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. (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?

ILM has always been preoccupied with this topic. It is what ILM was based on, the entire "black" music is superior to "white" music is the entire foundament of what ILM was originally meant to be.

http://www.sitcomsonline.com/photopost/data/1085/15585coleman_hasselhoff.jpg

xpost. Or not.

Exactly how much mainstream success did Talking Heads actually enjoy?

From my recollections of listening to American FM radio in the 80s, I heard a lot more Talking Heads than Clash. Psyco Killer, Life During Wartime, Once in a Lifetime, Burning Down the House, And She Was... Each album produced at least one radio hit. Byrne was on the cover of Time around 1986, which shows that they thought of him as important culturally as Springsteen or Madonna.

"foundament"

this is not a word, Mr. Hongro.

the Talking Heads have sold around ten million albums.

mostly to family members though

They only sold ten million albums, but everyone who bought one went out and befriended a black guy.

Remember in the '90s when Simon Reynolds was pushing "postrock," a kind of successor to postpunk---groups like Long Fin Killie in the Uk (whom I liked--although they sounded postpunk to me) and uh, I guess Tortoise in the US (I always found them a little too dry). I thought the original idea in theory was that rock in a convention sense was a been there done that sort of thing, so bands would instead pick and choose elements from anywhere with it somehow not seeming like a shoved together record collection mess. But it never seemed to have panned out.

Also, Sasha used the term "black" alot and then as MH pointed out, applied it to both 60s rock bands incorporation of American r'n'b and late 70s/early 80s mostly UK postpunk incorporation of dub, reggae, and ska from Jamaica plus some funk and early rap. While Sasha touched on how American black music changed, and how its role changed in the marketplace with Dr. Dre and Snoop and the Chronic in 92, he never discussed how Jamaican music changed--the growth of dancehall, etc. Also, I do not recall whether he discussed how in Jamaica the number of musicians decreased with the growth of the use of programmed rhythms (I know he mentioned hiphop and the change from samples to programmed rhythms). Someone above was pining for a new rhythm but first maybe we should think about the relationship between existing programmed rhythms used by producers, and those used by old-fashioned guitar led bands.

DC go-go bands cover rap hits but often struggle to come up with original material of their own.

the Talking Heads have sold around ten million albums.

-- Dandy Don Weiner, Wednesday, 17 October 2007 12:23 (1 hour ago) Link

mostly to family members though

-- J0hn D., Wednesday, 17 October 2007 12:36 (1 hour ago) Link

They only sold ten million albums, but everyone who bought one went out and befriended a black guy.

-- Dom Passantino, Wednesday, 17 October 2007 12:41 (1 hour ago) Link

Good job, people.

http://www.john-sykes.info/kerrang83a%20(2).jpg

^^^^^ Wearing yr own bands t-shirt on a mag cover = ultra-lame.

whatever dude!