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

And part of what's so great about the Wilson piece is that he very casually manages to explain why What's Missing In Indie Rock is bound up with What's Missing In White Liberal Culture

-- Hurting 2, Friday, October 19, 2007 10:41 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Link

[big hoos agree-ism]

I just saw Van Halen last night, and not only did they swing like crazy, the songs were clearly steeped in black music. So, if S F-J was really trying to say there should be more Van Halen in indie-rock, then yes, I totally agree with him.

Curmudgeon

Hugo, was the Clash with Lee Perry no longer the Clash; Talking Heads with Bernie Worrell, Nona Hendrix and others no longer the Talking Heads?

Yeah, you're right there. I was trying to make the point that the sort of music the Arcade Fire makes doesn't really call for a Sly & Robbie type rhythm section. Or even Spoon's rhythm section. But it was a poorly chosen and distracting analogy.

i'm listening to the new coheed and cambria album on myspace.

this makes arcade fire sound like the ohio players

I have about 8 million major complaints with SFJ's thinking here, which is incredibly sloppy for someone who's been banging this drum for years -- a lot of which complaints actually do boil down to one-line zings, like the vague sense that he's produced a large article on the theme of "why are blankets so blankety" instead of just buying a damn quilt instead.

That said, the only thing I really want to drop in here is something I was trying to get at when we had the thread on early-90s mainstream rock. If you want the source of the split he's talking about, it's so not the 1990s -- it's the 1980s period when that good ol' "miscegenated" 60s rock became profoundly corporatized and sparkly and eager to please, particularly in terms of the countless Huey Lewis types wandering around making strange theme-restaurant versions of rock'n'roll. From J Geils to H Lewis to G Thoroughgood to E Money to a lot of other 80s rock hits: these are guys most people would now consider very, very "white" playing music that was all about African-American forms. And it seems to me that as the 80s wore on, these were precisely the types of musicians independent rockers were most trying to steer clear of -- or the type of music, anyway, that strange 80s digital-keyboard endpoint of 60s rock and soul tropes. Like I said on the other thread, that sound kinda got as far as "Life is a Highway" and hasn't managed much since. And that, surely, is the moment rock started skewing away from certain audible African-American roots of rock; how it can somehow connect with new and current African-American sounds is an entirely separate issue.

Sorry to disappoint John D, but even typing that makes me feel like I'm giving this article too much credit. The whole thing is bizarrely dependent on SFJ defining terms the way he needs to: defining "indie" as white guitar bands, so you can go on to magically discover that it feels "white," even if other people are ripping off Baltimore club and the Blow are faking snap music; the dumb ethnomusicological feint of defining "Africa" as actually having to do with recent African-American rhythm+bass ideas, ones which are absent from the majority of music from the actual continent in question ... there is stuff in here to be talked about, for sure, but his writing itself seems like an exercise in defining terms and then having bold insights that they are precisely what you've defined them as.

isn't there a black guy in that band?
xpost

?

Nabisco OTM. Less microgenre-crit, more intellectual history.

J Geils ...these are guys most people would now consider very, very "white" playing music that was all about African-American forms.

Nabiscio, have you ever heard "Flamethrower"?? (Big hit on Electrifyin' Mojo's Midnight Funk Association show on WGPR-Detroit in 1981 -- right alongside Prince and Kurtis Blow and Grace Jones and Funkadelic and Kraftwerk and Yellow Magic Orchestra and Billy Squier.)

Thorogood/Money/Lewis all made excellent music in the '80s, too, but Geils "very white"?? Wow.

xhuxk, read a little closer. the GUYS are very, very "white." the MUSIC is "all about african-american forms."

Well, following up on Nabisco's post, Springsteen is nothing if not a compendium of '50s rock and '60s r&b/soul, plus folk. And yet I imagine S F-J would consider Springsteen and bands that sound like Springsteen quite "white." I suppose S F-J is playing close to the vest just what black music he considers black enough to support his thesis. Just post-"Chronic" hip-hop? Doesn't that overlook the inconvenient fact that the preceding 100 years or so of black music - from blues and jazz to James Brown and beyond - has already been pretty well integrated into nearly all forms of "white" music? Does a band need to slap its bass or dish out syncopated breakbeats to make that clearer, or can't it just be left, you know, implicit? Does it matter that, aside from the actual race of the performer, I'm not quite sure just what makes contemporary "black" music" black music? Following S F-J's dangerous line of reasoning, can a black act therefore be, um, too white?

The New Yorker is generally above publishing slopppy, ill-thought out blogs postings (like mine). I agree with the Slate response that a few more passes might have shaped the piece into something more donut than hole.

x-post "Flamethrower" was awesome. It was on the b-side of my "Freeze Frame" single. Reminded me of the Gap Band.

xpost - Ha ... careful snips aside, the "very white" was aimed largely at H Lewis sorts. In any case, I'm not looking debate the quality of the music these people were making: I'm saying that the big pop-spiffy glass-case version of rhythm and blues that cropped up in the 1980s was surely a lot of what sent a lot of independent / punky / arty musicians shooting in the other direction. (I mean, I can dredge this out of my own memory of the 90s: your band tries to play something with any funk = "eww that sounds like a bar band" = sounds like the passed-down rhythm-and-blues standard culture that was starting to smell a little bad in the 80s = sounds like your uncle dancing to "I Want a New Drug," etc.)

nabisco I made this same point WAAAAAY upthread about how the very idea of the blues became persona non grata in punk/indie circles thx to its being heavily overused/watered down (cf. Talking Heads "no blues" rule, etc.)

xp

And I'm not saying the post otherwise lacks credence -- I get your point; those were white rock acts whose explicit African American influences indie bands later associated with yuppies or whatever, which is ridiculous but quite possibly what was going through indie kids' minds, for all I know -- but if you're going to cite that stuff as a turning point, why not go a few years earlier and just cite "disco sucks"? Or general Anglophobia for that matter? (Say, X complaining about British bands' "glitter disco synthesizer night school noble savage drum drum drum"? They were referring to Haircut 100 and Adam and the Ants, not J Geils or Eddie Money.) (And X had their own attempted funky moments, actually. But the whole "return to real American guitars" stuff everybody talked in early proto-indie days of REM/Replacements/Del Fuegos/Del Lords was an anti-dancing movement, in way, whether the bands were personally responsible for it or not.)

Can anyone find me a thread where black musicians and black music writers are worrying about the lack of miscegenation with white musical forms?

I bet there isn't one. And that, ultimately, is what makes them cool, isn't it?

the GUYS are very, very "white."

I still have to say that it's still pretty goofy that anybody ever thought this, though, if you're talking Peter Wolf or Magic Dick.

they did speak jive

PhilK, I can only assume that you have never been to any hip-hop message boards. The topic is hardly a one-way street. Kanye West and the Neptunes and ?uestlove and a bunch of people have taken a lot of crap from hip-hop fans (of all races) about their love for weird/corny/"soft" music made by Euro-Americans. I think that's part of the reason for Kanye's shoulder-chip...and for him winning two PnJ album awards.

I bet there isn't one. And that, ultimately, is what makes them cool, isn't it?

how very essentialist of you (xxxpost)

Answers to your question, basically: because I see the rejection of dance music as a separate thing from the rejection of r&b / r&r stuff, with somewhat different roots. The rejection of dance music -- whether it's disco or early-80s British pop (even with its synths and soul boys) -- is a rejection of fashion/style/glamour/artiness. This still leaves plenty of "black"-coded music to work with: punk bands happily pulled in items like Chuck Berry riffs and old-school r&b yowling, even if they had to mentally translate them as some kind of white-greaser thing. Rejecting fashion/style/glamour/artiness could take you straight to the black blues, or 80s bar-band approximations of it. So what's black now?

The part that strikes me as significant about the 80s mainstream rock I'm talking about is that it bummed around this midpoint where regular-guy dude-ish r&r stuff rubbed up against money and fashion, and I think something about that had to do with the ever-increasing authenticity kick of the underground.

xpost - Chuck I really have no argument for you on the "very white" point, because my chief annoyance with articles like this is my hatred of the coding of things as "white" or "black" in the first place. Mostly because white people do it wrong.

^^^HOOS

(otm)

See, it's yet another thing I'd be interested to see this debate tackle: the various ends of what our coding of "black" music might mean (glamorous and sexual like disco? "authentic" and "gritty" like gospel or blues? funky? hard? isn't hip-hop's presentation of people like a BILLION miles from disco's?) and which ones WE mean. It's absolutely insulting to basic human intelligence that SFJ basically goes "you know, African stuff, like beats and bass," hoping we'll all just know what he means -- when in fact this is a huge question! Especially when you're trying to code it into how it's expressed in guitar licks and whatnot! He really can't seem to get any further than what'd be summed up in the word "funky."

I'm saying that the big pop-spiffy glass-case version of rhythm and blues that cropped up in the 1980s was surely a lot of what sent a lot of independent / punky / arty musicians shooting in the other direction.

not just that, though; there was a big reaction against "processed" music of all sorts -- including huge punky sneers at haircut bands, synthesizers and drum machines. a big hangup on ye olde authenticity (i.e. lots of 80s american college-radio stuff was very, well you know, rockist -- and in some ways sfj's thing is really a continuation of the rockist wars by other means). remember that for all the nostalgia about post-punk disco-not-disco, a lot of punk stuff was very anti-disco. (we don't need to drag out johnny ramone's old line about wanting to play "white" music, do we?) so it's more complicated than just saying, they thought huey lewis was lame. (huey lewis had some great singles, btw.) there were biases of various kinds underlying at least some of the american punk/post-punk/college-radio scenes, and some of those biases have been handed down in various ways to some strains of "indie rock." but it's all pretty complicated and hard to generalize about.

xpost well ok, you kind of just covered that.

Trying to use words like 'more rhythm' and 'funkiness' and myopic generalities like 'soul' just confuses everything.

-- deej, Tuesday, October 16, 2007 8:01 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark Link

xp

it seems to me like using the music to assess the 'whiteness' of a scene is totally useless. its a social issue and music might be a rallying point but if music history shows anything its that these signifiers change drastically over time; what represents popular music to black social groups at one pt represents popular music to white social groups later on and, to some degree, vice versa (maybe?). Trying to use words like 'more rhythm' and 'funkiness' and myopic generalities like 'soul' just confuses everything.

-- deej, Tuesday, October 16, 2007 8:01 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark Link

sorry nabisco u meant deej otm

:p

when J. Geils came out, weren't they regarded as a white r&b band? And isn't a lot of '80s stuff very black-music-rhythm-section, but played on them newfangled synths? For that matter, listen to any Malaco music (Jackson, Miss.) from the '80s featuring soul musicians. They're playing it on sequencers, synths, and so forth. And I think that '80s groups like the T. Heads weren't trying to get rid of blues influence as much as they were trying to return to what blues/soul/r&b had been about before the guitar heroes made the blues an intolerable genre. ensemble playing.

when J. Geils came out, weren't they regarded as a white r&b band?

minus the "white" part, yes. (it's not like "white r&b" was some new unheard of thing.)

Some day I'll get around to reading this vast expanse of thread.

xpost: and otm about '80s stuff, especially synth-poppers. culture club, eurythmics, heaven 17, that stuff's all r&b.

1. Sorry, I haven't really read the thread! I was trying to stay out of it.

2. Yes, that's exactly my point about 80s stuff: it was the moment where the ongoing tradition of the "new" black-music rhythm stuff was basically made shiny and digital and pop and firmly corporatized and preservationist then reached a sort of end-point. (Those are not criticisms, just descriptions: one example on the other thread was Aretha in her pink caddy)

3. One funny thing about this article is that you can read it as a giant compliment to indie, if you happen to think there's an indie rhetoric around trying to reshape music: if American pop/youth music has been "black" for decades, and indie bands have somehow created a vision of it so white as to merit New Yorker coverage, they have been profoundly successful in re-creating the world. Thing is, they haven't, which is why the article rings false

And I think that '80s groups like the T. Heads weren't trying to get rid of blues influence as much as they were trying to return to what blues/soul/r&b had been about before the guitar heroes made the blues an intolerable genre.

No. David Byrne has specifically said that one of the rules established when they started the band was that no identifiable blues structures, chords, or scales be used. How well they adhered to this rule is a different matter, the fact is they made a conscious aesthetic choice to attempt to avoid what they viewed as an omnipresent and oppressive trope.

Didn't Boston invent the "no blues" rule?

that's at the beginning, though. I have a hard time believing they rigorously maintained that rule over 14 years together. (xpost)

i heard the velvet underground had a similar rule prior?

I can't find the exact quote, I think its in the liner notes to the Sand in the Vaseline box.

and yes this was very much "at the beginning", obviously as they went on Byrne largely abandoned this posture.

x-post

(I mean obviously saying "NO BLUES!" and then worshipping at the font of P-Funk is kinda, er, problematic. But all hard-and-fast aesthetic rules are ultimately problematic.)

I don't think so, really. You can extract whatever stylistic beats and pieces you want from your influences and leave others behind.

haha, should read "bits and pieces"

There's some story about VU having a "no blues solo" rule.

Talking Heads, though, the blues rule doesn't really matter once you listen to Remain in Light and Naked and Bernie Worrell and all, and Tom Tom Club of course.

Quiz:

1. If your influences are white people who were influenced by black people, is your music "white?"

2. What was the "blackest" point in Stereolab's career?

3. What would you call John Mayer's music, without all the "black" parts?

4. Who's "whiter": Kanye West or Nivea?

5. Who's "blacker": Jon Spencer or Johnny Mathis?

6. How many indie boys can you fit in a bathtub?

7. Headbands: so white they're black, or so black they're white?

8. Why are Ladysmith so WHITE? I mean, that's some straight up NPR yuppie stuff, right there.

9. Rate Graceland on a scale of Wolof to Nordic.

10. Wearing hats: still "black?"

^^^^^^^^^ kudos

lol

chevy chase IS my favorite world music performer

9. Rate Graceland on a scale of Wolof to Nordic.

this is gonna get me in trouble laughing at work

hahaha

Some of those are actually serious questions! I only know the answer to #2 (answer = "not Uilab").

Actually I think it might be Cobra, which kinda tanked! SFJ OTM!

Or else ETK, which would lead to the opposite conclusion.