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

John, I don't necessarily think you have any reason to defend SFJ's piece that goes against what you really do believe or operates on grounds of personal loyalty or selfishness or whatever. But you have to be aware of the fact that considering that this is a critic who has called you "America’s best non-hip-hop lyricist," it's gonna come out looking a certain way.

"lots of T. Rex comparisons around the time of the first studio album but any Al Jolson refs? 'cause that's kinda who he sounds like)"

definitely. he is not alone there. antony and cocorosie and devendra are all in love with karen dalton. someone who wanted to sound like the oldest and blackest woman who ever lived. (tim buckley too had the jolson thing going on. another fave.)

I'm just trying to assign your inexplicable cherry-picking of what to acknowledge on this thread a motivation I can understand/sympathize with, John.

I mean really, Anthony: is this even true, or just a rhetorical stance? Half the things SFJ says are things his detractors on this thread have said & will again say, in various permutations, on threads here; cherry-picking is the name of the game here. There are some basic formal considerations (backbeat, swing) that he's talking about that you, zingmaster in extremis, aren't particularly interested in, even though they're primary in this discussion: why does so much mainstream indie eschew these properties, and mightn't it mean anything? I don't agree with SFJ about loads of stuff (for example: I don't give a shit about indie rock with some occasional exceptions), but this whole thread seems like mainly jealous haters doing the "my kid could paint better than that!" schtick, with some occasional and on-point exceptions. That he manages to troll all the free-weekly/blog ppl so successfully is kind Madonna-In-Her-Primesque from where I sit. But who knows, maybe I'm just trying to help him out on a pointless ILX thread owing to extreme gratitude about an article he wrote four years ago.

Alex, for sure, but c'mon: as true as that may be, and as nutty as I can get, does anybody who knows me really think I'd go "gotta defend dudebrah, he likes my shit?" C'mon. I may be cantankerous/nuts/corny, but I don't roll like that.

also plenty of those hiphop cats couldn't go twelve bars with me and they know it, so if anything I got beef with MC F-J

Trashthumb....

I really don't know where you think you can draw a line between the 'personal and human meaning' and the political, and i can think of plenty of abstract art that's part of an explicit social dialogue..... but its late on my side of the Atlantic, so if the conversation is still anywhere in this neighbourhood in the AM, I may have more...

I know that the postmodern assumption is that all ideas are available, and free to be discussed, and that society certainly has a role in dictating how people perceive music, but ultimately I'd like to see the meaning<->feeling dichotomy a little less polarized. And yea there's plenty of abstract art related to society or culture, overtly, like Urinal and 4'33", and I guess I'll be doing the terrible 'cherry-picking' because I'm not familiar with abstract art that's more political. I think both of them are about freeing the media from its rhetorical confines, although obviously they generated a lot of rhetoric and still do. It's been unfair of me to try and isolate the artists feeling from society, because everyone feels its pressure and that impacts the mood. To stop from being verbose, and further digging myself into a hole, I'm just trying to look for a 'solution' to political discussion of music, because although I think it's interesting, it's not what I'm concerned with as a musician. I want to see more aesthetic/theory discussion is really all, sorry to be a pain my first day on this forum

There are some basic formal considerations (backbeat, swing) that he's talking about that you, zingmaster in extremis, aren't particularly interested in, even though they're primary in this discussion: why does so much mainstream indie eschew these properties, and mightn't it mean anything?

I guess you must have missed the 500 posts detailing this, but most of the complaints with the article aren't that so much indie lacks backbeat and swing, but that he's arguing it once had it. Plus, as the Carl Wilson piece notes (a piece that restates much of what's been posted here), he's doing a piss-poor job theorizing why indie "lost" it. I'm sorry I went for the low blow, but you need to get over the "zingmaster" thing but take off the blinders at look at the complaints me and EVERYONE else here have been making on this thread, cuz you seem to be avoiding acknowledging them.

too drunk now to stay mad, gimme kisses daddy

you did have to be trolled into writing anything more than one-line crankypants posts on this thread and you know it

uh, yeah, cuz I already wrote my peace on the other thread that I LINKED to and the BEGINNING of the thread.

Also from the beginning, from Jess: John and mr. que's weird pile-up mostly seems born out of unwilling to do the unpacking of the SEVERAL YEARS WORTH OF DISCUSSION WEVE ALREADY HAD ON THIS TOPIC including THE SAME SHIT SFJ TRIED FOISTING UPON US A FEW YEARS BACK CIRCA EMP TIME that anthony has managed to squeeze into his "one-line bitchouts" ala "basically limits to folkies and brian wilson fans"

at the beginning of the thread, sorry so typo

There are some basic formal considerations (backbeat, swing) that he's talking about that you, zingmaster in extremis, aren't particularly interested in, even though they're primary in this discussion: why does so much mainstream indie eschew these properties, and mightn't it mean anything?

I think a lot of the prejudice against those sounds might be because they're happy and fun, and I know a lot of people (young, disillusioned 'indie' people) who seem to resent happiness and marginalize it as being stupid, unless of course something tickles their fancy and even then they excuse it as a guilty pleasure. Authenticity is important as well, and a lot of them probably didn't listen to that stuff growing up, and feel that they don't have any claim to it (since it's black culture), even though recent things they've heard they acquire with ease and then praise. It's easier to avoid it, and try and make music that sounds 'transcendent' or some other extreme, than risk inevitable racial discussion of your music and disenfranchising your neurotic white middle class audience. That's still all implicit, and I don't see why there's such a massive discussion of 'is not' rather than is, and why society led it that way. Then again, maybe I'm just upset because I'm reacting against music, something I needlessly sanctify, getting the same treatment as my Medieval lit class in some regards.

also you know Carl Wilson is also a fan of my stuff so yr bogosity in that regard is doubled: I don't take sides based on who likes me or I'd hate, like, 95% of the population

saying "I said it elsewhere" is a copout: if the question's so boring to you, why are you here?

thank you for admitting you're trolling, John

I don't see the huge crime in one-line posts, especially in the context of a long discussion that adds up to a hefty wordcount's worth of writing on the subject. I don't need to see any proof that Anthony can write in full paragraphs without being goaded into doing so.

thank you for admitting you're trolling, John

I learned it from you, Dad

I don't see the huge crime in one-line posts

Alex I have love for you but own up now, you have a horse in this race

you're all vv pretty <3

royal trux was way fonkier than 90% of the music mentioned on this thread, even when they weren't even trying.

howling hex has some crazy funk too

John didn't say RT wasn't funky, but that SFJ said they were funky we would have laughed at him because we're just haters frothing at the mouth and John's the Omega Man.

that if SFJ

what? i dropped a bunch of glib one-liners in this thread and also a few fat, indulgent paragraphs. I'm not going to wait until i have at least 200 words to post anything if I have a small thought now that I can throw into the fray. (xpost)

I'm just pointing out that Royal Trux are hardly bringing the funk now or ever

reads to me like, well, whatever. who has the energy for a good ol' ilm clusterfuck thread anymore anyway? not me.

ah missed that and was dealing with his first ref to Trux why do I suspect that if this line had come from the SFJ article he'd presently be getting raked both ways over the coals for citing Royal Trux as counterexample to the "does not swing" trend

If everyone's hope here is that the distinction between black and white music go away, because everyone is allowed to reference anything, then the next argument becomes why aren't the African Americans referencing 'white music'. Since it's almost impossible for a genre/culture and its ethnic origin to be dissolved, except through saturation, then the thrust of all this seems to eliminate identity, but since there's still the white european tradition of art music, they still have the 'historical' upper hand, whatever that means. Indie music is currently co-opting plenty of Balkan influence, and since those people are white, it's not taboo, and it doesn't bring up a talking point. It also achieves the goal of only being a reference point in terms of aesthetic, and not ethnicity of the performer. Is the solution to only use one or two components from the 'other' music, so that theres a slow desensitization to white people performing it, until it can be co-opted completely and only be historically black, by entering the comfort zone its lost its exclusivity, and I wouldn't doubt people want to maintain that to some degree. Comfort zone only functions in this argument with whites, and its only a function of race, they're uncomfortable because of authenticity, not because a lack of native familiarity or connection with the music. And if you don't have that, why should you incorporate these elements, knowing that they're going to politicize your music.

If a white guy lives in New Orleans and plays in a jazz funeral, then that's not going to raise any eyebrows, because that's their regional identity, which gives them some leeway in terms of authenticity. This entire argument is based around a tenuous conception of race, when most aesthetic is probably a result of what people listened to in the car with their parents as kids. I know this is a jumble, I just can't organize my thoughts, some reason I can't write a damn paper.

Well, he had 900+ ILM posts to draw inspiration from.

except Carl Wilson really didn't need them, dude can think for himself

yeah, while I wouldn't be shocked if he read part of this thread, there was nothing here that was obviously lifted for the piece. The problems are pretty obvious, and his points re: class went beyond most of the zings here.

Just re-read the Slate piece. Yup, still great.

It's been pointed out elsewhere on this site but the first two chapters of Wilson's forthcoming book will find their way to anyone who emails letstalkaboutceline at yahoo dot com.

Yes, I got those two chapters and thought they were great - no idea if he can sustain that over the length of a whole book, though?

I haven't requested the PDF (gonna wait to read the whole book) but I have no trouble imagining he can sustain it, Carl's a great writer.

so I've already said my piece way up there somewhere. but will add that what SFJ is really bemoaning, in my opinion, is some kind of irretrievable loss. the romance of black music, if you will. I know what that means. I used to go fishing in West Tenn. with my father. We went to a place called Reelfoot Lake, where extreme NW Tenn., SW Ky. and SE Missouri meet. a swamp. and I used to hear Howlin' Wolf and Elmore James on this station from somewhere up there, coming across that weird waste of stumps and cypress trees, in the middle of nowhere. that to me was the blues, and it was mysterious. now, of course, I know more about where that stuff came from. but it still seems a bit strange to me, as all good art perhaps does. SFJ might not have ever gone to that particular place, but seems to me that's what he's talking about. the removal of historical perspective, distance and mystery from music-making. and the removal of racially based shit, too, which can only be healthy for the body politic but perhaps not so good for...poetry, or something. not to say that poetry depends on distance, but maybe it does in some small part. and let me just add that I grew up maybe 200 miles from bluesworld (Memphis, N. Miss., W. Tenn.) but it was another world. so the inability of indie people to "swing" or "use space" or whatever SFJ thinks they should be doing, to use that old-time black-music stuff (which I firmly believe in myself) doesn't seem such a pretext for criticism. this whole country is fucked when it comes to that stuff, if it weren't we'd all be down in New Orleans shoring up the levees and taking stock of our heritage.

the romance of black music

This is a great subject for a full-length essay, and not restricted to a white author.

On "the romance of black music": I read a book called Smokestack Lightning, by a couple of guys who worked with Wynton Marsalis, that is mostly about barbecue but also about the romance of black culture being lost (in barbecue) in recent times; but they have a lot to say about music too, as they travel mostly through the south and other "great migration" strongholds like Chicago and St. Louis. Great book, and relevant here in an indirect way.

I don't think the dissapearance of mystery/romance from music has been a exclusive to any one race. Whisperin Ed, your story rings a bell with me and I could tell a similar story about a hundred what-was-THAT?! experiences of hearing something new and impossible to place in my experience and being floored by it, but in my experience it hasn't been just from black nor just from white musicians (nor just white musicians doing "black" musics). Maybe part of what Frere-Jones has keyed into and regrets is the way the strangeness that a lot of music fans, and certainly a lot of music critics, prize in music has (in a lot of indie music) been reduced to mere eccentricity. What music today is larger than life? That's what I want to hear.

lets all be honest and admit that what we're talking about is the loss of romance associated with certain black musics to a specific generation... still plenty of "kids" (black and non-black) who see a romance in contemporary (and, frankly, older) black music.

Max, I think it depends on how you read "romance". As early teens my friends and I were your typical white gangster herbs (yeah yeah), listening to the Dogs and NWA and cracking up. That music had a kind of romance, I guess, but I don't think that's the romance that Elvis or Alex Chilton or David Byrne felt.

Joshua Clover responds, giving Hall & Oates their proper place.

max, I think that's what Frere-Jones was talking about, how he thinks white indie kids are shying away from that hallowed hipster romance with black music, but I'm driving at a different point. Country has lost its mystery/romance for me, though I still hear and like some current stuff. And that happened to folk music a long time ago. Are those what you'd call black musics? I'm much more likely to feel that romance about older records in general lately, music overall seems less wild now, and blackness isn't somehow code for wildness.

"music overall seems less wild now" and I seem like a hundred year old coot. Kids, in my day ...

for a lot of people, the black music that we're talking about (blues and r&b i guess? i dont know exactly what we mean) still holds a certain amount of romance, and it seems to me that the loss of romance is connected more to age than to the progression of time, but im willing to say that the "romance" of early-20th-century black music is different somehow from the "romance" of contemporary black music.

what this line of questioning has to do with sfj's article, im not sure... but one of my major problems with it is what seems like a kind of mysticization or romanticization of "black music" that im not sure is fully explored. i think wilson's best point is that SFJs piece reads more like a first draft than a published essay.

I'd agree, the New Yorker piece treated certain black styles as a magic cure-all for a sickness he'd improperly diagnosed, and the rough draft looseness was oddly bloggy. I think he's a much better and more interesting and more enjoyable writer than this almost all the time, but the glaring exceptions seem to happen when he's on his White Guilt Supremacist hobbyhorse.

my blues is house music and it's for many of the same reasons mentioned in the last few posts. for the longest time i have wanted to write about it. i used to record house music with a guy from deep on the south side of chicago (he was black, i am white, both gay). needless to say i think a lot of the romance was born out of hardship (economic, racial and sexual prejudice, drugs, shitty jobs) which was subverted when we played together - it made everything that much more powerful (house is about escape and release and deep spirituality). he is gone now, but i will never forget those times. they were real in a way that is hard to put into words without succumbing to cliche or the authenticity police. i don't know if that's what SFJ is talking about because i haven't read the piece yet, but i suspect it's related.

You know, I just figured out this wasn't a revive. I just assumed it was, like, from 2005 or something. Someone better send the kicked-out-of Indieville memo to TV On The Radio...

there was some clusterfuck thread from a few years back, not the emp one, where stormy or someone pretty much called out sasha to his face (sfj was posting on the thread) regarding how Ui didn't sound very "black" or something. he dodged the question IIRC. anyone know what i'm talking about??

If forced to choose between tolerating some boringly undersexed rock music and reviving the, er, "vigorous" sexual politics of cock rock

I've often thought that a lot of emo has a kind of wounded-man misogyny that's not all that far removed from some Zeppelin stuff. Also there's a fair amount condescension to women, although nothing quite as unsubtle as what you'd hear in most 70s cock rock.

And yeah, that Wilson article. Wow.

Max, I think it depends on how you read "romance". As early teens my friends and I were your typical white gangster herbs (yeah yeah), listening to the Dogs and NWA and cracking up. That music had a kind of romance, I guess, but I don't think that's the romance that Elvis or Alex Chilton or David Byrne felt.

-- Euler, Friday, 19 October 2007 02:45 (2 hours ago) Link

lol @ reading universal profundity from anecdotal experience

rap isn't a joke to everyone

not saying its DEADLY SERIOUS BUSINESS but yr perspective is v. v. http://www.soulstrut.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/suspect5es.gif

Hurting OTM re: emo but I didn't realize it was intended to be read as anything else. Blue October "Hate Me Today" worst offender evar in this regard, if not technically emo.

I believe the 'romance' exists primarily in the experience of the listener, not the music itself. Generally music + nostalgia evokes a feeling of romance. That's why every generation goes through the same tired criticism that music au courant just doesn't have it anymore. Circumstances change, good musicians don't and as long as talent is still in our gene pool it'll manifest itself in one genre or another.

Summertime is romance... Shook Ones is romance.

I've been thinking about this and, that he manages to troll all the free-weekly/blog ppl so successfully is kind Madonna-In-Her-Primesque from where I sit is really totally OTM. This is totally SFJ's "Like A Prayer" video, if not song.