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

prepare for the pearls of wisdom

Sasha is apparently a fan of acts mixing "white" and "black" elements, blurring the notion of race. I guess he's a huge fan of Lionel Richie, Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, Lenny Kravitz and Seal then. Or maybe not.......???

"Wild Honey" is by far the worst Beach Boys album ever. Even worse than the throwaway early Mike Love rock'n'roll stuff.

In that case, let me state my love for the drunken beach funk of Dennis Wilson. Even the man's sandy chest hair had soul.

brian wilson said pet sounds was meant to be his attempt at a sort of 'white gospel music' i think.

can somebody start a beach boys albums poll and move this shit the fuck over there.

MORE RACE TALK PLZ.

(seriously tho this thread was kinda on a roll)

SFJ listed Neon Bible as one of his 2007 faves sometime back. Keep the Car Running is in is top tracks of the year and he wrote a long piece about them from that time. Sort of don't get that, but oh well:

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/musical/2007/02/19/070219crmu_music_frerejones

In any case, I feel the author limits his views on what it means to be 'soulful' in music, and is limiting what modes of expression are suitable for his taste. Keith Richards and Simon Reynolds say similar things, too.

I also don't think " so many white rock bands retreat from the ecstatic singing and intense, voice like guitar tones of the blues, the heavy African downbeat, and the elaborate showmanship that characterized black music of the mid-twentieth century" as he suggests. Again, music is an ‘expression’ and there is no definition of what is proper. Music should unify and get people excited, and on common ground. It does not have to have 'funk' to be soulful. A 'white' band does not need to collaborate with a 'black' band to be 'soulful'. It should be passionate, as well. The songs, need to be great enough for people to care. I think some of the bands he mentions in his thread do that in spades, which is more then I can say for UI back in the day.

theres something kinda essentialist about this whole thread - im pretty sure alot of white artists are boring & stiff for the same reason lots of black artists are, not because either of them are consciously rejecting blackness or sitting down & deciding to sound 'white'... same for black & white artists who sound vibrant/funky/soulful/whatever

Who cares if indie rock is bad or has boring beats or whatever? There is so much funky and interesting (and yes rhythmically-influenced by the African diaspora)(<---said with dorky white guy voice) music out there, just listen to that.

So piling on someone misquoting a musician by inferring they're racist is a "rowboat" while attempting an analysis of how a handful of indie bands aren't especially rhythmic is "the QEII." This has me more confused than anything in the New Yorker article. (Well, except "a funk band called Ui," which hit me the same way as reading someone call Sarah Vowell a "humorist" a few years back: not necessarily wrong, per se, but not something I'd have even imagined to be the case beforehand.)

so where is sasha to defend himself anyway

cashing the bonus check he was promised by the New Yorker if he was able to successfully stir shit with a fake controversy and beef up the hit count on their blog/podcast pages.

cha-CHING

haha when I first heard Wild Honey in '94 I was like, "this is an indie rock album!"

As long as they don't clap on the one and the three, Jordan, it's all cool with me.

wild honey is my favorite beach boys

sure, but isn't part of white indie the attempt to consciously sound like artists in the white indie canon? (moreso than other musics) and that over time NOT borrowing from other sources creates an even "paler shade of white" (xpost)

is this thread about...INDIE GUILT???

the podcast is a real laugh..."here let me illustrate my point about 'soulful' black-influenced music by playing you the same clips of Elvis Presley and 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' you've heard a billion times before"

SFJ listed Neon Bible as one of his 2007 faves sometime back. Keep the Car Running is in is top tracks of the year and he wrote a long piece about them from that time. Sort of don't get that, but oh well

see this is where some stuff gets pretty confused.. He's not saying he doesn't like the Arcade Fire. People are real eager to reduce any discussion to "I'm positing this, and also this, and therefore this music is bad!" but that's some freshman-year-of-high-school shit. He's saying that where once he found them compelling live, he didn't last time he saw them, and he has an idea about why that might be, and here it is. He is not saying "their music isn't like this other music I like, and therefore it sucks, fuck those guys." He's saying "it seems that this music is a certain way, let me describe it." Lots of people on this thread do great work parrying the description itself w/counterexamples and so on. But again, he's not saying "music that isn't funky sucks balls." He's describing - correctly or incorrectly. But avoiding doing the whole ridiculous "well, it's like this: so fuck that!"

oh god...I just got to the part where the interviewer presses him to name 90s/post-90s examples of indie acts that transcend the whole black/white divide and soulless, badly sung or badly played indie and one of his first examples? LIZ PHAIR.

and he just trotted the old "country music and hip hop actually have a lot in common" chestnut.

i'm not even mad at this guy or anything, but jesus, what a clown.

J0hn OTM.

Elvis Presley stole the world away from Pat Boone and moved popular music from the head to the hips.

I’ve spent the past decade wondering why rock and roll, the most miscegenated popular music ever to have existed, underwent a racial re-sorting in the nineteen-nineties.

J0hn is indeed bang on the mark.

anthony is going to give himself a stroke

this article sucks donkey dick

I don't get too many OTMs owing to being wrong so often so everybody let me just enjoy the moment k

John OTM.

for real lols check out breihan v harvilla meeting of the minds on sfj

anyone read this? pretty good. manages to make the point that american music was made via all kinds of mixtures and recombinations of white and black music (and culture)
http://ec3.images-amazon.com/images/P/0060528184.01._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-dp-500-arrow,TopRight,45,-64_AA240_SH20_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

for real lols check out breihan v harvilla meeting of the minds on sfj

ok here comes that stroke

I think Harvilla is pretty much right in that thing, even if he's being way too polite about just how ridiculous the article is.

I'm perfectly prepared to accept his ambivalence about Arcade Fire (or, hell, just Arcade Fire live) if he'd alluded to his earlier enthusiasm. All we get are a few half-hearted kudos ("ragged but full of brio," "what’s missing from the band’s musical DNA is missing from dozens of other popular and accomplished rock bands’ as well—most of them less entertaining than Arcade Fire," "a stretch of raucous sing-alongs").

Whenever I get a new issue of The New Yorker in the mail, I fear there might be a article by Frere-Jones, and moreover that it'll be about someone like Justin Timberlake or 50 Cent or some other artist the equivalent of that hideous fake New-Urbanist subdivision that's being built across the street from where I work. But you see all sort of publications that have a "general" audience having horrible writing on music. On the Internet, Salon is probably the worst, but Slate's are pretty bad too. It sucks, but I don't care.

For a much more subtle (to say the least) take on this issue (sort of) Greil Marcus wrote about the tendency of commentators/radio/etc. not to include black artists when defining Rock, back in the '70s. I've noticed that Soul and Funk and Motown artists will not receive the kind of retrospective attention, close listening (esp. when it comes to appreciating albums instead of singles) that white artists get, even when they certainly deserve it. But this is beginning to change: e.g., one of the few things I've ever enjoyed reading at Pitchfork was their lists of the best albums of the '70s - not the finalized one, but where they showed what each critic contributed. I'm not sure if they're available anymore.

Frere-Jones is a hack. The use of Arcade Fire as some sort of exemplar of contemporary Indie Rock is ridiculous. Though perhaps not much so, considering that the prerequisite for an Indie Rock band getting any sort of press attention these days seems to be that they must suck hard. Arcade Fire's blandness rhythmically speaking is because they suck the hardest, that's all.

And the Clash as the counter-example? He certainly opens up a big can of worms by picking only a decent example from that period of UK popular music; not mentioning Dub - which has a much different kind of influence than this rhythmic one he is divining out of rotten old stereotypes; and seemingly not understanding how this trend, to the extent to which it has a inkling of truth to it, goes back farther. I point to what Daniel, Esq., said about '80s Indie acts, e.g. Either way, from reading this article and other by Frere-Jones, he's obviously in a headspace I don't understand. I will hazard a guess and say that in the end it's probably the same old sociological BS, wherein the critic will say something like, as he does here, Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg are the most important artists of recent history blahblahblah, not based on his experiences as a listener but as some attempt to pin down the tastes and habits of, essentiallly, hundreds of millions of people.

Greil Marcus wrote about the tendency of commentators/radio/etc. not to include black artists when defining Rock, back in the '70s.

Now we have sfj not including rock artists when defining rock.

another thing that bothers me is that it ignores free jazz which pretty much influences everything noisy that's been done since.

Can't believe I'm going to jump into this, having read about a 20th of this thread (I did read his piece, tho'). A few random thoughts:

Didn't mind the piece at all but I found it odd that after
acknowledging Eminem (who's way more seeped in black music than the Stones or Zeppelin ever were--the same emotional and physical distance just doesn't apply at all), he doesn't (I don't think) mention Justin Timberlake or Pink or Gwen Stefani (just for instance). Good or bad, they all seem quite comfortable, from what I can tell, working within (and to a possibly unprecedented degree, it IS within) what are essentially black idioms. I guess I'm just repeating what others have said about his glaring selectivity, and merely pointing out different sorts of examples. I mean, sure, I want 1981 back as well--trust me on that--but indie has not--ever since the original post-punk moment--been the first place I'd think to look for whatever it is he's looking for. You generally have better luck looking to the pop charts for this sort of thing, and to all those funny 80s examples above like Black Flag and the Minutemen, two words come to mind immediately: George Michael.

Also, the whole Cream and Zeppelin thing--I don't know. Obviously, they did the blues thing explicitly, and there was a whole "blues boom" moment that can't be ignored, but the closer most of those Brit guys actually got to doing blues homages, the more horrifically boring their music was, at least to my ears (and Zeppelin are just about my favourite 70s band--except for those interminably long, slow blues jams).

the whole thing about how SFJ describes seeing them in London--you know, they were cool back when a cat could catch 'em full of brio in London--and backing it up with his "finally catching the Clash in '81 (when, of course, SFJ was all of 14 years old) was hilarious in ways he never intended. The article was brimming with mediocrity.

Cosign artdamages rec of that Leland book.

http://ec3.images-amazon.com/images/P/0060528184.01._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-dp-500-arrow,TopRight,45,-64_AA240_SH20_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg/

BIG HOOS aka the librarian

I think I agree with his underlying argument, though: possibilities that once seemed present in punk--that seemed like the driving force behind much of it--are now just occasional glitches. I jumped ship on most punk in the late 80s for that very reason.

two words come to mind immediately: George Michael

I need to think about it, but this makes sense. I'd love for you to develop this.

arcade fire is punk now?

x-post

Sasha's got more comments on his New Yorker blog now (he quotes comments and responds to them briefly). He leads with one praising him, before getting to some slightly critical ones. He ends in part with this response:

I was simply trying to outline the pop landscape against which indie rock is working, and trying, without breaking too many eggs, to restrain the discussion to whatever we can pin down as indie rock. Not narrowing it down would lead toward a soggy blend of averages—you can see significant miscegenation in major-label artists like Amy Winehouse, or indie acts like Spoon and LCD Soundsystem, but I don’t think that they affect the larger change I perceive: that miscegenation no longer happens in the same way, and indie rock is Exhibit A.

Anyway. More later.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/sashafrerejones

I am still not sure how this corresponds with his March 26, 2007 pop note statement--"About five years ago, indie rockers began to rediscover the pleasures of rhythm."

You know, there already is a contemporary genre where rock bands incorporate funk influences, and it is called jambands. Be careful what you wish for.

xp (alfred) - I'm just citing George Michael as a counter-example to all the "so-and-so had a song with dub influences on their third album" examples above of someone who you didn't need to bend your ear towards the speaker for to detect traces of "blackness." And I don't think he's the only example, but maybe the first from the '80s that comes to mind.

that was horribly worded, but hopefully it makes some sense...

ok "restraining the discussion to whatever we can pin down as indie rock" kinda makes your point moot when you define indie rock as not having what you're looking for.