'Plug in and Play!' UK 'Indie-Guitar' Culture

This chapter examines the construction and representation of gender, so central to issues of production and performance across a range of popular music styles, manifests itself in relation to indie-guitar culture. In the context of the UK, ‘indie-guitar’ has become an essentially generic term in popular music vocabulary to describe a loosely defined, guitar-based sound and its attendant performance and consumption aesthetic. The expressed ‘openness’ of indie-guitar culture is in fact grounded in a series of hardened discourses that have been established by male indie-guitar bands, their predominantly male audiences and the male journalists and writers who have effectively ‘written’ the indie-guitar scene into existence, and constructed its ‘history’, on male terms.