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

i think what's really kind of at issue is an enervating white-guy (or white american guy) insecurity that plays itself out in a whole lot of forms, not least of which is a growing inability to successfully tap into the macho-sexy outlaw strut that rock n roll actually was for elvis and for axl both.

otm, and its more obviously an issue in "real" rock, not indie, where sexy outlaws with rollicking raunch were actually probably MORE prevalent in the 90s, when irony was high, then when R.E.M. was on IRS.

then you have macho-sexy outlaws like Tim McGraw turning into John Prine on his last album.

I wouldn't call Maroon 5 or JT "real" rock in the way you define it, but certainly Adam Levine, etc are consciously selling their strut -- or signalling that they can strut.

What I mean is that the lack of strut is a problem on the RAWK charts, where from nu-metal on it's either pummel or ballad

probably mentioned prior, but whenever indie does venture outside "white emo guys with guitars" it gets reamed for being tokenist or a watered down 'safe for indie kids' version of the real thing. the oppression of nerdy white guys continues :(

Sasha is asking certain but not all circa 2007 indie bands to attempt and accomplish musically what the 1980s era Clash, a major label onetime punk band that sold lots more cds than the indie Arcade Fire, did.

Again: he's not "asking" any bands to do anything. He's just asking why they don't seem interested in it. What the bands themselves might have to say about it seems an uninteresting question to me: when have bands/musicians been good reporters of their intentions, goals, etc.? Unless you're really, really into authorial intention, I can't see how asking the bands (as alluded upthread, maybe not by you, I'm drawing in two things here) would be at all valuable. I for one am totally uninterested in what musicians have to say.

also Hongro's last post goes directly into the Geir Top Ten of All Time, shit was straight classic

What I mean is that the lack of strut is a problem on the RAWK charts, where from nu-metal on it's either pummel or ballad

yeah the whole post-nirvana nu-metal thing turned all angsty and moaning about bad childhoods and being a junkie or whatever. angst and mope as the prevailing white-male modes of rock expression. of course some of the angst and mope stuff -- rap-rock most obviously -- still took rhythmic cues from r&b/hip-hop, so it's not like there's one sweeping trend. but i think there is a serious lack of confidence, however you measure that but definitely including sexual bluster, in white-male (or white-english-speaking-male) pop music. i mean, i guess there's nickelback. but so anyway that has coincided in some ways with a retreat from r&b-derived rhythms, for reasons that are undoubtedly complicated and could be argued about cause-and-effect-wise for blogpages and blogpages.

(and jack white is an exception here too, although exactly what kind of exception i'm not sure because i've never been completely sure what jack white is up to.)

"real" rock, not indie, where sexy outlaws with rollicking raunch were actually probably MORE prevalent in the 90s, when irony was high, then when R.E.M. was on IRS.

Well, when REM were on IRS you had Johnny Cougar and Ratt and AC/DC and Loverboy and Bryan Adams and the Romantics and ZZ Top (who could be pretty darn ironic, last time I checked) etc. Not to mention Joan Jett. I'm not really sure who the '90s post-Cinderlla/Faster Pussycat/Warrant equivalents would be. (Stone Temple Pilots, I guess? Black Crowes?)

And now I suppose you get white rock dudes in Hinder or Nickelback or Avenged Sevenfold or whatever trying to swagger. Maybe they even pull it off sometimes, and I've been too lazy to notice. But yeah, if there's white rock that swings and swaggers like rock used to, it's calling itself country now for sure. And I said I wouldn't bring it up, so I'll leave it at that, though I'm curious how much Toby Keith and Shooter Jennings and Little Big Town Sasha listens to. (None of whom are afraid of Doobie Bros beats, either.) I liked Tipsy Mothra's post a lot.

(And then again there's also stoner metal, which has plenty of swing and swagger, when it pulls its '70s retro schtick off, which is rarer lately, and usually for a fairly small audience, though Monster Magnet and Queens of the Stone Age have had their mass-cultural moments; how do they fit into this?)

actually yeah Josh Homme is really worth mentioning in all this

wish I liked Shooter Jennings better

Xhuxk, if you re-read the entire sentence, my point wasn't that 80s real rock didn't have swagger, but that indie rock didn't "when REM was on IRS," and it prolly had more in the era of GVSB, Spencer, Afghan Whigs, Horton Heat, Supersuckers, etc, etc. the nineties when SFJ suggests indie lost it.

I for one am totally uninterested in what musicians have to say.

-- J0hn D., Wednesday, October 17, 2007 2:20 AM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

lol irony

i mean of COURSE it had swagger in the 80s, tipsy's whole post revolved around axl.

anthony if your implication is that that remark was unintentional irony I'm frankly insulted dude, that punch line deserves respect

i think what's really kind of at issue is an enervating white-guy (or white american guy) insecurity that plays itself out in a whole lot of forms, not least of which is a growing inability to successfully tap into the macho-sexy outlaw strut that rock n roll actually was for elvis and for axl both. (except like i said for country, and there's a reason that the self-defined reactionary pop form is the last bastion of white american male swagger.)

All of which I can't help but think is a by-product of the rise of the service and knowledge economies (and the decline of physical work) and the increasing sedentariness of our lifestyle.

good post, btw

"The Last Bastion of White American Male Swagger" sounds like either a really good Stephen Merritt song or a really bad Lou Reed title.

indie rock didn't "when REM was on IRS," and it prolly had more in the era of GVSB, Spencer, Afghan Whigs, Horton Heat, Supersuckers, etc, etc. the nineties when SFJ suggests indie lost it.

When did REM leave IRS, again? Because in the '80s you had all those manly Touch & Go and Homestead and SST bands, remember: Scratch Acid, Killdozer, um, Painted Willie and Das Damen or whoever. White Zombie were even indie band then! But yeah, I agree indie lost something in the early '90s that it half gained back later in the decade, if that's what you were saying in your higely ambiguous earlier post.

"manly" maybe but I've re-read Stairway To Hell enough you don't go to them for rhythmic swagger.

enough to know

Typos galore in my last post too.

(Btw, Little Big Town are not as swaggery as Toby or Shooter or Montgomery Gentry, really; they're more in the Fleetwood Mac lineage -- toughest voice in the band is actually a girl -- so maybe they weren't the best example. But they make some fairly explicit funk moves on their new album, so they're relevant.)

to clarify my hugely ambigous post: real rawk used to move, since the nineties that's been dropping. indie never really did, but probably did most in the 90s, the same time SFJ said indie lost its sense of rhythm (something it never regained except in his Sound Of Silver review).

When did REM leave IRS, again?

1988, I think.

"The Last Bastion of White American Male Swagger" sounds like either a really good Stephen Merritt song or a really bad Lou Reed title.

for the fucking win

SFJ responds to some letters/criticsm:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/sashafrerejones

The thing that drives me nuts about this is that if SFJ was merely saying that musicianship (in a prideful, "chops"-driven sense, not necessarily guitar solos galore but people seeming to give a damn about how well they play) has been on the wane in indie rock for a good 15 years, and that the overall quality of the music has dropped somewhat with it, I'd be totally on board. But because he wraps up his thesis in "rhythm" and some vague idea of black influence (what about math rock and neo-prog bands? lots of complex rhythm in there but still essentially as 'white' as Arcade Fire or whatever), I don't even want to agree with the part that does ring true.

"As for what constitutes a miscegenated piece of music, I chose four pieces.

Led Zeppelin, “Custard Pie.” This is built from blues bricks: the sexual metaphor (which sometimes resurfaces in hip-hop, cf. Domino’s 1993 hit “Sweet Potato Pie”) and the chords, give or take a move in the turnaround. But the band plays it like the heaviest funk in the world, which also happens to sound like pure hard rock. With Zeppelin, you always have to consider the Bonham factor: the greatest drummer in the history of rock is also one of the funk greats, and hasn’t fared too badly as a sample in hip-hop’s collective memory. Good luck figuring out where this belongs.

OutKast, “Bombs Over Baghdad.” Well, it’s full of rapping, so it’s obviously hip-hop. But the song isn’t paying any attention to the lines in the road. The beat is hard enough—stiff, at certain points—to work for a hard-core punk band, and the synth bass line that enters could be from a fast British rave track. That’s before the guitar solo, gospel choir, and drum-machine solo.

Prince, “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man.” This is much closer to a classic pop structure: chorus melody stated at top, verses flowing into choruses, with a very brief bridge back into the chorus. The only real break in the action is the space for a guitar solo. But Prince swings this in a way that it’s hard to imagine the Zombies or McCartney pulling off. His singing leans toward straight soul—lots of edge, plenty of growls. Wendy and Lisa back him up with uninflected, clear harmony that could be from any pop record (or TV commercial) of the last twenty years.

Miles Davis, “On the Corner.” It isn’t rock, but this is a pure hybrid. Michael Henderson and Jack DeJohnette’s rhythm pattern is Southern funk, slightly twisted, and the truncated solos are of a piece with other jazz, even if everybody seems to stop a few moments after they start. But the sound mix is a direct outcome of Davis’s obsession with the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen: the buzzer going off, the swirling sounds, the abrupt edits and violent panning in the stereo field. (Thank God that people can buy recordings from other countries.) This is the sound of the ball moving forward quickly—so quickly that nobody could find the ball again for decades."

wow, four whole from the past 40 years that combine white and black musical influences. glad we have experts like him around to dig deep.

four whole songs

All of which I can't help but think is a by-product of the rise of the service and knowledge economies (and the decline of physical work) and the increasing sedentariness of our lifestyle.

-- Hurting 2, Wednesday, October 17, 2007 2:39 AM

This is a really interesting point.

I didn't read the whole article but does he say anything that Reynolds didn't in '86?

OK, I read more of it. da croupier OTM about mainstream rock, as ever.

(Mind you, I'm listening to Mahler so I might not be the best person to comment.)

someday im going to read this whole thread and make a really smart OTM comment that everyone can agree on

oh my GOD with all this use of MISCEGENATED and only like 3 times has it been saying "wtf"

^^^

xpost

he didn't use the phrase "juju" though, gotta give him that

and actually, I just word-searched the thread and only found like two posts here where someone used the term "miscegenated" without quotation marks and some obvious distancing from SFJ's perception of the term.

i actually just read this whole thread o_O

SFJ basically spends the whole article trying to be a reverse-Geir, asserting the vague idea that there's some straight line out of Africa from which all rhythm is derived, and that all white musicians should either bow down to this awesome force and incorporate it into their music as faithfully as possible, or get out of the way and let black people make all the music. He not only laments (in reference to Michael Jackson) that "he alone could not alter pop music’s racial power balance," but puts forth the idea that Dr. Dre did tip the scales in the 'right' direction.

-- Alex in Baltimore, Tuesday, October 16, 2007 3:15 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

^^^ this

and actually, I just word-searched the thread and only found like two posts here where someone used the term "miscegenated" without quotation marks and some obvious distancing from SFJ's perception of the term.

Man, that's not what I experienced.

Perhaps a rushed misreading.

(x-post) I understood the thrust of the article to be that SF-J had noticed in recent years a leaching out of the African-American influences on rock music (specifically, space, bass, blues and swing) among white rock artists; and that he considered the resulting, leached-out music, somewhat uninspiring by comparison.

First time I read through the article, I felt some observations about contemporary pop gathering momentum, but the connections never got made. I feel kinship with what seemed to inspire SFJ here: there's so much satisfying music being produced right now, so many artists that are vivid and odd, why is it that music doesn't seem to be breaking down any cultural barriers?

The way he keeps hammering on the term "miscegenation" suggests he got to hung up on a thesis about race that doesn't really follow out from the gut feeling that inspired the article. As far as record sales and cultural impact in the USA, the Clash were hardly a mainstream force 'til right at the end- Combat Rock and the few months that followed. To say the Minutemen were influential in the late-80s is to seriously overstate the case. The influence of both bands was a very gradually accumulation.

Probably the best observation he comes up with is in the podcast, where he says "One definition of indie music is people don't sing very well." As a kid, I remember it took some work to overcome Strummer and Boon's singing. Mainstream imitators of those bands, Rancid and the RHCPs, sung a lot better. Frere-Jones talks about how hard it is for a white guy to sing over funk and not sound minstrelish, but Talking Heads figured it out. And mainstream success followed.

Another definition of indie is "working with what you got", but that implies limited access to recording time and production values and distribution and promotion. And that's gone now. The barriers to entry are so low. The limitations that affected the style of indie musicians in the past doesn't bear on the artists who've descended from them.

So you've got a bunch of people doing their own thing. Because they can. Spoon don't sound "raw" because they don't have to. In the Red is full of bands that don't have to sound "raw", but want to. It's why music is so interesting now, but also seems to explain why there isn't much cross pollination. Twenty five years ago, Arcade Fire or Joanna Newsom would have needed years to become so polished. Meat Puppets started sounding pretty with Up on the Sun, but it took until Too High to Die to figure out a way to doctor Kirkwood's voice enough to get it on radio.

With Radiohead and Madonna and NIN talking about controlling their own distribution and promotion, the changes are working from top-down, too. Things will change, things will mix again. But I think economics and the protools/mp3s/www have a lot to do with the contemporary situation. Everyone is working from their own personal-designed ghettos.

Amazing thread.
Think everyone agrees SFJ is onto something - what it means is the issue.
Hurting 2 OTM upthead re: sedentaryness of the service economy killing the funk
and bendy just above about personal-designed ghetto.....
I was listening to J. Geils last night and they're a band who just couldn't happen anymore - the invocation of a social, bacchanalian space by a white band, instead of the solipsistic between the earbuds world of indie.
Somebdy mentioned the Burritos upthread as having been unfairly claimed by SFJ as indie ancestors and that's totally right - remember when they did Do Right Woman or dark End of the Street, those songs were contemporary and there was no ironic, meta- intent at all - impossible to imagine an REM or Wilco equivalent.

Sasha is obviously NOT onto something. The entire article is just one huge pile of shit, written by someone who wants all true musical values to die.

Sasha is obviously NOT onto something. The entire article is just one huge pile of shit, written by someone who wants all true musical values to die.

Oh, yeah - obviously I see that now.....

Think everyone agrees SFJ is onto something

I think we must have been reading different threads

lol

Frere-Jones talks about how hard it is for a white guy to sing over funk and not sound minstrelish, but Talking Heads figured it out. And mainstream success followed.

Exactly how much mainstream success did Talking Heads actually enjoy?

I mean, apart from those three songs that were on high rotation on MTV due to their great videos.

"[Hongro's] on fire"

I think we must have been reading different threads

Well even negatively, he's found an argument so specious it produces a 1000 odd posts in under 2 days, then?