One only needs to browse the topics page of Hipster Runoff to see this phenomenon in full bloom: page after page of slump-shouldered, pudgy, and/or bearded guys interspersed with stick-thin, big-eyed, attractive young women. It’s something of a given that celebrities (or “celebrities”) will be more attractive than your average fan, but at least major-label media has an even field: the men and women are all unattainably hot. Indie’s implicit D.I.Y., garage/bedroom musician assumptions mean that anyone can become a star, which is true if you’re a dude. Not so much if you’re a lady.

So it’s so far, so good for Annie Clark. She is authentic, having played in and toured with the Polyphonic Spree and Sufjan Stevens. She is a serious musician according to her guitar soloing skills. And she is quite attractive. In this way, she’s the perfect trojan horse of a woman musician: passing all the indie litmus tests while telling the testers where to stick it.

I wrote something about St. Vincent where I construe her music as being essentially upending to the indie structure of power. Making the claim that she’s the first woman to “break into” indie music is a little weird, I agree, but I think her work does a lot to question the weirdly systemic fungibility of women musicians in indie (specifically). And if it seems like women have made it in indie, via Riot grrrl or the entire tradition of women making popular and challenging music dating back to Patti Smith, I’d direct you to overwhelming sales succes for Wild Flag’s debut, or even the whole mess of female-fronted punk and emo bands who’ve broke into popularity to play the Warped Tour. This sort of critique is already flawed, intrinsically, since it hinges on my conceptualizing Annie Clark in my own personal way. Given that, it’s something that interests me. I suppose it should be a non-issue, but it seems like the literal commodity status of certain brands of people has always been a “non-issue”, and this very non-issue-ness is what perpetuates it.