A Paler Shade of White---Sasha Frere-Jones Podcast and New Yorker article Criticizing Indie Rock for Failing to Incorporate African-American Influences

*SF-J, of course.

in a world where a few mouseclicks can bring you music from any part of the world, why is so much indie music so tendentiously and relentlessly Euro-focussed?

The "alternative to what" thing has been brought up already.

In a world where the singles charts are completely dominated by R&B, it is natural for the underground to contain those who dislike that kind of stuff and who are searching for something entirely different.

Singles charts haven't been "completely" dominated by R&B for about four years Geir, I don't there's been a single point in the past 18 months when there's been more R&B tracks in the UK top 40 than there has guitar tracks

You know when you drop by some indie rocker's house after a gig, and you end up looking at their CD collection and go 'OK - interesting. They have Sonic Youth and Big Star etc etc etc, and also some folk music: Irish stuff, Bulgarian stuff... but no black music, no Indian music, no African, no Japanese no Chinese, no Balinese, no Australian indigenous, no Tibetan, no Mexican, no Spanish...' No non-European music at all. And therefore, no non-European influences in this person's music. This is not rare, is it, in recent years? How did this become indie music? When did that twist happen?

Spain isn't in Europe?

who has actually had that experience?

i'm forever dropping round indie rockers' houses after gigs.

but sometimes i have to look on their computer for music, it can be a real grind.

but it usually pays off when i can out them for not owning any balinese music.

sometimes i check their dvd racks and bookshelves too, to see if they're up to date with tibetan fiction.

I don't really listen to much other than tiring, desexed white upper middle class because that's who I am. That really fucking sucks. I need a soul infusion.

It's like people here in Australia who only eat pie and chips.

plz not to hate on pies

Let's see when I do hear funk and soul it's when I'm preparing coleslaw and sauce at Raising Cane's on the lucky days my co-worker Avis is working, as the manager sometimes accommodates her. I am the only person who will, for 6-8 hours, take scoop after scoop of coleslaw and put it in cups, so people visit me occasionally to break up my ritual and inspect my slaw. Avis sings along and dances.

plz not to hate on pies

What is the Australian pie?

it's like a hand-held pot pie and was invented by God to express His love for the people of Australia

you can get sweet or savory ones

I would eat all these pies

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Not sure what Moley is talking about. Hey Geir, r'n'b and now rap have been around in various forms for years now(with various folks in the charts), and from the Beats to the Beatles some folks have added African-American influences into their sound, if more indie-rock artists are spurning those influences now(that is not entirely clear), the question is why.

Meanwhile others are discussing Sasha's loaded language:

From Wayne Marshall's blog:

Sasha’s conclusion then, a winking reference to the etymology of rock’n'roll and the “risk” that came with it, brings us right back to what Monson calls, in reference to Mailer’s celebratory tract of 1957, “the bald equation of the primitive with sex and sex with the music and body of the black male.” And though I’m not accusing Sasha of perpetuating these stereotypes too blatantly (and indeed, I think we should go easy on Sasha and applaud him for painting in bold, broad strokes), there’s no avoiding the resonance, the lurking essentialism, no matter how explicitly we may decry or attempt to avoid it.

http://www.wayneandwax.com/

I need a soul infusion.

-- trashthumb, Friday, 26 October 2007 13:00 (9 minutes ago) Link

hahaha

The only thing I can think of that's equivalent are the greasy and amazing pudding or fruit pies at the Hostess outlet and a Smuckers
Uncrustable, which was the funniest food item until Hormel? started producing individually wrapped hot dogs. If the Australians have a ready made meat pie does that mean they have a higher standard of living than us now?

Did anybody note Carl Wilson's followup?

http://www.zoilus.com/documents/general/2007/001123.php

xpost trashthumb you need to get yr ass to Oz, you'll see

Andrew Ross wrote a genealogy of the hipster?

x-post

Carl did several more postings in addition to the one linked to above. Liquid Liquid rejected the mainstream yet chose to incorporate elements that were arguably from it. The Ramones rejected the mainstream in a different manner and I doubt Sasha would take them to task. Maybe we need to examine how the need of some but not all to reject the mainstream fits in with popist and rockist views of whats on the charts and what's happening in niche genres. And why don't major label popsters and jam bands feel the same need to rebel (for better or worse). Also, as mentioned on the Indie Beat World Music thread (about the Will Hermes article) one could arguably connect the punk enthusiasm with reggae on through Stereolab and others enthusiasm for various international genres. Or is that just an exception to the norm?

I think the mainstream elements thing is way bigger than any of this is letting on. If there's anything rock and roll, and being American and all of this is really about, it's being rebellious, and pitting your identity against the norm.

Also as a side note: I know people who think that if you write something other than a pop song, you're a pretentious dork, and I know people that think anything short of Reich is pointless. I hear a lot of debate over accessibility, and I hear a lot of snide 'Oh this sounds like,' with an aim of discrediting the creator rather than establishing a listener-friendly link. What I haven't heard a lot of until now was, "that's not quite dark enough" not coming from metalheads.

Lenny Kaye (with Nuggets) and the NY Dolls with their approach were rejecting aspects of both the pop(mainstream rock) and underground(hippie and art-prog)themes of the time.

I mean Kaye was reaching back slightly to one brand of popular rock that was sneared at by some.

Frank Kogan weighed in on the class theme over on the poptimists live journal in response to Idolator Maura's posting there.

I would eat all these pies

-- J0hn D., Friday, October 26, 2007 1:09 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Link

WHO ATE ALL THE PIES WHO ATE ALL THE PIES
HERE GO J0HN D THERE GO J0HN D HE ATE ALL THE PIES

to me the bigger issue is that indie rock is so privileged in the first place in rock crit discourse and blaming indie rock for not fulfilling the lofty 'most progressive/important music in existence' expectations critics have is totally missing the point

I agree that indie rock is privileged in rock critic discourse (and at lots of mainly low wattage university radio stations) but it is not priveleged in American commercial radio(still listened to by many in cars and elsewhere despite new higher-tech alternatives) and on MTV(when they bother to show videos), and this factor plus its historical ties to college rock and punk rock and diy rebelliousness and early rock crit writing play a role in solidifying its dominant status in the print/web world.

Every year at critics poll time, Christgau and some others (including folks here) bemoan the percentage of support that indie-rock gets compared to rap, r'n'b, and various international genres, with others responding that they like what they like and are under no affirmative action obligations to write about anything. Broken record me insists that there are some writers out there who are covering other stuff but are not sought out by poll organizers (or by editors at general interest publications who one would hope would seek to have varied coverage). I am not saying Decibel or rock blogs have to cover other genres, but it surew would be nice if alt-weeklies did. Then there's the education/economy issues affecting who can start writing at universities and publications and established websites plus the role of editors in seeking out writers and getting coverage beyond the traditional...

to me the bigger issue is that indie rock is so privileged in the first place in rock crit discourse and blaming indie rock for not fulfilling the lofty 'most progressive/important music in existence' expectations critics have is totally missing the point

-- deej, Friday, October 26, 2007 11:22 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Link

^^^hoosteen

Yeah, it's kind of a questionable privilege that the world of indie exists more on paper, in print, on blogs, etc., when the world of pop quite comfortably and naturally has TV and radio and films and so on -- the amount of writing done about independent music would seem to stem at least in part from its defeat, text used as an easy way to get around its absence from more expensive media.

Umm I know I've banged on about this over the course of years, but it's always slightly weird to me when people argue that publications like (for instance) the Voice or the NYer, as "premiere" sources of writing and criticism, have some obligation to give serious analysis to popualr music -- I totally understand the point, but it seems to me to privilege the discourse in publications like the NYer the same way it's accusing those publications of privileging indie!

Thing is, there's a level on which indie's former claims to being more serious than everything else are actually accepted by the public, I expect -- Tom's last column for Pitchfork was mentioning that it was all pop-indie bands in Facebook's "Top Music" aggregates in the UK, but part of me was suspecting that might well have had to do with people feeling cooler about putting those bands in their "favorite music" profiles than putting in the known-to-everyone pop singles they liked!

but the discourse in those circles has a huge impact ... i dont think you are necessarily legitimizing these publications when u want to see them cover a broad spectrum of music.

im not even arguing for populism per se, i think covering unpopular artists is a great thing ... but that world seems so much more like an echo chamber to me now than it did before i really got a handle on this whole 'rock critic' thing

to clarify, they are covering the same boring small spectrum of unpopular artists and targeting a v. specific niche as a result. im not saying i wish the nyer would cover more j-zone or something but ... i think yr guilty of seeing pop vs. indie in this, when really its pop vs. tons of other artists and styles that don't get any attention.

in other words i'm totally not arguing the popist thing here, 'they should cover the charts!' more that they should cover music that is interesting, but also to acknowledge that indie is not the ultimate manifestation of 'interesting music'

Oh, I know -- I'm singling out pop a bit because I think that's where Sasha's thrust mostly goes. But at the same time, there are places to go for talk about any kind of music you'd like, usually in terms that tend to be dictated by the fans. In other words, I'm not confident it's just a matter of highbrow analytical "proper critics" having a boner for indie -- I think it's the other way around, a matter of the "culture" of indie having a boner for aspiring to highbrow analytical "proper criticism." I also think that's changing now. Toward the end of the 90s and early 2000s, you could kind of see a glut of people who liked writing about indie, because indie fandom itself kind of pushed people in that direction, in a way that a lot of other styles really didn't. (See also how jazz has that kind of history of analytical writing-about-jazz -- or how hip-hop has had a huge streak of this, just in different places.) But I think the internet environment over the past 10 years or so will have produced loads of people who want to bring that same tone of writing to lots of other kinds of music.

Can we assume from this article that Sasha's favorite indie track is Supersystem's "Born into the World?"

Can we assume from this article that Sasha's favorite indie track is Supersystem'sSteppenwolf's "Born into the World?""Born To be Wild."

I have noticed the French Impressionists have not been incorporating many Wagnerian influences into their sound. Why can't they sound more like Berlioz?

im not saying i wish the nyer would cover more j-zone

as much as i wanna see zone making $$$ this would suck ass

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The concert/gig music previews in my local alt-weekly are nearly 99% indie-rock (this week 100 %). I have difficulty believing that those are the only music events worth highlighting(yes the editor of that section turned down my pitches). And yea, I can turn to salsa or soul Yahoo groups and dancehall reggae and african music and hiphop forums, and read The Beat magazine, but those niches are even that much smaller.

Even the New Yorker and alt-weekly world is a small world, most people do not know about Joanna Newsom or the Annuals or whatever other indie rock flavor of the week despite all the blog and Voice and New Yorker coverage (and yes music is not as popular with the masses as movies or sports)

I don't see any coverage of Alva Noto, or Hauschka, or any you know, actual Europeans. I'm pretty bored of indie rock, especially the stuff Sasha is talking about, and this argument keeps coming back to 'god damn, I wish they'd stop covering this really limited style' no matter what perspective is being pushed, so maybe alongside covering more ethnically diverse music, just stop fixating on these boring ass bands.

Oh I forgot Arcade Fire are British and they're one of the big 'problems'

I am going back to the Jazz thread and maybe the Salsa thread, keep up your good work here, Steve.

Ha. Was just thinking that Dissensus has their threads on niche genres that get as few comments as the Rolling Whirled and Rolling salsa ones do here, and I'm not getting enough new music (and finding the time to write about it if I did) to add anything to the ones here, let alone write articles for other outlets.

One problem with talking about this stuff is that what might seem like editorial pull in one direction is surely accompanied by an entrenched network of business stuff: alt-weekly listings, for instance, are going to be plenty tied up with target readership demographics, club/venue advertising, established networks of publicity, etc.!

this is true, that why rap acts distributed by caroline or signed to epitaph tend to get 1000x the press of actually popular local cats

meow

"just stop fixating on these boring ass bands."

you'll have to take their shins CDs from their cold dead hands.

it's not where you're from it's what you know. people who write about indie rock all the time probably listen to a ton of indie rock and the forefathers of indie rock and a little bit of everything else(hopefully they listen to a little bit of everything else). having them write about other stuff just means that you will get bad articles about stuff that they don't know shit about or have no real interest in (unless they are super-talented and really open-minded and open to the idea of learning about stuff that they don't know shit about without being condescending or whatever). be thankful that arcade fire fans don't write about better music. they would kill it dead. and have in the past!

lol dabug

word.

Thing is, there's a level on which indie's former claims to being more serious than everything else are actually accepted by the public, I expect -- Tom's last column for Pitchfork was mentioning that it was all pop-indie bands in Facebook's "Top Music" aggregates in the UK, but part of me was suspecting that might well have had to do with people feeling cooler about putting those bands in their "favorite music" profiles than putting in the known-to-everyone pop singles they liked!

-- nabisco, Friday, October 26, 2007 9:34 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

not really -- those bands he named are all commercially successful and, as much as anything is nowadays, 'known-to-everyone'. facebook still has a slightly middle-class skew, but even still. it's funny that james blunt did not show up among the bands though, because he's massively commercially successful playing -- facing it -- the exact same music as those other bands.

Sasha on his New Yorker blog prints Wil Butler of Arcade Fire's response and summarizes some of the other e-mail responses he has gotten without giving ground:

October 26, 2007
That’s All, Folks
I wrote a piece about race and indie rock that ran in the magazine a couple weeks ago. Perhaps you read it.

The article opens with a description of an Arcade Fire show that took place here in May, and contains references to a show that the band played in London in January (which is described further here). At the end of this section, I pointed out things that were missing from the band’s music. Will Butler, one of the group’s members, responded:

Being as I am in the Arcade Fire, I prickle a little bit at your statement that “(i)f there is a trace of soul, blues, reggae, or funk in Arcade Fire, it must be philosophical; it certainly isn’t audible.” In a somewhat … I dunno, is it childish to respond to critics this way? Anyway. I’ve attached an MP3 with parts of our songs that I think steal quite blatantly from black people’s music from all over the globe.
Both the column I wrote on Arcade Fire and the brief descriptions of the band contained in “A Paler Shade of White” make it fairly clear that I enjoy its music and have an appreciation (perhaps different from yours) of what it’s doing. This is precisely the reason that the group seemed like a good example of how the musical landscape has changed. Here is a consensus band that’s drawing in people who don’t usually care about popular music (never have so many friends asked me for a spare ticket), and whom I really like, but which is not drawing from other sources in the way that its counterparts twenty or thirty years ago would have.

Surprisingly—in a pleasant way—Butler was a civil correspondent, and wrote not simply to defend Arcade Fire, as any proud band member would, but also to engage the ideas in the piece:

First, I would encourage you not to ignore the Latin element in rock-and-roll history. “Twist and Shout” by the Beatles is in fact “a fairly faithful rendition of a 1962 R. & B. cover by the Isley Brothers.” But that 1962 version is a fairly faithful rip-off of La Bamba by Ritchie Valens, which is a fairly faithful rip off of a traditional Latin tune plus a rock and roll beat. A song like “Stand by Me” (written by a black man with the help of a couple Jews) was written in part to cash in on the Latin craze in America. But those kind of syncopated rhythms are now so embedded in our culture that I, at least, have a hard time recognizing them as Latin.…
Secondly, don’t forget that miscegenation need (not} be across color lines. Poles and Italians and the Irish don’t mix, traditionally. I think an artist like Joanna Newsom is stealing Old World folk-style music (dare I say Irish?) and mixing it with more American Folk, which is partly white and partly black and partly mysterious (which you touch on in your article).
As for the MP3, there are parts where I can’t identify exactly what parallels Butler is drawing, but many of them are self-explanatory.

Keep in mind, I’m not saying we’re the funkiest, most soulful bunch of dudes and ladies (though we do, at least, always clap on 2 and 4).
We will end with clapping, entirely aware that it isn’t applause. The two and four will hold us for a while.

Another SFJ New Yorker blog posting:

Most of the e-mails I’ve received about “A Paler Shade of White” fall into one of three categories: frustration with my focus on indie rock (mainstream, non-indie music has remained fairly miscegenated, give or take a year, and so tells a different story); complaints about the omission of [insert name of a current band], which proves that indie music nowadays is miscegenated (or whatever I alleged it wasn’t); pleas to listen to the sender’s band, which proves that indie music nowadays is etc. None of the examples changed my feeling about the arc I described, which started in the early nineties. That the playing field is different now is something I allow for at the end of the piece, and this condition doesn’t retroactively change the historical arc.

I expected more complaints about essentialism and about my failure to mention TV on the Radio, and multiple inquiries regarding my statement that Michael Jackson was the first black artist to be played on MTV. (James Wyrsch filed the only one.) A look at MTV’s Yearbook, which Wyrsch referred me to, reveals that Michael Jackson may not have been the first, although MTV confirmed with our fact-checkers, twice, that he was. That said, I still give Jackson credit for breaking the color barrier. Jackson ended up in heavy daytime rotation on MTV and stayed there, initiating the slow dissolve of the line between R. & B. and pop, which is long gone. (Partly because it is another good example of musical miscegenation—though it is certainly neither rock nor indie—and partly because it is a song I am unable to tire of, I offer this link to the video for the Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love.” Aside from the deeply mixed-up music, note that the song is essentially a paean to a selection of black musicians, complete with a list.)

About the term “miscegenation,” one reader, Jeffrey Pearlman, wrote:

Why are you using the term “miscegenation,” which traditionally (and etymologically) has an extremely negative connotation (the biggest example being Southern taboos about white-black sex and marriage)? Why not use “cross-fertilization,” “cross-pollination,” or “hybridization”?
A friend wrote to say, more bluntly, “I’m sure you’ve been told by now, but you might want to avoid that word.”

It’s a delicate and powerful word, and I chose it deliberately. My piece is about American rock music, placed in the larger context of American pop, and framed by the fact—I claim it as fact and not opinion—that musical miscegenation is what started the whole ball rolling. Indie rock, in this piece, is the index of how American musical miscegenation has changed over time and will likely not happen in the same way again.