Red 16 is a pretty interesting place. It’s a church basement, located at 127 E. 16th Ave., that attracts national rock acts. It’s probably the filthiest space you’ll ever find in a church. There’s no bar, but you can bring your own beer.

Plus, it’s an indie rock club, which is a pretty interesting concept in itself.

Obviously, indie has always been something of a misnomer, indeed, a purposeful mislabel created by the people who use it. It’s not just misleading because it tries to imply that someone like Sonic Youth is somehow outside the same economic aspects that control ‘NSYNC, but because everything at indie shows – the whole recycled culture that has resurfaced at dives everywhere – is far from independent.

A usual indie show is a sea of things that have been handed down and recycled: old clothes and shoes, old records, styles and attitudes. It looks and smells how a thrift store would if you were allowed to drink and smoke inside. The kids look like grandparents from the ’70s, wearing polyester pants and old denim, trading vinyl and talking about bands fitfully paddling against the mainstream.

Moreover, a show at a club like Red 16 is filled with things that have already been used up – things in the past thought to be useless enough to be discarded, commodities that have been bought and sold and bought again.

Few things there are really independent.

Even the club, like other indie venues (VFW lobbies, Elk lodges, bingo halls), is a hand-me-down: Some church basement that’s been wrecked and rented out, nothing as innovative or exciting as the indie label has you believe.

However, the purpose behind the term indie, the values its fans want to attach to it, is interesting. It’s a self-conscious term, one full of a desire to secede, with fans desperate to be outside something they feel is obsolete.

So what the term implies is still fresh; exciting even. Especially when it’s somewhere new like Red 16, where a spark ignites in a scene and quickly dies out.

This club is probably a lot like what Bernie’s may have been 15 years ago – before all the ironic images; before the stagnation; before its landmark status changed it into a place you want to say you go, rather than somewhere you want to go.

Red 16 is a refuge for kids looking for something else, trying to use a little constructive self-determination to make something they can stand for, new products in an industry commonly known to be selfish and evil.

That’s what’s so great about a new club like this. It’s a place to see bands with similar ideals and interests as their fans. It’s somewhere creating the closest thing to a worthwhile sub-culture anywhere on campus – a place without the pretensions and exclusiveness that has deconstructed so many music scenes lacking individual bargaining power to change anything substantial.

So, even if the shows are full of kids dependent on cheap shoes and old jackets and other things that have already come and gone, Red 16 is a place where people – whatever they claim to label themselves as – are trying to find something worthwhile, and actually doing something about it without getting sucked back into the things they so greatly want to be apart from.

John Ross is a junior in comparative studies and can be reached for comment at [email protected].