Song, by Toad

Pig-Ignorant Racist Idiot

Right, disclaimers first. Apparently Sasha Frere-Jones is a respected music critic, so presumably this implies that he is not this bone-headed all the time. Also, given I’ve only read one of his articles I am in no position to judge his general output, but his recent excretion ‘A Paler Shade of White‘ is just bloody thick. He manages to shoehorn needless racist divisiveness, outdated stereotyping and a truly impressive ignorance of indie music into one article which is about… yes, the racial compartmentalisation of popular music.

Generally when people write nonsense like this they defend their idiotic statements by describing it as a ‘thought piece – intended to provoke reflection and debate’. The problem I have with this is that it is possible to justify pretty much any cretinous rubbish on this basis, no matter how infantile, shallow, facile or ignorant. This is not a thought piece, it is lazy and intellectually vacant, and were it not for the fact it happens to be in the New Yorker it would merit no more than a contemptuous shrug of the shoulders, perhaps accompanied by a murmur of ‘fuckwit’ or some such similar response.

Shit like this needs answering though, because this kind of lazy thinking doesn’t help any of us in days when division and not community are becoming more and more prevalent. Basically he has written a risible article in which he suggests that the white indie community is no longer borrowing anything like as much from black music as it used to and is the poorer for it. Try excerpts like this for sheer meaninglessness:

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.

He then goes on to make statements like this, which are broadly accurate:

The Beatles, especially in Paul McCartney’s compositions, married blues and soul with the verse-chorus-bridge structure common to songs from the English music hall and Tin Pan Alley, and hooked teen-agers on a combination of Irving Berlin and Muddy Waters that previously would have been unthinkable. Similarly, when Mick Jagger stopped trying to imitate Bobby Womack he became, musically speaking, an original—a product of miscegenation

He describes how rap and hip-hop went mainstream in the 80s but came with such a strong archetypal caricature that white artists didn’t dare appropriate the sounds in the same way that they had done so freely with blues and soul. He then goes on to make an utterly irrelevant, but on reflection perhaps rather revealing, detour into his own musical fumblings:

And the problem was clearly related to race. It seemed silly to try to sound “black,” but that is what happened, no matter how hard I tried not to. In some ways, this was the result of a categorical confusion, the assumption that if I could use my hands to play a derivation of black music with any authority I could use my voice to do the same thing. Playing black music never felt odd, but singing it—a more intimate gesture—seemed insulting.

This leads to the following:

Pavement began producing a flat-footed mixture of shaggy, improvisational rock and sylvan curlicues taken from obscure folk groups. During the same period, indie-band singers abandoned full-throated vocals and began to mumble and moan, and to hide their voices under noise. Lyrics became increasingly allusive and oblique.

Which is mildly interesting, but a fairly narrow observation about a very particular niche of indie music. And this is where, irrespective of the lazy racism, his argument crumbles completely. This man clearly has no idea what indie music actually is. He neither seems to understand the music, the bands, nor the roots of the sound. But most crucially, he has no appreciation of what has actually been happening in indie music for the last ten years.

He describes Wilco thus:

On “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot,” the lyrics are embarrassing poetry laid over plodding rhythms. (“Tall buildings shake, voices escape singing sad, sad songs, tuned to chords strung down your cheeks.”) The album features synthesizer squeaks and echoey feedback-, which fail to give shape to the formless music. A little more syncopation would have helped.

Again, this is a pointlessly narrow statement that may offend my taste – I love later Wilco – but is so irrelevant that it there is little point disagreeing with it. It also disparages Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, whilst failing to take into account the easy soul (black) of, say, Theologians, on their next album A Ghost is Born. He goes on about The Shins, The Decemberists, Modest Mouse and The Fiery Furnaces in much the same light, accusing them of mumbling, lacking beat and having no ’soul’. This sort of wonderfully ignorant statement is pretty much at the heart of what is wrong with his argument.

Indie music is a meaningless term these days. In terms of its original definition – bands on independent labels – it could include almost any kind of music on the planet. A great many ‘indie’ bands like the aforementioned Decemberists, are on major labels, so the original meaning of the term really has vanished. Generally nowadays it is a stylistic generalisation, but one so broad as to not really be very useful. When noodling electronica, sunshine pop like The Shins, psych-folk like Devendra Banhart, punk-pop like The Libertines and alt-country like Neko Case can all be vaguely lumped under the blanket term of indie then it really isn’t very useful as a genre definition.

If this retard knew anything at all about the broader world of ‘indie’ he would never have made so stupid a statement. What was the major movement amongst the Americana (i.e. country influenced, i.e. white) movement a year ago? It was bloody gospel music for fuck’s sake. Think Neko Case, Howe Gelb and Jenny Lewis. When the White Stripes burst into prominence it was from amongst a slew of garage bands in Detroit playing old soul and blues music with a hitherto unprecedented venom. The Come-ons, The Kills, The Detroit Cobras, The Bellrays and The Von Bondies spring to mind. No beat? No blackness? How much black blood do you have to have in you before you a nigger, man?

The list really goes on and on. How do you define bands like Calexico and Beirut? Are Mexicans and Gypsies dark enough to be black? Frere-Jones’ favourite word is miscegenation (presumably because it’s nice and long and sounds clever) so while this music may not be tinged black, they are both certainly valid counter examples to his accusation of an inward-facing search for influences and excessive whiteness.

Groups in the UK like Blur and, by extension, Gorillaz, have incorporated aspects of African guitar music, hip hop and, crucially, ska. And it is the appropriation of sounds like ska that brings me to my next point. Is the reference to ska as an influence acknowledgment of white influences or black ones? Ska was one of the most mixed musical movements around and, instead of incorporating the reggae from which it may have originated, current bands are absorbing music from one step further along the timeline – ska itself. Are Babyshambles and The Sequins white? There is a lot of ska and dub influence in both of them. How about the punk-soul of the likes of The Gossip?

When he complains about the Arcade Fire being too white, he doesn’t really think about it too much. As Greg points out on The Rawking Refuses to Stop:

when we look at Arcade Fire’s influences, one name is writ large: Bruce Motherfucking Springsteen. Whether you like the Boss or not – I don’t – his music neither seems black nor white. Rather, its dominant color is blue – as in blue collar.

The other thing to mention about Springsteen is that his influences are entirely mixed as well – (white) folk from the likes of Woody Guthrie and Dylan may have dominated lyrically and thematically but his music, especially in the early days, was hugely indebted to 70s (black) funk and soul. So if your influences include Springsteen, what colour is the music you are incorporating?

This is the big problem I have with his argument – it’s just so pathetically superficial. There may be a rise in (presumably white) influenced folk music at the moment, a lot of which is quite psychedelic (white – Hendrix was white, of course) but that is so far from being a portentious trend it’s laughable. Most country (white) influenced music that would be described as indie tends also to draw heavily from soul and gospel. Most rock music is still heavily indebted to the blues, but the influences themselves have been digested several times already and it is now impossible to attribute them to a particular race.

If you sing gutsy soul are you incorporating Dusty Springfield or Aretha Franklin? Well it probably depends on how you sing it, but I assume Frere-Jones would call it black. I think this is facile and racist. Would Kele Okereke of Bloc Party or Murray Lightburn of The Dears thank you for calling their indie-rock white?

His general categorizations seem to either draw on lazy racial stereotypes about black men having rhythm – is he seriously trying to imply that Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s first album has no rhythm? The rhythm is the only reason that album was so bloody good. How about the relentless thrum of the Walkmen? Or iLiKETRAiNS? These groups have phenomenal rhythm, they just use it differently – it isn’t dance music. If it was, it would be filed under, erm… what was it again… oh yes, dance music. Folk has plenty of rhythm. What it often lacks is melody actually, because it uses a rolling rhythmic refrain to underpin what is essentially storytelling. If it didn’t have a strong and consistent rhythm it wouldn’t have been able to adapt to the constant shift in the content of the story over the years.

The mass-market indie product may be white suburban and very, very turgid. But then, the mass market hip-hop product is all bitches and hos, and even I know there is far more to the scene than that. Basically, because he doesn’t understand indie he makes up some half-arsed, ill-thought-out statement based on the top five indie chart and then draws a stupid conclusion about it not having rhythm because it doesn’t have the kind of rhythm he likes, which is nominally derived from black music.

He comes across as a mentally vacant echo chamber who hears meaningful conversations going on around him and, in the absence of the intellectual equipment to actually contribute to them, settles for randomly repeating phrases and themes he hears in the desperate hope that if he drops enough keywords into his paragraphs it might just mask the fact that he has absolutely no fucking clue what he is talking about whatsoever.

If you look back at his statement about his own (black) music, it seems instructive: “Playing black music never felt odd, but singing it—a more intimate gesture—seemed insulting.” This sounds like so many people who try and mask basically racist instincts by overcompensating the other way. ‘Gosh, I know how you black people love to dance and that’s so great ’cause we white people, well we can’t dance at all’. What about the black men who are shit dancers? Embracing a stereotype and proclaiming it to be good instead of bad is no less racist. It is what is known as dodging the issue. You can’t actually handle black people as a bunch of individuals, so you clad them in caricature and assume that because yours are not wielded as criticism that they are therefore less pernicious.

This is same prejudicial, divisive thinking that leads to marketing machines pushing hip hop artists down the niggaz and hos route, because it is a simple, easily digestible stereotype that they know how to handle. If you want to write meaningful social criticism, try tackling that one instead. Why is it thought necessary to dress black men up as cartoon gangstas in order to sell them to suburban white kids? How long until we find the more fragmented and specialised market niches enabled by the internet bringing more black musicians into indie bands. Those questions are interesting. Peddling outdated stereotypes about black music is not.

Jenny Lewis & the Watson Twins – Rise Up With Fists!
The Von Bondies – Going Down
The Dears – Don’t Lose the Faith
The Detroit Cobras – Won’t You Dance With Me