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

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

x-post

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.

And still no mention of the glorious heyday of 24-7 Spyz.

think he'll ever respond to the slate piece? Seems like he's still clinging to the "everybody sounded like the clash, then came snoop, and now they're the arcade fire" chronology, which makes me feel really sorry for the Waterboys.

Anybody who watched 120 Minutes in the 90s knows that the late 90s were a LOT more beat-crazy than the late 80s-early 90s! Grand Royal! Trip-hop! or wait, maybe that's not indie rock.

Has the phrase "post-rock" come up yet? Or is that just called "funk" now?

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),

Now the Arcade Fire symbolize popular music and an anecdotal tale about his friends is supposed to convey their importance.

Maybe if he can just find some friends who listen to other stuff he'll change his approach. Then there's more SFJ nostalgia with his paean to that Tom Tom Club song naming off black musicians, as if that song was somehow representative of everything happening then.

why bring up the Tom Tom Club if you're gonna disqualify all the groups in indie rock culture that sound like them as not being indie rock?

"once indie rock was full of dance tracks chock full of references to more popular entertainers...what happened?"

ignore me, I'm just annoyed that SFJ was so swept up in the dialogue that he forgot to give us that In Rainbows review.

"once indie rock was full of dance tracks chock full of references to more popular entertainers...what happened?"

That's great
It starts with an earthquake.

Oh wait.

i still think the passage on UI is key to understanding this piece. sfj is writing from the personal perspective of a musician -- "what happened to MY music this isn't how I played indie rock" -- rather than the objective distance of a critic.

i'm sorry, but isn't Ui post-Snoop? Or is the point that he couldn't get the Doggfather out of his mind when he tried to sing and that's why the Fiery Furnaces is afraid to get on the good foot?

I AM NOT AFRAIDS

http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/c/c3/Lenny_Bruce_Mugshot_4-27-63.jpg

all I know is UI were completey unknown to me until I read about them posthumously in the new yorker

I get Ui and Ut confused myself.

noisey second-gen no wavers VS metal box tribute band

I get Ui and Ut confused myself.
UTI?

U2 is disqualified because that's not indie rock like the clash

maria has some sad looking old comp with aphex twin and others on it that has ui on it as well. ui-vs-luke vibert or something? i've never listened.

Lord, I probably have that comp still, or had it.

Skot why is there no indie-funk influence in black metal? I am so sad at this turn of events.

Ha, looks like those Arcade Fire guys know more about some of these issues than SFJ does, or at least leafed through a copy of Ned Sublette's book in the bookstore.

meanwhile, this week sasha is stumping for the animal collective. which is just boring. score another one for brian wilson fans. why don't rock critics want to write about funky stuff? doesn't angie stone have a new album? sasha and i do share a love for keren ann at least. the funkiest of them all!

"Skot why is there no indie-funk influence in black metal? I am so sad at this turn of events."

but meanwhile black & roll is one of the big trends in metal land these days. 70's blues rock solos + grim frostiness. so there!

here is that comp. maybe i will actually listen to it:

A1 Barbed Vibrators
A2 Luke Vibert Controlling Transmission
A3 Sycophants, The Second
A4 Spring Heel Jack Sweep
A5 UI Out
B1 Mellowtrons, The I Want You So Mad Because You're Bas
B2 Wormhole Headbanger
B3 David Kristian Strange Mountaineers
B4 Tortoise Why We Fight (D Version)
B5 Sycophants, The Fourth
C1 Margoo Villain
C2 Infrastructure & Thurston Moore Yvonne/Thaw
C3 Newt Epsilon Boot
C4 Stick Basin Pin
D1 Mike Flowers Pops vs. Aphex Twin Debase
D2 Echo Park Razor Kiss
D3 Luke Vibert & UI Unknow
D4 Sycophants, The Third

oh: united mutations: lo recordings vol.3

And he never really explains well in the Paler Shade of White article or the Animal Collective one, why they should matter despite his theory and why they are an aceptable exception.

Nit-picky stuff--Tom Tom Club were on Sire that was distributed by a Major, so again he is asking certain of today's indie bands to live up to what one major label offshoot act did years ago (while choosing to leave out of the equation today's major label acts)

i think i still have a vocokesh/ui split 12" - i dont remember what it sounds like but its clear vinyl in a clear sleeve which is kinda nice

I like that he commends Win's civility and that he's willing to "engage the ideas in the piece." Some people are being rather rude to the QEII, I'll admit.

that will happen when youre willfully provocative

btw i am listening to for the first time a song by an indie blog hype band called the black kids with a chorus saying "dance dance dance"

IT'S SFJ'S HAPPENING AND IT'S FREAKING HIM OUT

A+++++++++