This dissertation traces the tensions surrounding indie music production in Santiago, Chile and Sao Paulo, Brazil. I conducted several years of ethnographic research on locally situated, yet transnationally interpolated, musical production, circulation and listening practices in Santiago and Sao Paulo. I open by detailing the expansion of the indie touring market from the global north into both cities, theorizing the enlistment of affect as a neoliberal technique for producing monetary value. The next chapter considers spaces for musical association as forms of infrastructure that both emerge from and themselves help constitute musical-social networks in Santiago. I follow by showing how the history of Brazilian individuals' engagement with particular sets of indie sounds from the global north bear upon the contemporary formation of infrastructures of social relations, musical aesthetics, and places for musical and social association. Finally, I detail how the tensions between the construction of audience, value, aesthetics and circulation arising from new production structures manifest in the politics of a new type of Brazilian institution called Fora do Eixo. Here, I inspect the logics of aesthetic valuation in building structures for music production within a complex state-private nexus of cultural funding in Brazil. As a whole, this dissertation explores the political struggles emerging as actors seek to establish new structures for participating in live shows and for playing music as both a creative practice and as an economic activity within emerging forms of communication and cultural circulation made possible by digital media. Each struggle is simultaneously interpolated by the messy articulation of transnationally-produced notions of aesthetics, authentic modes of engagement with music, and moral-ethical ways of organizing music production, circulation and remuneration as a social practice. The dissertation thus highlights the way new media and economic logics build upon and clash with historical practices of production, evaluation of aesthetics, and regimes for mediating the artistic, the economic, and the social.

La réflexion proposée par ce travail s’inscrit dans le contexte d’une ascension symbolique du rock au sein du paysage culturel français, qui peut être rapprochée de celle que connaît le jazz de plus longue date. Ainsi le public français de la pop dite « indépendante » (ou indie pop) a-t-il principalement été recruté au sein d’une population étudiante, ou de jeunes actifs, qui peut être qualifiée de cultivée, partageant une même aspiration à se distinguer du goût le plus commun. Le point de départ de notre questionnement est néanmoins celui d’un hiatus entre ce profil culturel et l’apparente trivialité du genre pop : l’attachement de ce public pour le genre a-t-il quelque rapport avec des dispositions légitimes (en dépit des apparences), ou traduit-il au contraire une franche distance vis-à-vis des traits historiques de la culture légitime ? C’est par le biais d’une étude de cas que cette thèse tente d’apporter des éléments de réponse ; celui d’un magazine, Les Inrockuptibles (l’une des principales instances de légitimation de la pop indépendante en France), et de l’un des groupes britanniques que ce dernier a le plus contribué à promouvoir durant les années quatre-vingt-dix, The Divine Comedy. Au terme de cette étude se dessine un ordre de légitimité hybride, qui tient à la fois de valeurs enracinées dans le monde de l’art légitime et de registres hétérodoxes portés par des instances de consécration concurrentes. Cette étude interroge également la relation entre les représentations ainsi associées à The Divine Comedy et les caractéristiques musicales des opus, esquissant une approche musicologique de l’œuvre à l’aune de sa médiation. / The subject of this work falls into the broader context of a symbolic rise of rock in the French cultural landscape, comparable to the similar longstanding evolution of jazz. The French audience of so-called "independent" pop (or indie pop) has been found mainly within a population of students or young workers one might refer to as "educated", and who have aspired to distinguish themselves from the most common musical tastes. Still, the starting point of our concern is that of a gap between this cultural profile and the apparent triviality of the pop genre: has this audience’s fondness anything to do with legitimate dispositions (despite appearances) or, on the contrary, does it step away from the historical features of "legitimate culture"? This thesis attempts to provide answers through a joint case study of the magazine Les Inrockuptibles (one of the main legitimizing institutions of indie pop in France) and one of the British bands it had most contributed to promoting during the 1990s, The Divine Comedy. What this study ultimately reveals is a hybrid type of legitimacy, which holds both the fundamental values of the art world and the heterodox registers of competing legitimizing institutions. This study also investigates the relation between the representations thus associated with The Divine Comedy and the musical features of the opus, sketching a musicological approach of the musical work through its mediation.

This is an essay about love and gender representation in Håkan Hellström’s and Veronica Maggio’s lyrics. The purpose of this essay is to investigate how lyrics of indie-pop music represent gender, sexuality and love. The lyrics used is from love songs performed by Håkan Hellström and Veronica Maggio. The method for examining the lyrics of the love songs is discourse- theory and analysis. I analyzed the results using theories about performativity, heteronormativity and masculine hegemonyic masculinity. I found patterns which indicate that love songs in indie-pop music often represents an ideal relationship to be heteronomy, meaning a heterosexual and monogamous relationship between a man and a woman. Although, there were differences between how a masculinity was built; Hellström’s discourse built a masculinity that was fragile and vulnerable, but still loving and showing a lot of emotions. Maggios discourse built a masculinity that were more or less mirroring the society’s view of how a “man” is supposed to be. Also, the view of femininity differed from the two artists: Hellström’s discourse built a femininity of strong and controlling women, and Maggio’s built a more fragile and normative discourse about femininity. Another theme that was discovered was of all the disappointment that was found in love. Indie-pop’s love is always built around disappointment in the relationship – that you will always be disappointed either by yourself or by your partner.