An ideal for listening?
Some more thoughts on SFJ's "A Paler Shade of White":
I think the tenor of Frere-Jones' piece is polemical; that is to say, I don't think that he's necessarily making a blanket claim that all white rockers are collectively moving away from black sounds. Such a claim could be refuted easily enough: even within the confines of indie rock itself, acts like The White Stripes, !!!, and The Rapture are directly drawing from black influences with their blues, funk, and dance derived approaches respectively - SFJ certainly knows this. Frere-Jones is actually trying to kick start (or restart, depending on the audience) a much more nuanced debate, which brings me to:
Why pick on indie rock? There is an unsubtle disconnect between discussing Wilco and the Arcade Fire, and, say, The Clash and the Rolling Stones. The latter groups have sold tens if not hundreds of millions of records combined and are literally world-renowned; if Wilco and the Arcade Fire have sold a combined 1 million copies of their most recent albums I would be shocked. In fact, if Neon Bible and Sky Blue Sky have sold as many copies in a combined 12 months of release as Kanye West's Graduation moved in its first week, I will eat my hat. Again, Frere-Jones is probably not living in an internet bubble (you know, the one that made you think that Annie and M.I.A. are household names). Black music - that is musics that are directly conversant with ongoing trends in mainstream African-American music - has basically won the day from a commercial perspective. Timbaland, Justin Timberlake, 50 Cent, Jay-Z, Rihanna, Kanye West, and Maroon 5 - even in a fragmented mainstream, these are the predominant sounds of young America today.
So, again, why pick on indie rock? Well, I think the answer lies in SFJ's rather unsubtle linking of his piece with a rather famous (or infamous, depending on your perspective) article by rock critic Lester Bangs. "The White Noise Supremacists", first published in the Village Voice in 1979, is an unflattering portrait of the New Wave scene in New York: a scene marked out in Bangs' mind not only for its reactionary "white" aesthetic - a reaction to that dominant "black" music of the day, disco - but its employment of punk's embrace of anti-social stances as a vehicle for overtly racist attitudes. The piece is peppered with benighted anecdote after benighted anecdote - you really ought to read them yourself, but I'll share one of the relatively tamer examples here - one I feel is most illustrative of the point Frere-Jones is driving at:
The stimulus and the response in each case is vastly different. Bangs' punks are deliberately trying to develop an aesthetic rooted specifically in their community; a community defined at least in part in opposition to the dominant New York sounds of the day - the black musics that would go on to become disco and, later, hip-hop. Punk and New Wave are "their" music because it originated with them; part of their paradigm is ethnic. (Obviously Bangs' point is a generalization, but is not too extreme - a lot of the names in that article are big players from that scene, not just indicative of some wingnut fringe.) Frere-Jones' indie rockers, on the other hand, are certainly reacting to the mainstream, but their problem is more about form than a question of taste.
The rise of the "doctrine of racial sensitivity" coupled with rap's ascendancy as the dominant idiom in black music has presented white rock musicians with something of an insuperable challenge. Suddenly, the "miscegenation" (Frere-Jones' term) that had been rock and roll's defining characteristic was subject to intense scrutiny: "Dabbling in black song forms, new or old, could now be seen as an act of appropriation, minstrelsy, or co-optation." This new political correctness meant that cultural boundaries that were once freely disregarded (rightly or wrongly), became warily observed. Simultaneously, rap, now the cutting edge in black music, presented its own unique set of problems to white performers: content-wise, it is strongly grounded in the urban African-American experience (an experience obviously alien to most white Americans), and technically, it's difficult if not impossible for white people to credibly reproduce modern hip-hop's specific cadences without "sounding black" as it were - at best, you'd sound faintly ridiculous; at worst you would be charged with wholesale cultural expropriation. Frere-Jones posits that the response to these twin pressures by the indie rock community was what legal scholars have come to refer to as "avoision": a "gray area of ambiguous acts" that fall between avoidance and evasion.
The result of this "avoision", according to Frere-Jones, is that indie rock has backed itself into a corner, cut off from the black musics that represent the main artery of American musical innovation. The indie rock community - a community, if you will, composed mostly of young white educated liberals - is both aware of the peculiar burdens of history (that Elvis "stole" rock and roll now constitutes received wisdom), and at the same time not particularly receptive to hip-hop as a form. Has all indie rock formed within this very narrow psychic space? Of course not. But what Frere-Jones is suggesting is that as the genre has begun to enter the mainstream consciousness, the exemplars of this success - The Arcade Fire, Modest Mouse, The Decemberists, The Shins, etc. - are basically making music that is pale going on translucent. Rather than engaging with other musics, as The Clash did most prominently with Sandinista! (SFJ's example), these bands seem to be drawing from so-called "safe" influences, like Brian Wilson and Bruce Springsteen. Whether by accident or design, indie rock has entered what Frere-Jones sees as a creative cul-de-sac that is rendering the music increasingly stagnant.
So is he right? Well, he's under attack from two sides (at least): those who think that indie rock is perfectly fine the way it is, and those who believe that, though the musical polyglot SFJ believes existed during his youth may no longer be around, the fact is that we've got such an enormous amount of new and exciting music to choose from, that what does it matter? (The flip side to this argument is something Frere-Jones tacitly acknowledges - we still have black music, it's just that black people are its public face and they reaping more of the profits - a point with considerable merit.)
I'm not exactly certain how to address the first point, except to say that I've been getting pretty tired of indie myself lately, and for much the same reasons as Frere-Jones: there's only so much atonal singing, chamber music instrumentals, lyrical obtuseness, and conceptual nonsense that a man can take. That's not to say that there hasn't been some great indie rock this year - Of Montreal's Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?, for instance, is a particularly exciting and inventive record. On the whole though, the incestuousness bleeds through more and more with each new listen, and I find myself devoting far more time to seeking out and listening to older records than I used to.
The second point is more interesting, because it does make sense, at least on the surface: as the mainstream has become increasingly fractured and the internet has vastly increased the avenues by which we can learn about and consume new music, why should this be considered a problem? In a sense, to each his own; the mutual exclusion of black music and indie rock has not hurt the diversity of musical choices out there. This line of reasoning has its appeal. In a sense, it refutes Frere-Jones' claim as somewhat reductive and solipsistic, boiling his argument down to "Things were better in the good old days" and "I don't like Yankee Hotel Foxtrot." Those attacking Frere-Jones along this line don't necessarily view his piece as a wholesale assault on indie rock (which many of them have even less use for than he does), but a self-aggrandizing attempt to diagnose a non-existent problem.
So, does a problem exist? That is a very loaded question, and I imagine damn near impossible to answer to anyone's total satisfaction. The heart of Frere-Jones' argument is that a continued interplay between black and white is at the very core of what rock and roll is, and that if the conversation (or whatever you would label it as) stops, this crucial cultural locus ceases to be. The real controversy, I suppose is over where the stealing stops and the exchange begins, or whose chocolate got into whose peanut butter, or whether there actually is enough of definitive sample of prominent indie rock groups that fit SFJ's particular notion of enforced whiteness to make his case stand up. And who's to say that The Arcade Fire don't have "black" elements in their music? Anyone who thinks they totally eschew "ecstatic singing" or "palpable bass frequencies" hasn't heard "Rebellion (Lies)"; anyone who thinks they don't demonstrate "elaborate showmanship" has never seen them live.
Ultimately, Frere-Jones' argument rests on whether or not you believe that there is a deeper emotional truth at work: that indie acts truly are "settling for the lassitude and monotony" they "seem to confuse with authenticity and significance." Perhaps this claim is a rhetorical bridge too far. Yet ultimately, it is not the job of the polemicist to resolve but to provoke, and it is clear that Frere-Jones has managed that much successfully. Let a hundred flowers bloom, etc.
I think the tenor of Frere-Jones' piece is polemical; that is to say, I don't think that he's necessarily making a blanket claim that all white rockers are collectively moving away from black sounds. Such a claim could be refuted easily enough: even within the confines of indie rock itself, acts like The White Stripes, !!!, and The Rapture are directly drawing from black influences with their blues, funk, and dance derived approaches respectively - SFJ certainly knows this. Frere-Jones is actually trying to kick start (or restart, depending on the audience) a much more nuanced debate, which brings me to:
Why pick on indie rock? There is an unsubtle disconnect between discussing Wilco and the Arcade Fire, and, say, The Clash and the Rolling Stones. The latter groups have sold tens if not hundreds of millions of records combined and are literally world-renowned; if Wilco and the Arcade Fire have sold a combined 1 million copies of their most recent albums I would be shocked. In fact, if Neon Bible and Sky Blue Sky have sold as many copies in a combined 12 months of release as Kanye West's Graduation moved in its first week, I will eat my hat. Again, Frere-Jones is probably not living in an internet bubble (you know, the one that made you think that Annie and M.I.A. are household names). Black music - that is musics that are directly conversant with ongoing trends in mainstream African-American music - has basically won the day from a commercial perspective. Timbaland, Justin Timberlake, 50 Cent, Jay-Z, Rihanna, Kanye West, and Maroon 5 - even in a fragmented mainstream, these are the predominant sounds of young America today.
So, again, why pick on indie rock? Well, I think the answer lies in SFJ's rather unsubtle linking of his piece with a rather famous (or infamous, depending on your perspective) article by rock critic Lester Bangs. "The White Noise Supremacists", first published in the Village Voice in 1979, is an unflattering portrait of the New Wave scene in New York: a scene marked out in Bangs' mind not only for its reactionary "white" aesthetic - a reaction to that dominant "black" music of the day, disco - but its employment of punk's embrace of anti-social stances as a vehicle for overtly racist attitudes. The piece is peppered with benighted anecdote after benighted anecdote - you really ought to read them yourself, but I'll share one of the relatively tamer examples here - one I feel is most illustrative of the point Frere-Jones is driving at:
Something harder to pass off entered the air in 1977, when I started encountering little zaps like this: I opened a copy of a Florida punk fanzine called New Order and read an article by Miriam Linna of the Cramps, Nervus Rex, and now Zantees: "I love the Ramones [because] this is the celebration of everything American - everything teenaged and wonderful and white and urban..." You could say the "white" jumping out of that sentence was just like Ornette Coleman declaring This Is Our Music, except that the same issue featured a full-page shot of Miriam and one of here little friends posing proudly with their leathers and shade and a pistol in front of the headquarters of the United White People's Party, under a sign bearing three flags: "GOD" (cross), "COUNTRY" (stars and stripes), "RACE" (swastika)."...everything teenaged and wonderful and white and urban..." Now, bear with me for a moment here, but if you make the "white" implicit in that sentence (and maybe change the "teenaged" to "twentysomething"), how is this not an acceptable description of the rapidly gentrifying quarters of Brooklyn, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, Los Angeles - those increasingly bleached out post-graduate boho enclaves where indie rock in America basically makes its bed? I'm not saying that the indie rock scene is racist, or that Frere-Jones is trying to say that, but I do think that where he and Bangs intersect is over the concept of "our music."
The stimulus and the response in each case is vastly different. Bangs' punks are deliberately trying to develop an aesthetic rooted specifically in their community; a community defined at least in part in opposition to the dominant New York sounds of the day - the black musics that would go on to become disco and, later, hip-hop. Punk and New Wave are "their" music because it originated with them; part of their paradigm is ethnic. (Obviously Bangs' point is a generalization, but is not too extreme - a lot of the names in that article are big players from that scene, not just indicative of some wingnut fringe.) Frere-Jones' indie rockers, on the other hand, are certainly reacting to the mainstream, but their problem is more about form than a question of taste.
The rise of the "doctrine of racial sensitivity" coupled with rap's ascendancy as the dominant idiom in black music has presented white rock musicians with something of an insuperable challenge. Suddenly, the "miscegenation" (Frere-Jones' term) that had been rock and roll's defining characteristic was subject to intense scrutiny: "Dabbling in black song forms, new or old, could now be seen as an act of appropriation, minstrelsy, or co-optation." This new political correctness meant that cultural boundaries that were once freely disregarded (rightly or wrongly), became warily observed. Simultaneously, rap, now the cutting edge in black music, presented its own unique set of problems to white performers: content-wise, it is strongly grounded in the urban African-American experience (an experience obviously alien to most white Americans), and technically, it's difficult if not impossible for white people to credibly reproduce modern hip-hop's specific cadences without "sounding black" as it were - at best, you'd sound faintly ridiculous; at worst you would be charged with wholesale cultural expropriation. Frere-Jones posits that the response to these twin pressures by the indie rock community was what legal scholars have come to refer to as "avoision": a "gray area of ambiguous acts" that fall between avoidance and evasion.
The result of this "avoision", according to Frere-Jones, is that indie rock has backed itself into a corner, cut off from the black musics that represent the main artery of American musical innovation. The indie rock community - a community, if you will, composed mostly of young white educated liberals - is both aware of the peculiar burdens of history (that Elvis "stole" rock and roll now constitutes received wisdom), and at the same time not particularly receptive to hip-hop as a form. Has all indie rock formed within this very narrow psychic space? Of course not. But what Frere-Jones is suggesting is that as the genre has begun to enter the mainstream consciousness, the exemplars of this success - The Arcade Fire, Modest Mouse, The Decemberists, The Shins, etc. - are basically making music that is pale going on translucent. Rather than engaging with other musics, as The Clash did most prominently with Sandinista! (SFJ's example), these bands seem to be drawing from so-called "safe" influences, like Brian Wilson and Bruce Springsteen. Whether by accident or design, indie rock has entered what Frere-Jones sees as a creative cul-de-sac that is rendering the music increasingly stagnant.
So is he right? Well, he's under attack from two sides (at least): those who think that indie rock is perfectly fine the way it is, and those who believe that, though the musical polyglot SFJ believes existed during his youth may no longer be around, the fact is that we've got such an enormous amount of new and exciting music to choose from, that what does it matter? (The flip side to this argument is something Frere-Jones tacitly acknowledges - we still have black music, it's just that black people are its public face and they reaping more of the profits - a point with considerable merit.)
I'm not exactly certain how to address the first point, except to say that I've been getting pretty tired of indie myself lately, and for much the same reasons as Frere-Jones: there's only so much atonal singing, chamber music instrumentals, lyrical obtuseness, and conceptual nonsense that a man can take. That's not to say that there hasn't been some great indie rock this year - Of Montreal's Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?, for instance, is a particularly exciting and inventive record. On the whole though, the incestuousness bleeds through more and more with each new listen, and I find myself devoting far more time to seeking out and listening to older records than I used to.
The second point is more interesting, because it does make sense, at least on the surface: as the mainstream has become increasingly fractured and the internet has vastly increased the avenues by which we can learn about and consume new music, why should this be considered a problem? In a sense, to each his own; the mutual exclusion of black music and indie rock has not hurt the diversity of musical choices out there. This line of reasoning has its appeal. In a sense, it refutes Frere-Jones' claim as somewhat reductive and solipsistic, boiling his argument down to "Things were better in the good old days" and "I don't like Yankee Hotel Foxtrot." Those attacking Frere-Jones along this line don't necessarily view his piece as a wholesale assault on indie rock (which many of them have even less use for than he does), but a self-aggrandizing attempt to diagnose a non-existent problem.
So, does a problem exist? That is a very loaded question, and I imagine damn near impossible to answer to anyone's total satisfaction. The heart of Frere-Jones' argument is that a continued interplay between black and white is at the very core of what rock and roll is, and that if the conversation (or whatever you would label it as) stops, this crucial cultural locus ceases to be. The real controversy, I suppose is over where the stealing stops and the exchange begins, or whose chocolate got into whose peanut butter, or whether there actually is enough of definitive sample of prominent indie rock groups that fit SFJ's particular notion of enforced whiteness to make his case stand up. And who's to say that The Arcade Fire don't have "black" elements in their music? Anyone who thinks they totally eschew "ecstatic singing" or "palpable bass frequencies" hasn't heard "Rebellion (Lies)"; anyone who thinks they don't demonstrate "elaborate showmanship" has never seen them live.
Ultimately, Frere-Jones' argument rests on whether or not you believe that there is a deeper emotional truth at work: that indie acts truly are "settling for the lassitude and monotony" they "seem to confuse with authenticity and significance." Perhaps this claim is a rhetorical bridge too far. Yet ultimately, it is not the job of the polemicist to resolve but to provoke, and it is clear that Frere-Jones has managed that much successfully. Let a hundred flowers bloom, etc.
