Alter egos and the difference beween pop and indie:
Pop music treats imagination roughly the same way stage musicals do: You can take up the trappings of any aesthetic you like, roving anywhere through style and history, costume, and theme. But the music is always bedrock; it always needs to function as pop. This is how, say, Katy Perry can put across her Candy Land-pinup persona, and Ke$ha can put across her futuristic junkyard-rat persona, while both sing fairly similar songs, co-written with the same guy. It’s also how the songs in musicals can take on the flavor of any setting, genre, or mood, from the Victorian to the hair-metal to the Oklahoman, but always sound, fundamentally, like the kinds of songs one finds in musicals. There’s some underlying formal purpose they have to stick to, and if a musician strays too far from it— if she, say, passes over the trappings of “being inspired by the 20s” and begins to sound too oddly of that decade— listeners feel imposed upon; the artist seems trying, ungenerous.
With indie musicians it’s the opposite. The music itself is allowed to follow its aesthetic imagination off in strange directions, but the artists are often expected not to. The artist is always just an auteur, the creator of a fiction: She might make an album totally committed to theatrical concepts, but she’ll show up to interviews in normal clothes, explaining her ideas like a normal person. Persona, imagination, ideas about style— listeners expect them to be packed into the sound. It’s when a musician tries to embody them in person that fans start grumbling about being imposed upon, or asked to believe in something ludicrous. Pop alter-egos, like Beyoncé’s Sasha Fierce, rarely make an appreciably different kind of music from the stars who spawned them; indie alter-egos tend to be goofy notions concocted to let someone play with an entirely different aesthetic.
