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

it just makes it even more of a lame article that there are 10000 examples of musical miscegenation (as mentioned, RHCP, rap-rock, RATM, Jon Spencer, Phish, jam bands, bla bla bla, even if they all suck), but Sasha picks one tiny, average-selling genre that arguably didn't really miscegenate in its history at all (with a few exceptions), if one is draw a line from VU through 80s SST indie to Pavement to Arcade Fire.

RHCP and Sublime and Rancid and No Doubt and Mighty Mighty Bosstones and Dave Matthews Band and 311 were and still are really popular among young white people in America, whether any of those bands are still together or not. listen to any modern rock station that still leans heavy on 90's oldies and you'll hear at least a couple of those bands every hour. but they're not indie and more importantly, they're not credible or "cool" to critics like SFJ, so they don't get a mention.

"commercial, but generally appealing"

woops, "commercial but generally unappealing"

i accidentally took his contradictory statement and made it redundant.

The elephant in the room is that hardly anyone listens to indie rock anyway.

no i think the elephant in the room is that it's harder to define what indie rock exactly is more so than it is to define psych or country.

b-b-but the postal service went gold!

oh wait ignore them

x-post

does Sasha frequent ILM at all anymore? think he'll read this thread?

alternate titles for this piece that I'd approve of:

- Indie Rock: Where Have All The Competent Drummers Gone?

- Why Aren't Orange County Ska Bands Allowed In The Indie Rock Treehouse?

^^^nice

why all the "VU are uber-white" stuff? they are easily the most doo-wop influenced of any 60s rock band i can think of.

Why Aren't Orange County Ska Bands Allowed In The Indie Rock Treehouse?

The treehouse can have 'em!

Elsewhere, roffles.

I dunno, is indie rock that hard to circumscribe? As someone said above, isn't it whatever soundtracks those "serious" movies the kids these days like, e.g. Rushmore, Garden State? There's some marketing category here, and this music seems to hit the sweet spot.

I will also say that I went to an Arcade Fire show a couple of weeks ago, the first indie show I've been to in years, and I was amazed at how many women were there---not at all the sausage factory I was used to. So I think that has something to do with it, but I can't even begin to say what.

the rushmore soundtrack is almost all 60s british invasion stuff. not contemporary indie rock.

is indie rock that hard to circumcise?

loving the LaMonte posts here

when rock critics talk about indie language goes on holiday

ok sorry had no idea

why does women not respond to bass?

why all the "VU are uber-white" stuff? they are easily the most doo-wop influenced of any 60s rock band i can think of.

...and half their grooves are ripped from Bo Diddley.

http://i13.ebayimg.com/05/i/000/98/a1/d4d6_1_b.JPG

a paler shade of robot jugs

the heart of this is that sfj stil hasnt gotten over what every ilm dude who fucks with hip-house/metal/ambient/whatever more than indie rock learned like 3-4 years ago which is to stop bitching about rock critics liking rock critic music and just listen to whatever you want - sometimes theres even other dudes you can talk about this shit who you'll find if you stop trying to make such a big fucking deal to rock critic dudes how you dont like rock critic music

his yearly best-ofs are pretty "rock crit" music as far as I know it

everyone who thinks that "indie rock" is obsolete/unpopular needs to spend 4 years on a liberal arts college campus with rich kids who love this stuff and will someday be VIPs

Hokum. Indie rock, or whatever you want to call it is a reaction to the mainstream, just like punk rock was a reaction against AOR (or classic rock or whatever.) Or if you disagree with that then at least it's an alternative in the marketplace.

And as an alternative it has to be different than the perceived mainstream. And it's this lack of swing - or lack of any rhythm and blues influence - that accomplishes this. Arcade Fire with Sly & Robbie as the rhythm section would not be Arcade Fire. And people wouldn't call them indie rock. Just like Pavement with the Doobie Brothers rhythm section wouldn't even be close to Pavement or indie rock either.

There are other ways to do this of course, Minutemen being the notable exception. And the more garagey side of indie rock is an exception that SFJ doesn't mention.

Or maybe bands are just the sum of their influences and the current generation grew up listening to Pavement and the Church.

To ascribe racist motives pertaining to any of this seems pretty irresponsible as well as misguided. You might as well say that 1950s monster movies were systematically eradicating any traces of traditional slapstick comedy. They didn't use any of the elements of slapstick becuase that's not what they were, they were monster movies.

Why isn't SFJ criticizing rap music for the lack of, say, Celtic influences? Sure we had House of Pain but they're long gone. Why can't Lil Wayne drop in some bagpipe samples? Is this some sort of denial of Celtic culture? Or is it that bagpipes don't really go well with hip hop?

Why Aren't Orange County Ska Bands Allowed In The Indie Rock Treehouse?

Al, you should submit this to the Experience Music Project as a proposal for the next Pop Conference:

Call for Proposals
2008 Pop Conference at Experience Music Project|Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame

Shake, Rattle: Music, Conflict, and Change

April 10-13, 2008, Seattle, Washington

How does music resist, negate, struggle? Can pop music intensify vital confrontations, as well as ameliorating and concealing them?

Send proposals to Eric Weisbard at Er✧✧✧@emp✧✧✧.o✧✧ or Weisb✧✧✧@earthl✧✧✧.n✧✧ by December 17, 2007; please keep them to 250 words and a 50 word bio. Full panel proposals, bilingual submissions, and unusual approaches are welcome.

how many elephants are there, in the room, now? a lot!

another one i've just thought of: when real-deal big time black pop artists um "reach into" whiteland, they go to chris martin, adam levine, [country dude on the hook to that one nelly weeper]. not "indie." diss!

ie: indie may or may not engage in much of a conversation with the rest of contemporary american pop music, which is HUGELY BLACK in so many ways, structurally and in terms of surfaces and images. but, looking from the other direction, black music gives even LESS of a fuck about indie. as in, zero.

who likes the decemberists anyway? even corny indie fux i know think they are gay drama club dorks. spoon seems way more core indie than decemberists to me.

You wouldn't be saying this if you were at the huge outdoor concert the Decemeberists had a couple months ago in Chicago. After work on a weekday, Millennium Park was packed with cubicle jockeys, art-school fucks, teenage girls, etc. I ran into like five people I knew, without even trying.

You might as well say that 1950s monster movies were systematically eradicating any traces of traditional slapstick comedy. They didn't use any of the elements of slapstick becuase that's not what they were, they were monster movies.

this isnt true at all, dumbass

Seriously, do any musicians (except SFJ, who claims to be one), sit around wringing their hands about whiteness and blackness in their music to the degree music writers do? As far as I've obseved we just try and figure out a way to play that works for us, thinking about what's white or black has very little to do with it.

'how come there isnt a united CAUCASIAN college fund??? if i started white entertainment television you'd call me racist!!'

Things I feel he doesn't talk about, that should be included in this conversation:

-The United States is right now the most segregated it has been in a long time. Much more so than the 1960s. At one point, whites and blacks lived in the same areas, even if blacks were treated as second class citizens in those areas. Now the middle class white kids who are making indie rock are growing up in predominately white neighborhoods, and then moving to new "liberal" cities like Boston or San Fransisco or Portland that are also predominately white.
-The time gap. Why are whites willing to appropriate black music so long as it's been about 10 years since black people were actually playing it. Indie bands will play music inspired by funk or 80s electro but rarely by modern hip hop. What significance does this have?
-Define white music, define black music. Is there such a thing? What are the characteristics of both? I understand that he wouldn't have room to do so in a New Yorker article, but I feel like if you can't do this then you shouldn't try to tackle this subject.

and what is reminding me of my Georgia upbringing. I heard that kinda thing weekly. Of course I went to a school where for a project on WW2 two girls brought in cookies with frosting swastikas.

everyone who thinks that "indie rock" is obsolete/unpopular needs to spend 4 years on a liberal arts college campus with rich kids who love this stuff and will someday be VIPs working at a coffee shop

-- max, Wednesday, 17 October 2007 17:39 (6 minutes ago) Link

-The time gap. Why are whites willing to appropriate black music so long as it's been about 10 years since black people were actually playing it. Indie bands will play music inspired by funk or 80s electro but rarely by modern hip hop. What significance does this have?

ive always wondered about this - does shit just become ok for rock critic/music nerd types once history has weighed in on it or nobody listens to it anymore or what

somebody paste that o-dub review of the chronic from 93

there's some thread on ilx about that, i think sasha himself might have called it 'sonic gentrification'

the language means a lot too, unconsciously i think. there was a time when what was called as "miscegenation" was basically rape. and weren't there huge huge arguments 10-20 years ago that "borrowing" and "homage" were terms glossing over straight up thievery and parasitism?

i don't know exactly what i mean by bringing this up, but etymology always sticks out to me after looking at the same word 100+ times... maybe if something has been lost in the past several years, it's not a bad thing

i get that like no one on ILM listens to "indie rock" and 90% of americans dont either but the 10% (or less) that do are (for a variety of sociological/economic reasons) the "cultural elite" (aka, theoretically the "tastemakers" for the upper middle class)... and i dunno, one the one hand its easy to be like "whatever, who gives a shit what the U.M.C. listens to" but the fact that the people who like indie rock are the ones who end up as editors at major magazines and publishing houses and, like, curators at art galleries or whatever shit the "cultural elite" does, and this means my dad and my future boss and most of the people i go to college with will continue to buy decembrists CDs and i cant speak for any of you but i dont really want that

i mean i know you all are way too cool for the new yorker but you should remember that the new yorker's reader base overlaps pretty widely with indie rock fan base

http://phs.abstractdynamics.org/archives/001731.html

never mind it wasnt on ilx and it was simon reynolds

your dad buys decemeberists cds??

yeah man

altho hes not the best demographic indicator, he also buys r kelly cds

max ive actually made a near-identical argument before, and i do think that folks in these positions and what they say about music does matter ... my whole senior independent study project was about how a small minority can affect the majority discourse.

but this article is ineffective on these terms because he's not really upending this cultural elite canon, he's still arguing everything on indie rock's terms

max, you're right that indie rock is a bigger piece of the pop culture pie than most people here are giving it credit for (I definitely think the phrase "indie rock" is much more commonplace than it was 10 years ago, for one thing), but saying "come to my liberal arts campus and you'll see how many people listen to indie rock" is kinda like saying "come to France and you'll see how many people are French".

i suppose they should get a few points for at least acknowledging the contradictions of what they're about in a really upfront way but unfortunately the name White Out only seems to make it worse somehow

if it weren't for the inclusion of ludacris and chingy i'd say it was straight up that standard timelag syndrome where white folks get into a particular black music only a good ten years or more after the black folks have moved on to something else ... sonic gentrification

it's like they've gone through Stage One of white indie engagement (the IDM-nerd missing-the-point a bit 'timbaland's rhythms are really complicated and weird and glitchy') and straight onto 'it's all about partying down' which unfortunately gets translated to a 'it's just stupid dance music but we're down with that' stance

and yeah you're right phil that house and techno, which has claims to both Afrofurist-intellect-weird-and-avant and stupid-fun-lets-great-crazy, gets written out -- although they do plan to play some technotronic and that's almost house music right?

a fascinating slab of discourse
Posted by: simon r at February 27, 2004 08:21 AM

When the hell did indie rock's terms get defined, though? I realized I don't have a clue, past the idea of college radio stuff and the growing organization of smaller labels and certain sounds.