Is indie too white?

[cymrococh]

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/music/2007/10/..._too_white.html

 

So it's a good week for race rows. James Watson has inflamed the scientific community with his claim that black people are less intelligent than white, while New Yorker critic Sasha Frere-Jones has stirred up the blogosphere - a thread about him on one popular music message board had racked up almost 1,000 posts by yesterday lunchtime by, well, claiming that Arcade Fire aren't funky enough.

 

I'm oversimplifying slightly. In his piece, published on Monday and drolly titled A Paler Shade of White, Frere-Jones accused indie rock of losing its soul, using as exhibit A the aforementioned Montreal doom-mongers lack of swing. One could counter that it's like criticising 2001: A Space Odyssey for lacking jokes (ie it might explain why you don't like it but it's hardly the point), but Frere-Jones' wider thesis is that rock music no longer draws on black influences the way the Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin learned from blues, or the Minutemen and Public Image Ltd took from funk and dub.

 

At one point he seems to suggest that the bleaching of indie-rock can be blamed squarely on Pavement's second drummer. At another, he implies that the pop-cultural sea change brought about by Dr Dre's The Chronic scared whitey away from adopting black modes (tell that to Fred sodding Durst). Eventually, he settles on a version of the long-tail theory: that music is now separated into so many niche strands that white and black need no longer interact - the racially mixed centre cannot hold.

 

Now, Frere-Jones is a thoughtful, erudite critic with excellent and diverse taste. It takes skill to be able to convey both the significance and the excitement of Lil Wayne to a readership of Manhattan highbrows, or at least wannabe Manhattan highbrows. But he has a bee in his bonnet about white musicians who don't like black music - witness his row with the Magnetic Fields' Stephin Merritt last year - and it wrecks his powers of argument. It's odd that the fastidious New Yorker editors allowed this meandering mishmash of ideas on to the page. Among the questions it provokes:

 

1. Why no mention of LCD Soundsystem and DFA ? Or the drummers of Bloc Party, Franz Ferdinand or the Arctic Monkeys, all of whom have plenty of swing? Indie rhythm sections have rarely been so interesting.

 

2. Why, if he's trying to argue that musical miscegenation (his word) is automatically a good thing, does he cite blues-rock bores Grand Funk Railroad? Kraftwerk are white to their core but they were adored by more black listeners than Grand Funk ever were. His logic leads him perilously close to deciding that the ideal modern rock band is the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

 

3. What exactly does he mean by indie rock? There is a relatively pale, funkless indie tradition that began with the Velvet Underground and another that harks back to folk, but the tradition of Orange Juice and Talking Heads is equally influential on current bands. Even Frere-Jones's own examples of too-white indie bands trip him up. The Flaming Lips' last album had the soul-influenced Mr Ambulance Driver, while the Decemberists' latest has the disco-powered The Perfect Crime.

 

4. What exactly are black qualities in music? Frere-Jones posits passion, funk and sex, thus simplifying both racial identity and musical history. In most cases, the distinctions are blurred to the point of meaninglessness.

 

5. Is it necessarily wrong for a white musician not to engage with black music? I might not want to listen to their iPod but all I can expect from an artist is honesty. I'm not going to lock Stephin Merritt in a cupboard and bombard him with Mobb Deep albums until he repents.

 

6. In 1983, were Michael Jackson and Hall and Oates really "equally gifted"? I mean, really?

 

The most important question is whether this debate, for all the heat it has generated, is actually useful. Is it healthy, or even possible, to tell black and white influences apart this late in rock's development? And is one kind automatically better than another?

 

He's right about one thing though. Don't try having sex to Arcade Fire records.

Edited October 19, 2007 by Paul Caruso

[Des]

This post is not viewable to guests.

You can sign in to your account at the login page here

If you do not have an account then you can register here