Underdogma
Weakness has been a prevailing aesthetic of what is now called indie-pop long enough to warrant some serious reflection. Its brand of ressentiment — the geek shall in
herit the earth! — is now available for purchase in the form of thick-framed glasses at your local Urban Outfitters, courtesy of Indonesian sweatshop labor. A lilting, grade-school cursive is its signature font, and anemic line drawings of all things harmless, vulnerable and sheepish (its peculiarly conformist timidity lending itself, as it were, to a flock mentality), often birds like pigeons and sparrows, make up 
much of its visual content. 
And yet much of its music has an anthem-like quality (four-on-the-floor, chanted choruses), a soaring magic feelism that is the recipe for an enchanted sense of empowerment for the crowd, atomized though they may be by the earbuds of their iPod headphones.
The empowerment it peddles, though, recruits the listener like an insidious marching beat, a pied-piper hypnotism to which one finds oneself given over and chanting along with an imaginary crowd that evaporates at the end of the song. If this moment feels like waking from a dream, we might then call the song a success of indie-pop writing, since a lyrical hallmark of indie is the attempt to reconcile escapism with affirmation and authenticity. Take Arcade Fire’s “No Cars Go.” This is an anthem of innocence, calling all victims of banal obligation and worldly burden to the magical place only “we” know, “between the click of the light and the start of the dream”:
We know a place where no planes go/ We know a place where no ships go
HEY! No cars go / HEY! No cars go…
HEY! Us kids know! / HEY! No cars go…
Between the click of the light and the start of the dream
But for all its fancy-free innocence, childlike and wide-eyed, indie pop is thoroughly anti-Nietzschean, having not only replaced Übermensch with Under Dog, but having neutered the latter of any particular personhood, any character, and thus rendering Under Dog an -ism. Toward the end of “No Cars Go,” the marching beat rolls on the backs of the violins’ ever shriller, mounting tremolo, into thundering crashes at the climax, a rallying cry to join in, to go along:
Little Baby, LET’S GO! / Women and children, LET’S GO!…
/Don’t know where we’re going!
…followed by the chorus of voices singing along in unison with the melody.
Really? So, after all that, we don’t know where we’re going? And, to reiterate a central question about pop lyricism, who is this “we?”
In the case of Arcade Fire, arguably the leaders of the indie flock, it’s “we kids,” the innocent flock itself. “We” are the innocent, fleeing the reality of a world wherein cars, ships and planes drive the relations of production and consumption “between” the places of their departure and destination, and on which hinge the relations “between” the people who populate those places.
“We” exempt ourselves from this for a place only “we know” — found instead “between” the onset of darkness and the onset of a dream — that is, found in the moment of falling, falling asleep. And of course, anyone can find this place; all one has to do is count the sheep.
