What It’s Like to Be Black in Indie Music

Black artists and professionals discuss the roadblocks they’ve faced and offer ideas on how independent music scenes can change for the better.
Image may contain Silhouette and Art
Graphic by Drew Litowitz

The idea of being independent carries a heightened personal meaning to every marginalized person who has yearned for equality, so it’s especially telling that the term “indie” has historically been ascribed to art mostly created by white people. Since indie music first blossomed as a reaction to the corporate conglomeration of the 1980s, it has represented a culture and business model that holds idyllic potential for creatives with unconventional ideas and few resources. It was an ethos invented by and for outsiders that relied on the vagueness of what an outsider could be.

For decades, the same barriers that have kept Black people from financial parity and acknowledgement in mainstream music have also regularly kept them out of the presumably more inclusive indie music workforce. Even now, when Black artists manage to break into the indie realm, they are often misunderstood and measured by a different standard than their white peers. The often misleading economics at play in the white-dominated, do-it-yourself narrative of independent music, as well as a segregated understanding of genre, feed into the systemic racism that has long plagued indie culture. Over time, the resourceful sound and style of independent music production has become a pastiche for major labels to exploit, and the principles that indie was built upon have failed to produce a legitimately inclusive environment. All of the Black artists and workers I spoke with for this story can speak to this lack of equity first-hand, and so can I.

At first, I was drawn to the progressive possibilities of indie culture. As a teenager in the 2000s, discovering independent record labels like Dischord, famous for its politically charged punk and egalitarian ethos, was incredibly inspiring. I admired the fact that so many in the indie music industry were trying to hold themselves to a higher social and cultural standard than most of their major label colleagues. After high school, I ran my own independent publication and interviewed scores of contemporary musicians, hoping to provide a platform to share honest experiences and capture a diverse creative ecosystem. But once I entered the established indie music industry, I was shocked to see that its ethnic makeup didn’t reflect the wide range of people I encountered while working on my zine. As I got older, my excitement for indie music and the promise it offered began to wane as it became more apparent that so much of the community discreetly functions to serve white people almost exclusively.

Throughout my experience as a label manager at indie imprints Bayonet and Danger Collective, while also contributing writing, photo, and video work for releases on Carpark, Sub Pop, and Hardly Art, I have been one of few, if not the only, Black personnel involved on every project. While I’m appreciative of all the opportunities I’ve had within indie music culture, the feeling of alienation is inescapable.

That sense of loneliness is why I’ve always looked up to and cherished the Black peers I’ve met along the way. Gleaning some of their wisdom and having the chance to commiserate has kept me optimistic and motivated. One of the first Black indie musicians I befriended was Shamir, who has helped expand the idea of how a Black artist can operate and develop in indie music across much of the last decade.

While in high school in suburban North Las Vegas, Shamir formed the lo-fi, acoustic duo Anorexia with his friend Christina Thompson, receiving encouragement and praise from the women-led and non-binary-friendly pockets of the indie world. “Independent music was my space away from a lot of my surroundings,” he tells me. Shamir then made his way to New York to pursue a solo career in indie music, moving into the Bushwick, Brooklyn DIY venue and residency space Silent Barn.

In 2015, he released his bright, electro-pop debut LP, Ratchet, on the British indie juggernaut XL. Led by the heavily licensed single “On the Regular,” the album was a fast critical and commercial success. But Shamir says the lack of representation of Black, non-binary artists like him in the indie community—and his team’s control over the presentation of his work—created unrealistic expectations for him to fill. Looking back on that experience, he says, “I struggled with working in a production style I didn’t want.” Despite Ratchet’s popularity, the album veered far away from the homespun music Shamir was making on his own.

Shortly after Ratchet’s promotion cycle ended, Shamir parted ways with XL and picked up where he left off with the indie rock sounds that inspired him in the first place. He relocated to Philadelphia in 2017 and put out the brooding Revelations on grassroots label Father/Daughter as well as his first self-released album, Hope. Both releases showcased a more vulnerable side of Shamir, but they polarized many fans of the more polished Ratchet. While plenty of white indie acts are heralded for changing their sound and becoming more self-reliant, when Shamir abandoned the lush production that listeners were comfortable expecting from a queer pop star, many critics and fans reacted as though he was making a mistake. “One big lesson I learned was people are just uncomfortable when Black people don’t fit their set ideas of what they want,” he says. “Once I started to do something that was out of the ideal they had for me, they were writing about everything I was doing wrong.”

Shamir didn’t let this discouragement prevent him from pursuing a more independent creative practice and style, as he continued to self-release and self-produce more music. Around the same time, he also started to mentor young musicians in Philly’s DIY scene, hoping to impart what he learned from personal experience onto emerging artists. In 2018, he announced his own label, Accidental Popstar, where he now seeks to nurture underexposed artists while giving them the tools to avoid the obstacles he has faced. This week, the 25-year-old self-managed artist is self-releasing his upbeat and affirming new album, Shamir, on his own terms. His seventh full-length in just five years, Shamir is the first to fully integrate his pop and indie rock sensibilities, while preserving his uncompromising approach.

Equity within any industry relies on education and access, and it’s often hard for young Black people to find employment or learn about how the indie world operates. Internships are still the gateway for so many people who work in all facets of the music industry, but since most of them only offer school credit, companies often end up hiring those who have the privilege to dedicate time and labor for free. Digital coordinator at the independent press, radio promo, and licensing company Terrorbird, Sabrina Lomax, 25, tells me, “I worked all through college—there never would have been a reality where I would take on some part-time label job for free, because I was using that time to make money to pay for school expenses.”

Upon signing to XL in 2014, at age 19, Shamir had the foresight to know that many labels can take advantage of their artists’ lack of awareness. So he asked to intern for the label as preparation for the promotion of his album. “That internship saved me from a lot of things, because big labels really don’t want the artist to be educated,” he points out. The experience helped provide him with context for how the release process worked and how other artists’ projects were being promoted, which eventually helped him to realize that he and his team were not on the same page about his career later on. “I think I would still find myself in a tough situation had I not had that slight education,” Shamir says.

People working in indie music and other creative industries are regularly expected to feel lucky about any opportunity they’re offered. But cred and exposure only go so far when you’re responsible for your own survival. “Even if you love making music, you still need to make money,” Lomax says, “and that opens up a lot of opportunities for people to take advantage of you.”

Before the COVID pandemic, Lomax worked from Terrorbird’s office in East Williamsburg, the neighborhood that once was the epicenter of Brooklyn’s DIY scene. Venues and collectives built on self-sustaining values and practices have been a staple of indie culture throughout its existence, but in practice, the DIY ethos can quickly reveal the disproportionate privilege and access to resources of a given community. “The DIY scene isn’t as ‘do-it-yourself’ as many people think,” Lomax attests. “There’s a lot that has to happen behind the scenes for people to thrive in that: Who’s getting you to those cities to play shows, who’s paying for your equipment, and who’s helping you make those T-shirts so you can sell them on the road?”

Riliwan Salam, 35, who currently manages independent rappers Fat Tony and Dai Burger, and has worked in both the independent and major label music industries, says Black artists often gravitate towards major label deals out of necessity. “There are not a lot of us working in the indie world ’cause there’s not a lot of money there,” he says. “I feel like there are a lot of art-school kids who have a comfort level or cushion and can afford to make this esoteric art and play a show to 70 people.”

Father/Daughter A&R and creative director of the indie website Portals, Tyler Andere, has built a wealth of knowledge of every aspect of the music promotion process by launching self-motivated projects as a journalist, curator, and organizer. Andere got his start in indie music in 2010 as the writer behind a relatively anonymous Tumblr blog called Flashlight Tag. “Part of my breaking into the industry was that I didn’t have to ID as a Black person right away,” he says. “Maybe my experience would have been different if I was more explicit about that.” Andere remembers the first time he met many of his blogger peers in person, at Austin’s SXSW festival in 2011. “I had all of these interactions that were like, ‘Oh, you’re Flashlight Tag?!’ Those were my first experiences with micro forms of racism—just in people being surprised that there’s a Black person at SXSW who’s a music writer.”


Black people in the indie community are constantly made to feel as though they should fit their white peers’ expectations of them. So much of this stems from the way Black people have been removed from the history of underground culture, making white people assume they never existed there in the first place.

Many of the groundbreaking music movements of the past hundred years have begun with traditions or innovations by people of color, only to be adopted and reappropriated by opportunists of a white ruling class. Black Americans in particular have played a vital role in shaping their nation’s musical identity, consistently creating music as a way to openly communicate and preserve the heritage that was stripped away from them.

The American music traditions of jazz, country, and R&B are rooted in Black traditions and were first played by Black musicians who were never made to feel as American as their white peers. This trend has also continued for decades within underground genres like punk, house, and reggae, where Black pioneers are often copied and overshadowed by the white musicians they inspired. H.R. of Bad Brains inspired hardcore punk frontmen Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat and Fugazi as well as Henry Rollins of Black Flag. Several Black DJs, including Paul Johnson and Lil Louis, are referenced on Daft Punk’sTeachers,” though they are rarely given the same recognition as the French duo. 2 Tone ska was entirely centered around integrating British youth with multiracial bands like the Selecter and the Specials, but the sound became whitewashed by American bands like Reel Big Fish and Less Than Jake in the ’90s once it was more commercially viable.

In fact, plenty of Black people have played huge roles in the development of underground culture and independent music. In the ’70s, British filmmaker Don Letts managed the London clothing boutique Acme Attractions, which influenced punk fashion and turned white scenesters onto roots reggae. The Scroggins sisters of early-’80s Bronx group ESG have had a lasting impact on New York dance and no wave sounds for decades, and their track “UFO” is one of the most sampled songs in the history of recorded music. In the late ’90s and early 2000s, Kimya Dawson of the Moldy Peaches was vital to the development of the anti-folk music scene, eventually helping to bring indie to the masses with her band’s contribution to the Juno soundtrack, which reached No. 1 on the Billboard 200 in 2008.

For many generations, Americans have identified the average underground music and art consumer as a “hipster”—the term was used in the 1950s to describe young white pseudo-intellectuals who read beat poetry and in the 2000s to describe young white pseudo-intellectuals who read indie music blogs. The term as we now understand it first came into prominence in the 1940s as an easy shorthand to describe young, white people who wanted to engage in the Black subculture of jazz. With “hipster,” white listeners and journalists had a descriptor that allowed them to fit into the scene and feel like experts, leading to the kind of cultural appropriation of Black underground lifestyles described by Norman Mailer in his 1957 essay The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster. So even the derivation of the word “hipster” could be seen as an early example of white audiences asserting control over a burgeoning Black music scene.


Even if the ideals of independent music are relevant to Black listeners, it can be hard for them to make the leap into participating in the scene if they don’t see themselves represented in it. Rachel Aggs, 33, of the UK punk bands Shopping and Sacred Paws, grew up in the English countryside and was one of only a few queer people of color in their immediate surroundings as an adolecent. “I was really inspired by Riot grrrl and queercore and very identity-led punk movements and scenes,” Aggs says. “That expression of pride or defiance was always a part of playing music as a minority person.”

After moving to London as an adult, Aggs formed their first band, Trash Kit, with then-roommate Rachel Horwood, after they bonded over their shared experience of being bi-racial. “I started listening to a lot of punk,” Aggs says, “but I wasn’t really considering starting a band until I actually thought about the fact that I wasn’t aware of any other Black punk bands.”

While touring with their bands in the U.S. in the early 2010s, Aggs was thrilled to meet people like Brontez Purnell of Younger Lovers and Osa Atoe of New Bloods, who were among only a few Black punk bands at the time that were releasing albums on far-reaching indie labels like Southpaw and Kill Rock Stars. “It wasn’t really until I connected with Osa and read her Shotgun Seamstress zine that I was like, ‘Oh, there were all of these Black punks. They just weren’t being written about.’”

Because Black artists often work with management and executives who are predominantly white, they are historically more susceptible to being misheard, misrepresented, and mismarketed. “So many of our stories get mangled, and I feel like art is a way for people to truly write their history the way they experienced it,” says multi-instrumentalist, recording artist, and Sooper Records co-founder NNAMDÏ, 30. “That’s really important to me with putting out other musicians’ projects as well.” NNAMDÏ has played in many Chicago indie bands, while also producing genre-defying experimental music with his own solo project. He and his partners at Sooper help artists tell their own stories through their music. “It’s important to work with people that get you to speak from what’s really inside instead of taking what you say and twisting it into something else that’s just based on what they think is profitable,” he says.

Record labels, publicists, journalists, and promoters have so much control over the context that indie music is presented in. If the staff of these companies don’t reflect a range of identities and backgrounds, they can fail to properly tell artists’ stories—or even properly contextualize their music. “One of the more frustrating aspects of the streaming world is how Black music is categorized,” says Terrorbird’s Lomax, whose job includes pitching music to streaming playlists. “Even if I wanted to go against the grain with an artist I wanted to promote, I’m not really helping that artist if I pitch their project as this cool new indie music if Spotify still says, ‘No, this is R&B.’ At the end of the day, everyone gets screwed.”

White people in the indie world often have so much confidence in their idea of what a Black artist should look and sound like that they craft a narrative for themselves that further perpetuates misrepresentation and revisionist histories. Bay Area educator and the mastermind behind experimental pop project SPELLLING, Tia Cabral, remembers reading an article that claimed “James Blake opened the gateway for artists like me to create the kind of music that I make, which I thought was interesting, because his style of singing is really rooted in Black soul music.” Cabral’s Afrofuturist sound and approach was born out of poetry performances at house shows in Oakland’s encouraging DIY scene. But once she began playing more conventional live spaces, she noticed a heightened culture of competition between artists. “That mindset can be really discouraging,” she says, “especially for artists of color who, on top of being in a position of not making a lot of money doing music, don’t have the same set of privileges and access.”

Being on the road as a Black indie act comes with its own set of problems. “Safety while touring is a big concern that a lot of white artists take for granted, but it’s something we can’t choose to disengage with,” says Cabral. “As a Black musician on tour, you are political. You can’t opt out of that.”

Early on, while booking tours for emo and punk bands that he played in, NNAMDÏ quickly realized that he would get fewer email replies if he used his real name, Nnamdi Ogbonnaya. “So I ended up making a ‘manager’ email,” he says, “and I’d get way more responses that way.” Many indie bands touring without additional funds resort to crashing at friends’ homes around the country, sometimes even asking strangers in the audience if they have a place that could host the band for the night. “I definitely remember experiences where I felt like I was crazy because it seemed like our host was maybe watching me more than other people in the band,” NNAMDÏ says. “It has felt like I have to be on my best behavior in those situations.”

Although the current indie community still fails Black artists and workers in many ways, the Black people participating in the industry are hopeful to be a part of more structural change moving forward. 4AD label manager Nabil Ayers, 48, has made lasting contributions to indie culture over the past three decades, but recognizes that significant progress happens slowly. Ayers, who has written for Pitchfork, started working in music as a student DJ at the University of Puget Sound at the height of college radio’s impact on alternative culture in the early ’90s. On his weekly show, Ayers remembers playing noisy guitar rock —Drive Like Jehu, Failure, Sonic Youth—while also trying to spin Black artists like Funkadelic, Bad Brains, and 24-7 Spyz to break up the string of mostly white bands on the airways. “Alternative radio is very, very white, and it always has been,” he says. “It’s easy to say, ‘Those stations should play more Black artists.’ But that also means labels should have more artists and employees of different colors. It all goes back so far, and that’s what’s so hard about changing things.”

In 1997, Ayers co-opened the Seattle store Sonic Boom Records, and he maintained part ownership until 2016. Ayers remembers the excitement he felt when the first releases by Black-led indie bands TV on the Radio and Bloc Party arrived at the store in the mid-2000s. “I was pretty blown away and thinking, Who is this? And then once I realized they were Black, I thought, Wow, this is great! I hope there will be more of this.” Both groups achieved critical and commercial success, but indie bands with Black members were still few and far between on label rosters through the ’00s. In 2009, Ayers was offered a management role at the American headquarters of legacy British indie label 4AD, and since then he has witnessed more Black artists signing to indie labels than ever before in his career.

Now, Ayers is beginning to see a more meaningful shift towards recognizing racial inequity in indie music. With some shock in his tone, he says, “The biggest change happening now is how everyone is talking about it—not just those who are affected, but those who are the ones making people feel affected and those who never knew they were a part of the issue and were passively keeping things the same way.”

There are plenty of immediate actions any indie music company can do to make things more equitable across the board. Shamir puts it elegantly: “Hire Black people, it’s really as simple as that.” Shamir argues that indie music should be marketed to more diverse demographics as well. “If you’re not putting these alternative Black artists in front of Black listeners, you’re just essentially signing Black people to be subject to the gaze of a primarily white audience.”

When asked about the new generation of Black indie artists, artist manager Salam points out, “Kids are more aware of having ownership or power, and that brings more leverage. We’re in a trajectory where labels will have to meet artists in the middle more and more now.” Having experience on both the artist and label side, NNAMDÏ says, “Ultimately, if you’re helping your artists, you’re helping yourself. So I don’t really believe in the intention to keep artists in the dark so that people can take advantage of them.”

Indie record labels also need to not be afraid to lose money on Black artists in the same way that they’re not afraid to lose money on white artists. “Anybody who knows anything about the music industry knows that most music isn’t profitable, but there’s this sense that Black music is not valuable unless it’s profitable,” says Lomax. “It speaks to real racism in the label world because, if it was always a matter of making money, no artists would get signed.” Andere, who has launched the careers of several Black indie artists like Tasha, Anjimile, and Christelle Bofale through Father/Daughter, adds, “So many of these labels are willing to take a chance on white indie band after white indie band, but for Black artists there has to be this whole complex story and they have to have all the correct boxes checked to make it possible for them to even get a chance.”

Thanks to affordable home recording equipment and more egalitarian forms of promotion and distribution, there is now a whole generation of young Black people who have more power and resources than ever to make and share their music how they see fit. Rather than continuing to employ an outdated business model while taking advantage of artists’ lack of knowledge, indie labels will need to curate a future with more intention if they want to maintain any influence.

As with so many other institutions, once the indie industry confronts its complacency in upholding racist traditions, it can create a more equal future for everyone. For indie music to live up to its original intentions and continue to hold itself to a higher standard than the major label status quo, the community must seriously examine the systemic racism of its past and present. The problem can’t be patched over. Structural transformation is necessary.