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

(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!

yeah, it was probably just a random pic someone snapped while they were on tour and band merch was the only clean laundry available to him that day. plus being in a band as awesome as Thin Lizzy cancels out any lameness. although SFJ would probably diss them for not trying to sound like James Brown or something.

plus being in a band as awesome as Thin Lizzy cancels out any lameness.

u + k

No, still lame.

^^^ still wrong.

Phil Lynott is SFJ's worse nightmare

when i saw pavement play one of the pavement guys (spiral?) wore his own pavement band t shirt, and pavement are indie so i guess wearing your own t shirt is "indie," ergo Thin Lizzy are indie.

Lots of great stuff on this thread. I haven't weighed in at all, mostly because there are so many dead-on points that kind of state what my reactions to the article are. (strongohulkington's drunk posts early in the thread are fucking great, da croupier's pretty much OTM throughout this whole thread, mh had some great comments too). I liked these ones from mh especially:

The only real argument he throws out, among mentioning the diversity of influences that hip hop picks up on, bickering about the lack of rhythmic variation in indie rock, and going on with some sort of unrelated history lesson, is the "lassitude and monotony" that indie rock apparently gets stuck in.

What is the yardstick for measuring whether a band has been influenced by African-American music, and why does SFJ think he has one? And what privileges African-American music, other than the fact that it's the largest minority? Why aren't we complaining about indie's inability to absorb latino culture as we go into the 21st century?

Other things that have been said that I wondered quite a bit about when reading the article: why aren't bands who take ideas from (mostly black) free jazz acknowledged at all? Free jazz doesn't fonk, sure, but I guess this kind of goes along with the nebulous and reductionist concept of "black music" Sasha's kind of working with, here. This was mentioned, what do more people think of it?

Sasha's had this shtick for a long while and it's kind of odd that he dropped it all in this pretty mediocre article (someone said previously, "write a book!") -- was it an editor's thing, slashing it down to fit in the magazine? The New Yorker wasn't going to run a 15-page article on indie rock? I don't know, but it might account for how sloppy, simplified, poorly supported the article is, maybe...

I mean if the guy has been ruminating on this for years, you'd think he'd really have his argument hammered out. But it just reads like he has this "big giant thesis" that's he thinks is totally gonna drop a bomb on how we think about indie rock, but he really doesn't have much to back it up. But the "big giant thesis" just sounds so good to him that he has to hang onto it, even if there's not much really there. It's a shame because this unsupported "big giant thesis" has been informing his music criticism for a while. I always enjoy reading his articles whether or not I agree with them, but a lot of his points are hard to stomach.

Sasha is slowly turning into that scene from Jerry Maguire where he goes "I am Mister Black People!"

was it an editor's thing, slashing it down to fit in the magazine?

I get the feeling that he was allowed to coast, editors deferring to his expertise. Editors who were more informed about music would have challenged the obvious generalizations that we're challenging here.

People wore their own band shirts all the time before Pavement, i.e. the Clash! Ergo, it is a requirement.

It was mentioned before upthread, but I thought linking to Bangs piece was kind of weird move. From the Breihan v Harvilla piece, linked upthread:

Go to SFJ’s personal blog now and he links to 1979’s famed Lester Bangs Voice essay "The White Noise Supremacists" and describes Bangs as “somebody who saw this coming twenty-eight years ago.” This ain’t that. First of all, what Bangs is describing is far uglier and more explicit: Racial slurs permeating the CBGBs scene, Nazi regalia flaunted for cheap shock value, Richard Hell getting shit for having a black guitar player, etc. To even obliquely hold that up as a precedent to or as racially problematic as the Arcade Fire not swinging enough or whatever is incredibly unfair. I guess that’s where I’m getting the “malicious racism” overtones in what SFJ writes now, and maybe I’m overanalyzing, but hey, he brought it up. He sees a parallel there and I don’t.

That was Harvilla, btw, not Breihan.

I think the most galling thing about this is that SFJ easily has the level of press access to talk to 90% of the contemporary acts he mentioned if he wanted to, but he'd rather just blatantly misrepresent the intentions of the music they make from afar. Granted, as a critic he seems way more into think pieces and reviews than interviews and profiles, and like John said, "authorial intention" might not be that important to this topic. But when he writes stuff like this, or, say, lobs a grenade like the Stephin Merritt thing without even trying to get the guy's side of the story before doing so, he comes off like a shock blogger, just saying outrageous shit about popular artists just to attract some web traffic. This year it's Arcade Fire, any other year it'd be another emblematic indie band of the moment.

he comes off like a shock blogger, just saying outrageous shit about popular artists just to attract some web traffic

Completely right. With his history here, one of my first thoughts on reading the article was that it was an unusually public instance of ILX trolling.

Ui: C or D?

The use of Arcade Fire as some sort of exemplar of contemporary Indie Rock is ridiculous.

What? Arcade Fire is perhaps one of the two or three most visible exponents of indie rock.

and the EL Lay studio-rock posse's

Alfred = Xgau?!?

haha oh like THAT'S news

Sasha is slowly turning into that scene from Jerry Maguire where he goes "I am Mister Black People!"

-- Alex in Baltimore, Wednesday, 17 October 2007 14:44

looooool