In yet another attempt at talking about music in terms of ideology and not melody, this week’s column is an attempt at drawing out some of the meanings behind underground and mainstream music. To do this, it’s helpful to reference my previous effort. Do you actually remember what I wrote two weeks ago, in the last installment of the critically acclaimed "The Price of Coffins is Gonna Rise"? If you do, you are a big nerd. Only a nerd would lead a life that was so boring that an interview with obscure hardcore band Orchid was actually a memorable thing. But, I take solace in knowing that my readers are not nerds. In fact, they are cool people. My readers are the sort of people that reference The New Yorker in jokes and like drinks whose names the rest of us can’t remember. Right now, my readers are probably wearing smart-looking sweater-vests and pretending to like free jazz.

But I digress. To refresh your memory (which has been dulled by Evan Williams bourbon and the horsetrack), I left the last episode with an interview with Jayson Green of the band Orchid (an interview which my sweatpants-wearing editors deemed "a confusing marriage of Foucault and jumping"). I’m sure you can find it in the archives if you missed it the first time around. This week I’d like to clear up some issues that we addressed in that conversation. I will do this quite one-sidedly, as I didn’t feel like continuing a cumbersome e-mail interview with Mr. Green.

When asked to comment on what Michel Foucault would say about underground music, Jayson posited that the late Frenchman would place independent music and mainstream music in the same discourse. This is probably a correct analysis, as both independent and mainstream musicians must present their art to a consumer public and, ultimately, their ability to continue depends on their ability to sell records. The problem is that this ignores part of the discourse: what are the ultimate goals of the musician? Is selling records merely a stepping stone to some other goal? To both of these questions, the answer is a resounding, "Yes." Or, "No." But that answer is wrong.

People often make a badly mistaken analogy: underground music is to mainstream music as minor league baseball is to major league baseball. "Underground musicians are struggling in obscurity, trying to break into the big leagues of double-necked guitars and blowjobs," so the logic goes. "Underground music should be appreciated for the endearing quality of participants who are trying hard but just aren’t good enough to get any further. All an underground musician could ever want is to be a mainstream musician." While few people actually say these things, these thoughts are in the back of someone’s mind when they say, "Yeah, they’re good…for a college band," or, "They may be good, but I want a real band to play at this event…you know, somebody with a name." These statements play on two myths that I want to address here: that underground bands are reasonably good, but amateurish, versions of mainstream bands and that a band’s "realness" somehow correlates to their name recognition. The reality is that many underground bands (to be sure, a few bands are underground because they suck and can’t get famous) simply would rather not become mainstream.

Why would a band wish to remain in the underground? Surely, we can all recognize that there is a very limited scope of music in the mainstream. Off the top of my head, I can think of perhaps four genres of music that regularly sell millions of albums: sexy teenagers singing over bad techno beats, overgrown boys playing some form of rap-rock and letting women get raped at their concerts, rap songs that address issues such as spinning donuts in Bentleys, and divas wearing leather halter-tops. If that’s what it takes to be famous in the mainstream, then it seems clear to me why so many bands would rather not bother with it.

Such a reason is easily countered, though. "Wouldn’t you still just like for your preferred genre of music to sell more records than Vanilla Ice?" Perhaps not, say many underground bands. Indeed, a more substantial reason to embrace the underground is that profit is not a motivating factor in the production of music. While underground music does happen in a society that uses money as the primary source of exchange, I believe that underground musicians would not cease to create art if, all of a sudden, money quit playing a role. Do you really think that Limp Bizkit or Mystikal would continue to make music if they had to do it for free? This is an absolutely critical difference in mainstream and underground art: the influence of money. Quite the opposite of bloated mainstream rock-stars, underground bands typically actively lose money: that’s right, underground bands spend money to play music. There is obviously some other reward, and I don’t think that it’s just being on stage performing. (If you want to be in the public eye, write a newspaper column.)

Underground musicians are motivated by the music itself, by the community that underground art engenders, and by being able to personally touch their fans (both literally and figuratively) on a one-on-one basis. Not only is the mainstream bad, but the underground is good, say these reasons. If mainstream tastes change, if we have a Leninist revolution, underground music will still be here, because the underground is good for its own sake, not merely as an alternative to the mainstream.

While just about a bazillion bands embrace the underground (including countless bands in the Inland Empire alone), one example that stands above the rest as the embodiment of underground music, it’s Washington, DC’s Fugazi, who, for more than a decade, have remained out of the mainstream. They embrace music for music’s sake, expanding their realm of both challenge and beauty with each release. There is a vibrant underground music community in DC that is directly tied to Fugazi, who support other bands in the scene almost as much as they support their own band, a community in which every band helps every band. Finally, Fugazi makes strong attempts to touch people that mainstream music forgets about: they play shows in prisons, they tour third-world nations, and they don’t exclude the poor (you’ll never have to pay more than eight dollars to see them), or the young (all their shows are all-ages). Fugazi shows a commitment to a completely different set of ideas/ideals than any band in the mainstream. For Fugazi to be who they are and stand for what they do, it has been necessary for them to remain outside of the mainstream.

This has hopefully discounted the claim that underground bands are somehow lesser than mainstream bands. The underground is an alternative, not a minor league. Of course, this does not just apply to bands: KSPC is an alternative to mainstream radio, not a shitty version of KROQ; independent films are an alternative to Hollywood, not movies that had to settle for someone less than Kevin Costner because of budgetary restraints. And my grandfather’s moonshine was an alternative to Miller High Life.

You get the picture. The underground and the mainstream are different and need to be judged on different terms. In fact, they may not even be part of the same discourse.