attached to who puts your records out or who takes you out on tour. It is transmitted through a message that is pounded into our heads, in which “manufactured” music is poisoned, singers should always be their own songwriters, and music should always be more “interesting” than pleasurable. These are the myths that fan the flames of indie rock: It is a cult of credibility, and you think you don’t care about it as much as you actually do.

So learning to love Take That as much as I do really challenged everything I ever believed about what it means to be a meaningful artist. I mean, their backstory borders on absurd: They were five young boys, chosen partially when — after having to take their shirts off for a svengali manager during auditions — each of them proved to be fit. They got their start singing in British gay clubs, shamelessly singing with bare chests and short-shorts, dancing to songs that would later appear on a full-length debut album laughably titled, Take That and Party. Yet by the time they broke up for the first time in 1996, the English government actually had to set up telephone hotlines to counsel distraught and suicidal teenagers around the country. You can’t make this shit up!

But something incredible happened in the ten years between their break-up and reformation, and to watch it unfurl over the last few years has been, to me, somewhat awe-inspiring. For one thing, Gary Barlow and Mark Owen somehow became incredible songwriters and musicians in their own right! Their 2006 comeback album, Beautiful World, owed a larger debt to the Beatles than it did New Kids on the Block; it was a rich and classic song-centered album in the British pop tradition. For another, the band never shied away from acknowledging their past while formulating their reinvention, but worked it in with panache and a wink: When Take That went on tour to support their career-defining follow-up, The Circus, in 2009, a special section of the show featured the band mournfully applying clown make-up to their faces before attacking a medley of old hits with a full on circus production in the background. (They closed the segment by riding away on unicycles.) Compare this to the guy from Ratatat, who seems loathe to simply admit that he began his career as the guitar player for Dashboard Confessional, and it’s remarkably clear. Only one of these artists is truly free.

The fact is that credibility has been institutionalized by scene ideologies and critical tropes. And because we don’t own it, we are unwillingly controlled by it. We consume, evaluate, and in many cases, simply dismiss media based on outdated historicism and meaningless signifiers of taste — and this is precisely why I am not an indie rocker. Much less an over-idealistic punk. Because, by my estimation, a group of 40-year-old men who, only twenty years ago, appeared in a music video naked while smearing jelly over themselves just made the album of the year.