RICHARD A. KERR posted:ScienceShot: Asteroid Vesta As a Failed Planet
Since slipping into orbit around the solar system's second-most massive asteroid last July, NASA's Dawn spacecraft has confirmed Vesta's status as a body whose arrested growth denied it true planethood. In a series of papers published online today in Science, researchers report that according to Dawn observations, Vesta did indeed agglomerate enough rocky debris as it grew to heat itself by the decay of the rock's radioactive elements. That heat led to the separation of the primordial body into a rocky crust, an underlying rocky mantle, and a central metallic core, hallmarks of planet Earth and the other rocky planets. Dawn was the first to detect Vesta's now-solid core. The trick was to record its subtle gravitational signature during many orbits of the asteroid. Vesta also grew large enough to survive a massive battering about a billion years ago that formed the 500-kilometer-wide Rheasilvia impact crater and its 22-kilometer-high central mound (above). But at a diameter of only 530 kilometers, Vesta was not quite massive enough to pull itself back into a sphere after the Rheasilvia impact. And, like the rest of the asteroids, it stopped growing far short of the mass needed to gravitationally clear other bodies from the vicinity of its orbit. That was Pluto's downfall, as well.
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There is continuing interest in the ethnic make-up of indie. Like other music genres, indie mirrors the ethnic make-up of its audience. The number of non-white artists is relatively the same proportion as the audience, which is 1–2% in the UK. People often do not count ethnically diverse indie bands, unless the singer is non-white. I'm not going to list them because it forces you to think of artists according to their ethnic backgrounds, which is not how they choose to define themselves. It's interesting that there isn't a similar ethnic scrutiny of hip-hop or country. Or for that matter, why Balinese gamelan music is disproportionately popular with Balinese people? In some ways, this question is similar to asking why are there different cultures? Why do you like the music of your culture or a different culture best? Eventually, you are brought to the question of why does anyone like any particular form of music. Music expresses cultural values through conventional sounds. For example, in the west, minor chords are often thought of as sad – yet even our notion of a chord is formed by western ideas of tonality. If being part of a music community is sharing similar sentiments, it should be no surprise that people raised in the same culture would have a similar ethos and conceive of the aesthetically pleasing in a similar fashion.
The aesthetics of indie: the longing for a golden age, the melancholy, poverty chic, and the overall values of simplicity, autonomy and austerity. This may not be appealing to immigrant or marginalised groups who have already experienced poverty and experience genuine outsiderness as a social class. As expressed in Pulp's Common People, people who have a genuine experience of being poor do not like it when other people play poor. Indie's vernacular aesthetics do not speak to their life experiences or aspirations. Pop or hip-hop values are often at odds to the indie DIY ethos. Can you imagine an indie band singing name-dropping lyrics of wealth/status-markers such as Cristal, Louboutins or Prada? Or displaying affluence by putting diamonds in their teeth when for an indie band even putting on a suit is seen as dressing up? Aggrandisement is not part of the philosophy. On the other side, why long for the past when it includes slavery or colonial imperialism?
You might make this ethnic characterisation of indie bands, only if you don't look globally. Brent Luvaas's work on youth culture in Indonesia shows there are many Indonesian indie rock bands including La Luna, Pure Saturday, and the Upstairs. The indie aesthetics are consistent, but meaningful in a different way. Here there is a nostalgic longing for an imaginary past. For them, indie is a way to create an identity beyond a confining national model of Indonesian ethnicity. Their world music is worldly, not ghettoised. Our society is heterogeneous, with different cultures living together. So indie bands are generally white in the UK and US, but so what?