"Indie" Authenticity: Redefinitions of the Counterculture in the 1980s and 1990s

As the counterculture waned in the 1970s, new cultural and media institutions arose to provide new outlets for avant garde and underground music groups and to connect activists and community groups. College radio offered a unique opportunity for cultural critics and innovators. Stations gave voice to activist and community groups unable to find purchase on news or commercial radio, and to artists and musicians whose sounds resonated with local cultures but less so with the mass marketed, major label music industry. As college radio formed a national network in the 1980s and 1990s with a particular reputation for facilitating musical discovery and community engagement, it redefined countercultural notions of authenticity with specific regard to authenticity and non-commercialism. This poster will explore the evolution and coalescence of the idea of “indie authenticity,” which continued the intervention of 1960s-era activism in American politics and culture.

Drawn from archival records of individual stations, student and university media, and related publications from local music scenes and nationally distributed press, this poster will both define and complicate the legacies of the counterculture in music and local activism. Sources include both text and image reflections on the idea of authenticity, and will demonstrate emerging coalescence and coherence over time, influenced by broader political and cultural contexts in the United States.

Themes that emerge in this new idea of authenticity include a strong social pressure to adhere to the values of this emerging media identity. While overshadowing the diversity of college and community radio, the emphasis on this “indie” identity, with its commitment to noncommercialism, particularly giving voice to artists without major label contracts. Loyalty to that emerging ideal became a centerpiece of college radio’s reputation, but also became a source of tension between college deejays and stations, university administration and wider communities, and the community of the individual institutions. Indeed, college radio became a centerpiece of larger political and cultural conflicts over the value of diverse and challenging expression—and thus became a key player in the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s. As the value of indie authenticity became a powerful force in American popular culture, it redefined and redirected conversations about the definition of American civic culture itself.