Not a coincidence
Every other issue of The New Yorker these days seems to be a "The _______ Issue." "The Food Issue", "The Summer Fiction Issue", "The Style Issue", "The Winter Fiction Issue", etc. Having had a subscription to the magazine for some years now, and having just recently gone through some roughly 200 back issues that have been occupying valuable real estate around here, I believe I can authoritatively state that "The ______ Issue" overload is a relatively recent phenomenon; perhaps the editorial staff is taking more vacation nowadays (special issues usually count as two regular issues, thus shortening your subscription and allowing an extra week or two before the next edition).
Anyway, this week "The Arts Issue" arrived at my door, and in it, a most interesting piece by resident pop scribe Sasha Frere-Jones on the so-called whitening of rock. "A Paler Shade of White" is the sound of a gauntlet being thrown. Frere-Jones thesis is simple, and on its surface, self-evident: rock and roll, once "the most miscegenated popular popular music ever to have existed", has been progressively drained of its "blackness" - the result of a pop music schism that began with the ascendancy of hip-hop as a co-equal genre and the concurrent infusion of political correctness into pop culture during the late 1980s and early '90s. The chief culprit is indie rock, which by the mid-nineties, according to Frere-Jones, "implicitly came to mean white rock." (Metal and, uh, Nickelback apparently are unindicted co-conspirators.) Not so implicitly, he laments this development, articulating the glaring truth that something has been lost during the course of this de facto re-segregation.
Frere-Jones got me thinking of another piece, this one by Robert Christgau, on the subject of post-modern minstrel studies, that appeared in the February 2004 issue of The Believer. "In Search of Jim Crow" is a fascinating rumination on the nature of minstrelsy, and, since I cannot hope to do justice to Christgau's argument on such a sensitive subject by synopsizing it, I will let him speak for himself.
What both articles have in common is the authors' belief that the story of American music (rock and roll and minstrelsy being distinctively American idioms) is not solely about cultural appropriation - that is, theft - but an ongoing conversation wherein, as Christgau puts it, "Conduits have a way of connecting to other conduits." When we seek to create our own hermetic cultural spaces, whether as a product of self-consciousness or aversion, we are struggling in a sense against a larger American narrative. Whether or not this has rendered Wilco, The Arcade Fire, or Pavement the poorer is unclear, but when Frere-Jones trots out antecedents like The Rolling Stones, The Clash, and Led Zeppelin to make his case, it's tough not to feel like something's missing, or that we're missing something.
Addendum: And now the accompanying podcast and blog post - you know, there used to be a time when it wasn't S.O.P. to try and preempt your critics, especially when you've explicitly acknowledged that you're deliberately provoking them.
Anyway, this week "The Arts Issue" arrived at my door, and in it, a most interesting piece by resident pop scribe Sasha Frere-Jones on the so-called whitening of rock. "A Paler Shade of White" is the sound of a gauntlet being thrown. Frere-Jones thesis is simple, and on its surface, self-evident: rock and roll, once "the most miscegenated popular popular music ever to have existed", has been progressively drained of its "blackness" - the result of a pop music schism that began with the ascendancy of hip-hop as a co-equal genre and the concurrent infusion of political correctness into pop culture during the late 1980s and early '90s. The chief culprit is indie rock, which by the mid-nineties, according to Frere-Jones, "implicitly came to mean white rock." (Metal and, uh, Nickelback apparently are unindicted co-conspirators.) Not so implicitly, he laments this development, articulating the glaring truth that something has been lost during the course of this de facto re-segregation.
Frere-Jones got me thinking of another piece, this one by Robert Christgau, on the subject of post-modern minstrel studies, that appeared in the February 2004 issue of The Believer. "In Search of Jim Crow" is a fascinating rumination on the nature of minstrelsy, and, since I cannot hope to do justice to Christgau's argument on such a sensitive subject by synopsizing it, I will let him speak for himself.
What both articles have in common is the authors' belief that the story of American music (rock and roll and minstrelsy being distinctively American idioms) is not solely about cultural appropriation - that is, theft - but an ongoing conversation wherein, as Christgau puts it, "Conduits have a way of connecting to other conduits." When we seek to create our own hermetic cultural spaces, whether as a product of self-consciousness or aversion, we are struggling in a sense against a larger American narrative. Whether or not this has rendered Wilco, The Arcade Fire, or Pavement the poorer is unclear, but when Frere-Jones trots out antecedents like The Rolling Stones, The Clash, and Led Zeppelin to make his case, it's tough not to feel like something's missing, or that we're missing something.
Addendum: And now the accompanying podcast and blog post - you know, there used to be a time when it wasn't S.O.P. to try and preempt your critics, especially when you've explicitly acknowledged that you're deliberately provoking them.
