Sunday Morning Irritation: That Sasha Frere-Jones Indie Rock Thing

Over at the New Yorker this week, music writer Sasha Frere-Jones has (in)advertently started a minor hubbub with his piece "A Paler Shade of White: How Indie Rock Lost its Soul."  Opening with an anecdote about going to a couple of Arcade fire shows in which the band ended their sets with Clash covers, Frere-Jones reminisces about seeing the Clash in 1981, when the band had just released Sandinista!,

a three-LP set consisting of dub, funk, rap, and Motown interpretations, along with other songs that were indebted—at least in their form—to Jamaican and African-American sources. As I watched Arcade Fire, I realized that the drummer and the bassist rarely played syncopated patterns or lingered in the low registers. If there is a trace of soul, blues, reggae, or funk in Arcade Fire, it must be philosophical; it certainly isn’t audible. And what I really wanted to hear, after a stretch of raucous sing-alongs, was a bit of swing, some empty space, and palpable bass frequencies—in other words, attributes of African-American popular music.

Frere-Jones goes on to remark that the point here is not to chide the Arcade Fire for what it doesn't do, but rather that he's pondering the following:

why rock and roll, the most miscegenated popular music ever to have existed, underwent a racial re-sorting in the nineteen-nineties. Why did so many white rock bands retreat from the ecstatic singing and intense, voicelike guitar tones of the blues, the heavy African downbeat, and the elaborate showmanship that characterized black music of the mid-twentieth century?

[Deep breath.]  Ok -- I had planned on launching into an extended critique of the article, and the sentiments behind it, and how I find all of this pretty ridiculous -- do you have to name-check the other in order to establish credibility?  And if so, credibility in whose eyes?  But then I came across two articles, one in Slate and the other in the Guardian's music blogsite, that do my ranting much better than I ever could: the Slate article points out that maybe class, and not race, is the problem (and also how Frere-Jones seems to have ignored the fact that he himself wrote a review of LCD Soundsystem a few years ago in which he remarks gleefully, "About five years ago, indie rockers began to rediscover the pleasures of rhythm."  Has he forgotten about those indie rockers, or do they not count somehow?); the Guardian blog asks, simply, if the question of race is even a useful debate to begin with.  They're both quite good pieces -- check them out.

Both pieces echo my general irritation with Frere-Jones' piece, namely that he seems to have excluded any number of bands who do, in fact have this so-called 'soul' that he so badly wants back in indie rock -- christ, has he never heard the Afghan Whigs?  Hot Chip?  TV on the Radio?  But even more fundamentally, and more importantly, his argument is just sort of creepy and vaguely ... er... reductionist?  (I could use other -ists, but I'm trying here to be generous.)  By not incorporating certain kinds of syncopated beats and not hearkening back to blues- and funk-based roots, indie rock bands supposedly lack a kind of sexiness, a certain sensuality.  And by making that claim within a framework of race just feels like an unrigorous and problematic correlation of blackness = exotic eroticism.  And that's just weird.   

I make no meaningful claims here.   I fully acknowledge that I'm not being very rigorous, either.  I'm just irritated.  Comments/thoughts/etc are most welcome.  I don't even know how to end this post, other than to say that, if nothing else, the article reminded me that I haven't listened to Pavement's glorious Slanted and Enchanted in a while. (Frere-Jones makes some claim that Pavement got all boring and white again on their second album, no thanks to their replacement white-beats drummer.  Whatever.)    And so I'm going to put that on my stereo now and enjoy it and not listen for black or unblack beats, and goddamn it, I'm going to try to have a Frere-Jones-free Sunday afternoon. 

Comments

[ks]

yo ht, thanks for the links here: meant to go read this after our conversation on saturday but might have forgotten. and i agree with you: i found the slate piece to be a thought-out and thought-provoking article. more like what i would assume sfj would have wanted his piece to be.

[bob]

All the bands you could mention to counter the soul-free indie rock contention and you start with the Whigs? That, my dear, is why you are my fave rave.

[Toby Southfield]

"And by making that claim within a framework of race just feels like an unrigorous and problematic correlation of blackness = exotic eroticism. "

I don't think he's saying that. I think he find's african-origin rhythms more moving, and more exciting, and more sexy. I think that's more about the rhythms themselves than the fact that a black person is playing them, - although you if you want to, you could reduce all the achievements of african musicians to being a result of the essentialism of their blackness. Personally I agree with Sasha - rhythmically, musicians in Indie bands are bland as hell. He's saying that it's a shame that rock and roll started out so full of rhytmic energy and now it's rhythmically like listening to paint dry - the music is all head and no heart and genitals. You only think that's a condescending attitude if you yourself value the head over the heart or genitals. For a lot of people, it's a serious achievement to make music that appeals to all the human instincts, not just the cerebral ones exclusively.