A Paler Shade of White by Sasha Frere-Jones
in the New Yorker
The first and most obvious point is: here’s an essay that’s long overdue, of the stripe the New Yorker should have been running for at least the past twenty-thirty years, ever since Ellen Willis left. The color line is still the most dramatic, obvious, blatant, screaming-in-silence issue facing pop music today, as it ever was.
Second, Frere-Jones’s point about indie rock forsaking African rhythms is quite well-supported, on through to his points about Eminem (“the exception that proves the rule”), but he leaves out Beck ENTIRELY, which is a major editorial oversight. Beck is perhaps indie-rock’s Godfather, the patron saint of lo-fi sampling, an intriguing character who dominates the indie field with hit albums and a sizzling stage show (where he’s James Brown trapped in the body of Bill Gates), and crosses over to persuasive, largely unsentimental folk (MUTATIONS and SEA CHANGE). Beck’s commitment to rhythm is overt, and yet he’s not only missing from this essay, so far he’s also missing from all the feedback comments.
Then there’s Dylan, whose early embrace of R&B caused a sensation, but he’s largely dropped same over the past, oh, twenty years (exceptional rule-prover: LOVE AND THEFT), yet still charms critics who oughtta know better. How does he fit into this scheme? He’s an indie God too, right?
rock culture approximately
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Hi Tim,
You might want to check out http://sohothedog.blogspot.com/ – Matthew has some interesting points, especially concerning Brian Wilson and how SFJ seemed to miss Wilson’s black influences.
I have been reading Frere-Jones in the New Yorker for a while, and I am always disapointed by how obsessed he is by what is popular, and what is selling- especially since its so much harder to define either of these terms anymore, with Soundscan revealing how much record companies pad the numbers, and with downloads making sales a poor tracking device for true numbers of listening.
And here, he focuses again on a few mass market bands, and ignores hundreds of other bands that contradict his theories.
Where in his scheme of things does Bad Brains, the original black punk rock band fall?
Or TV on the Radio, a largely black band from Brooklyn that combines pychedelic drone with post hip hop sampling and gets David Bowie to guest with them, or plays live with both Nine Inch Nails and Bauhaus, to cover a Pere Ubu song?
What about Tim Fite, who mercilessly and fiendishly skewers commercial hip hop, on his free over the internet album “Over the Counter Culture”, with a song that compares Kayne West to a consumer product?
The music world is a whole lot more complicated than he wants us to think in this essay.
Sly Stone to Gorrilaz, there has always been, and will always be a wide range of hybrids out there, which defy his neat categories.
Nope, not all of it is top 40, whatever that means these days, but its more accessible, successful, and better than ever, and the flow goes both ways.
Thanks for flagging the New Yorker article by Sasha Frere-Jones. I can’t agree with you that the Dylan of the past 20 years belongs on any list of rockers who’ve forsaken black roots. He was completely adrift as a performer and recording artist in the late 1980s (with the exception of “Oh, Mercy,” a good album). In the early ’90s he went all the way back to basics with two acoustic, all-covers country-blues albums; to me, those reoriented him for his big creative comeback in the late 1990s with the very blues-infused “Time Out of Mind” and the two strong albums that have followed it. Also, I’d put the Red Hot Chili Peppers ahead of Beck in chronology and influence when it comes to demonstrating a meeting ground between the funk-soul-rap tradition and that of “indie” rock and its precursor, “alternative” rock. And before the Chili Peppers came Talking Heads and Roxy Music. My gripe with Frere-Jones’ interesting and thought-provoking article is that he’s played the attention-grabbing race card when the problem with the kind of indie rock he dislikes is much broader: a pervasive anhedonia and a beautiful-loser fixation that prevents indie bands from embracing any kind of exuberant, expansive and joyful expression, whether rooted in black music sources or “white” rock sources. Whether it’s a matter of getting on the good foot or putting out good vibrations, not many of the current indie crop are up for being up. I blame that talented but depressive mope, Cobain. Rest his troubled soul, but he was no role model for an art form.