I feel like as of late I’ve been reading articles left and right discussing the validity of today’s state of rock n’ roll, punk rock, indie rock or whatever the fuck you or Billy Joel wants to call it. I myself watched Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips, someone I grew up admiring on television personally hawking cell phones on TV. Now, I have, throughout my life, mostly eased up on the idea of chastising artists for selling their music to commercials. People who I respect from Iggy Pop to Jonathan Richman, from Guided By Voices to Modest Mouse have sold their music to commercials, and I can live with it for one particular reason: they deserve the money. The more I learn about the long haul of being a working rock musician, my expectations of making any real money lessen further and further. I get how bad it is, and I get that people have kids, grandkids, want some recompense for the plunge they took as teenagers and never got back. However, something about seeing Coyne himself, not Flaming Lips music, his weathered, drug-kissed indie rock image, sitting on a throne for Virgin Mobile, in-between syndicated episodes of The Simpsons made me declare, to anyone who would listen: “It’s official! Indie Rock is dead!”

Now, a totally valid or at least predictable argument is that Flaming Lips haven’t really been an indie rock band in a long time, they’re on a major label, and it isn’t the weirdest thing ever for a major act to appear personally in a commercial like that. I really, really have no issue with bands signing with major labels. I understand why they do it, and it naturally happens when bands get bigger, if it works or not is a complete crapshoot. I don’t believe that signing that contract made The Replacements or Husker Du stink, and I truly don’t feel that way about The Flaming Lips, in fact I like almost all their records. Saying they’re not indie rock doesn’t mean much to me, because they came up in indie rock, in the same generation of DIY zines and college radio, that at 27, I missed completely. Wayne Coyne is an indie artist, label or not, and watching him on that Television I thought this. Robert Pollard wouldn’t do that. Paul Westerberg wouldn’t do that. If D. Boon was alive, he wouldn’t do that. I wouldn’t do that.

That distinction brings me to another article I read the very same day by the member of a band called The Long Winters, who I still haven’t found any good reason to listen to, even as I write this article. This article, by a supposed indie music, declares that “punk rock is bullshit”, complains that he basically felt emasculated by the genre, called out all the hypocrisy of any political stances or credos, he disparaged The Ramones, The Clash and The Sex Pistols and complained that sticking to punk ideals had ruined many of the lives of his peers, thinking that making money, being successful and being happy was “not punk” and vastly compromising their lives.

Being someone who listens to and plays punk music, someone who feels like a punk, especially the older they get… I had to have a reaction, reading this overlong diatribe. Now, the American circuit can be a fairly depressing lot, filled with overdressing, aging bands that have not made any creative advances in 20 or 30 years… but that isn’t everything. His defensiveness about punks making him feel bad, brought me back to being an awkward teenager, who listened to Clash, Ramones, Sex Pistols and Iggy but was too geeky to hang out with real punks, or at least felt that way. In NYC growing up, there were crust punk shows, hardcore shows, pop-punk shows etc. and I mostly went to ska shows because I wasn’t intimidated by the crowds, or hung out in my parent’s basement drinking wine coolers and trying to learn Pixies songs. I didn’t come from a DIY scene. I learned music from the radio. However, as I learned more about the history of rock n’ roll and discovered post-punk and indie rock, I noticed a line in the sand for modern rock, and, for me, the Ramones drew that line.

Basically, every culturally relevant band after them listened to punk and acknowledged it existed, and every irrelevant band didn’t. Not that stupid, meaningless punk bands didn’t exist, in fact they did all over the place. But even on the radio you could tell, in one corner: R.E.M., Nirvana, Weezer, Smashing Pumpkins, Radiohead. In the other corner: Dave Matthews Band, Alanis Morisette, The Black Crowes, Train, Candlebox. At the time, this was all on the same radio format, sitting nicely against each other. I discovered Television, Replacements, Elvis Costello, Joy Division, Violent Femmes… the more I learned, the more I realized it was all punk, and maybe I was a punk. In four years of high school I went from an MC5 afro, to Korn-esque dreadlocks to thinning hair like young Frank Black or Bob Mould… where else could I really stand?

Anyway, that being said, I would have to guess that The Long Winters probably sounds like The Eagles-meet Fleetwood Mac-meet a bad version of Wilco, and y’know, a lot of people probably like that. In fact, that’s what a lot of what passes for “indie” or ‘rock” music in the mainstream these days. It’s not like hip-hop is any better. A lot of the acknowledgement of Lou Reed or Joey Ramone has existed from the mainstream, and there are plenty of us who don’t mind it that way. These were not mainstream artists to begin with.

Being a musician though, it makes me surly, because I’ve been doing this shit for 12 years now, and every time a Brooklyn band that plays rock n’ roll gets signed or blows up on the blogosphere, I honestly wish it was mine. Because I love to do it and I want to do it for the rest of my life. I made a commitment when I was a starry eyed, awkward High School student, and I’m sticking to it. I love bands like Screaming Females, Waxahatchee and Kurt Vile, and want other people to listen to them, I want them to be successful, they are the good ones, and deserve the money. But I also know there’s just as good bands out there that might not get a chance because for the most part, people don’t like this kind of music enough for there to be any money in it. This is a labor of love, and I know that the hard way. Friends who aren’t in bands usually feel like we’re doing really well, but when I reveal the truth about our monetary situation, they often cringe.

So in all these affronts to my livelihood, I have to feel defensive. This is a culture worth keeping alive, and any affronts to my peers, I have to feel defensive, there are some real geniuses out there… I go see their bands, they come to see mine and some of them have become my favorite people. We will continue to support each other until other people give a shit, and if that never happens… well, I try not to think about that.

So when Wayne Coyne destroys the iconography of my favorite genre of music, well… ok, if Wayne Coyne wants money, I guess I can’t really hate on him. I know for a fact that he’s had a long, hard life and in growing from a kid to an adult, I usually try and adopt Buddhist mindsets of understanding and forgiveness instead of the jealousy and resentment that pushed young Elvis Costello and young me to write songs. I guess I can’t take everything personally, including this betrayal. I used to say that “Garden State” killed indie rock anyway, and that was almost 10 years ago.

A couple months ago, my band played with one of the true living geniuses, Jeffrey Lewis, who took a similar stance upon corporate tie-ins from “indie” people like Beck and Best Coast, juxtaposing them with the girls of Pussy Riot rotting in jail for their beliefs, by reading a touching poem called “What Would Pussy Riot Do?” in which he described the plight of having integrity in today’s world, how easy it would be to just take the money, but instead to think about Pussy Riot and the sacrifice they made. I felt this in my bones, and when I saw Wayne Coyne on the TV, I couldn’t help but think about Lewis, Pussy Riot,Wayne Coyne and I, all connected in this weird universe for those few who give a shit about any of this.

Most people just listen to the radio, or Pandora, or Mumford and Sons or whatever the fuck… they don’t care about punk politics, indie rock integrity, DIY culture … they don’t really care about Rock n’ Roll. But some of us do, and that’s why we keep going. We continue the fight, it’s personal and it’s political. It’s local, national and global. If I didn’t give a shit, I probably could have been an advertising executive or something by now… D. Boon said it back in 1984, “punk rock changed our lives”, it takes regular people and puts them in a different trajectory and though it’s been hard and can only get harder, I stand by my teenage decision, and ask all of you out there, if you ever see me hawking cell phones on television, to call me out and ask Paul Westerberg’s eternal question from Tim’s “Left Of The Dial”: “What side are you on?”

Jamie Frey is a writer and musician born and raised in Brooklyn, NY. He sings in The Brooklyn What.