How Come I Only See You On The White Train
Sasha Frere-Jones' New Yorker article about the whiteness of indie rock makes some good points, and I'm glad he wrote it. But there were a few oddities. For instance, why not mention the whole crop of dancepunk bands, who were nothing if not indie with black influences? It seems like it would've fit fairly well in the article--the fact that they ultimately lost out to coffeeshop-rock would see to bolster his point.More importantly, though, while it's a great observation that indie's whiteness surged at the same time rap acheived true commercial dominance (in the same way art historians point out that representational painting faded when photography was invented), it's also hard to ignore the fact that there's a good ten-year difference between the indie bands he mentions who did incorporate black influences (the Clash, the Minutemen) and the ones who didn't (Pavement). That gap is no accident, and I think it gives a more pertinent explanation for why the black influence faded than what he goes with, which does sorta amount to "white guilt." Indie did continue to try and incorporate black influences after the Clash and the Minutemen, and it sounded awful. Those bands aren't in Our Band Could Be Your Life because no one wants to talk about them anymore; they've been left out of the canon. At the same time, what 90s indie was reacting against was very heavily influenced by blues and soul music: pop-metal and the other genres of rock prevelent in the 80s had a real swing to them, and were full of blues-derived solos. (Well, that and Eddie Van Halen neo-classical pull-offs, but still.) 90s indie perceived that these influences were, at least for the moment, played out, exhausted, meaningless. In the context of Pavement's emergence, choosing not to have prominent black influences was an actual choice, whereas the opposite wasn't true. Indie explored, and is still exploring, a different cultural heritage, a white one to be sure, but hey, it was a bunch of white kids, you know? A lot of good art was wrung from folk, the Beach Boys and Philip Glass.
It's also true that this is no longer the case, that these influences are as played out as black influences were at the end of the 80s. (Though, honestly, I wouldn't really want to hear Devendra Banhart try and steal from R. Kelly; R. Kelly does not need to be made more ridiculous.) That's why I like what the Fiery Furnaces do: they're trying to find new places to steal from. The admitted ones are the Who (and, now, Zeppelin), but there's a lot of other shit there, which resembles less the broad streams that SF/J's article dwells on, but very specific, minor ones that were dropped sometime in the past and never recovered.
But if there's a piece of evidence that calls into question his ultimate assessment of the situation, I can express it in two words: jam bands. There is a whole style of rock music right now that quite consciously draws from black styles, particularly funk and jazz. And it is, by and large, horrible. In a way, it proves indie's point: continuing down that road did lead to bloat, wishy-washiness, and self-parody. That indie has arrived at a place now that shares at least two of those qualities, if not all three, is not necessarily evidence that they need to sound more like soul--it just means they need to embrace that urge to incorporate and experiment which made all of the bands SF/J approvingly cited great. Did the Little Richard matter more to the Beatles than the Gershwin, or is it their wandering ear and ability to assimilate that really made the difference? I agree that indie bands seem too eager these days to stick within the culturally acceptable bounds of influences, but those bounds aren't racially defined, they're culturally defined, and they exclude lots of white stuff just as much as they exclude black stuff. Indie's stagnation seems less to do with its avoidance of black influences and more to do with its codification as a genre, as a sound, rather than as a set of moves and drives that lead to widely disparate kinds of music--the Minutemen's contemporaries and friends were, after all, Black Flag. Indie used to value weirdness and experimentation, but now it looks ascance at anything that flies too close to the sun. That seems to be far more problematic than its unwillingness to syncopate.
Labels: indie rock, pop, sasha frere-jones, The New Yorker
posted by Mike B. @ 10:24 PM
23 Comments:
Thirty years ago, Banhart might have attempted to imitate R. Kelly’s perverse and feather-light soul. Now he’s just a fan. The uneasy, and sometimes inappropriate, borrowings and imitations that set rock and roll in motion gave popular music a heat and an intensity that can’t be duplicated today, and the loss isn’t just musical; it’s also about risk.
Hmmmm. This passage makes me uncomfortable for reasons I can't quite articulate, except that he seems to be implying a lot about sexlessness being attributed to lack of "integration." (I understand that he's talking about what the term originally meant, but there's a sneaky conflation there that he doesn't argue explicitly in the piece itself, that "losing touch" with black music leads to safe, sexless (="white") music.)
Strange that Arcade Fire, his opener, are currently touring with LCD Soundsystem, who I don't think could be accused of being danceless and/or sexless. The article's generally working with narrow definition of "indie," which leads to a kind of circular logic: "how come these bands that don't sound like they're being influenced by black music don't sound like they're being influenced by black music?" I'd include plenty of acts (Jamie Lidell's album was on my 2005 list) in a broader umbrella -- and there are plenty of bands following in the (by now pretty hopelessly watered-down) Stones-rock tradition coming from the UK, not to mention yer Amy Winehouses etc. that should be considered here. (And the mere fact that indie-audience-leaning music can draw on black influences doesn't make it any good, which is one point I think he sidesteps -- his strongest argument for "miscegenation" is probably the Rolling Stones, or maybe the Clash, but most bands who try to sound like the Rolling Stones or the Clash tend not to be even remotely interesting.)
As far as, say, taking influences from more contemporary black music (hip-hop), where do you place a band like Radiohead (hip-hop beats, New Orleans jazz, still very "white")? Or the Motown bits of the new Spoon album? Or the ska/reggae influence in Lily Allen? (Didn't Simon Reynolds raise related issues last year with limited success for similar reasons? I can't find it now.)
I do think that his description of the situation is pretty right--those bits you mentioned are stray and not reflected in the vast swath of bands that make up Pitchfork's (say) main concern. Indie, what most people call indie anyway, is very white these days. I'm just saying there's a reason for it, an understandable one. More people should be trying to be like Pavement!
one point I think he sidesteps
Actually, he talks about this in relation to his own band, I guess -- but it's still not a very satisfying explanation (I think that certain kinds of appropriation do sound pretty misguided, but there's also more subtle integration of styles that goes unnoticed in the piece -- waitasec, wasn't Gang of Four an inescapable indie reference point in recent memory?).
Well, the audience is certainly white, but I just don't know if you can so easily make the claim that there's been no influence of "black music" -- how are Radiohead, Lily Allen, and Spoon not part of Pfork's bread n' butter?
Whether or not any of these artists "code black" (or whatever) is a different question, but I guess my concern is more that I'm not totally sure what's supposed to count as "black music" in this piece (except...uh, syncopation?) and that I'm having a lot more problems with Sasha's criteria for what makes for "white" and "black" music than I am with the bands he's singling out (most of whom I don't care about anyway, so maybe that's part of the problem).
N.B., the second half of "Wake Up" is v. syncopated, almost a Bo Diddley beat: dah dah dah! Dah daht dah-dah! One more dah and it'd be "Nothing in This World" -- is Paris Hilton "blacker" than indie rock???
(Not that close to Diddley, but decidedly syncopated.)
Well, Spoon isn't a modern indie band, it's been around for a long-ass time. And Radiohead and Winehouse aren't Pitchfork acts, they're everyone acts, right? I think you'd be hard-pressed to get people to call those two indie.
Point being, you can pick nits, but I really do think the overall point is valid. There is very, very little funk or blues in party-line indie bands. It's not part of the sound! I could get into musical shit if you want, but I think it's fairly clear to the casual listener. I mean, we could just talk about instrumentation and get a long way. Banjos and accordions, oh my!
(ALso, for the record, SF/J mentions drums that emphasize the downbeat and an actual low end in the rhythm section as elements missing from indie that make it sound whiter.)
I guess I just think he's choosing a semi-useless narrow focus here. (Is the modern folk circuit "out of touch with black music"? Where does Banhart lie in relation to them? Where did the Who lie in relation to black music? Is Sufjan's gospel/church choir-type influence definitively "white"?)
Side note: I might also be underestimating the relative importance of the bands that signal "indie" to Pitchfork's audience versus the bands that signal "indie" to, say, the New Yorker's audience.
Yes, but are funk and blues big anywhere at the moment? (I hear "blues" in plenty of UK bands that most people there wouldn't hesitate to call indie; I also wouldn't really call it the blues, more like "signifying blues," or "coming from the general tradition of white people who were signifying blues.") What about the White Stripes? What about, what about, what about...
I'm just not seeing a clear argument here (you say all this indie is "party-line," but none of my counter-examples count!)
(Most-read record reviews over at Pfork right now, include Spoon, M.I.A., Kanye West, 50 Cent, Les Savy Fav, Go! Team, Prince, Common, White Stripes, and Justice, none of whom really fit this description.)
I know that 50 Cent and Common aren't indie by any stretch of the imagination, I just think that if we're using Pitchfork as a gauge here, we need to be open to the possibility that there is music covered there that meets the criteria, and that to focus on, say, the Decemberists, the Shins, and the Fiery Furnaces (all name-dropped in the article) is selectively choosing the bands whose influences don't "code black" (still not comfortable using this phrase, really). At which point I'd ask why their reference points aren't "black enough," and I don't think this is adequately addressed (why is Brian Wilson a "whiter" reference point than the Rolling Stones or Paul McCartney? I'm just suggesting that these definitions of "black music influence" seem fairly ambiguous, and that the argument is sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy; it's defining "black music" to sound like whatever the "white music" isn't -- are Gogol Bordello (accordion) "white music"? Is there any banjo music that's not in conversation with black music?
Dave, c'mon, you know damn well that at most 3 of the artists you name there are indie in any sort of way. I think he makes pretty clear what he considers black identifiers: syncopation, emphasis on the downbeat, low-end, and references to black artists. He spends a lot of time talking about rock's rich tradition of dialogue with black music, so he's not just coming out of nowhere with this, although it's arguably a wrongheaded move to talk about just indie rock rather than rock in general. Still, I think that comes from someone who genuinely believes indie rock is rock's true inheritor, rather than Nickelback or whatever.
I agree (like I said in the first paragraph) that he's willfully ignoring certain strains of indie, esp. NYC-dancepunk stuff. But that's a pretty clear outlier in indie these days. The bands that are rising up, and which Pfork is trying to make their rep on (think Band of Horses, Beruit) entirely work for his argument. If he wanted to be more inside-baseball I suspect he would've mentioned elbo.ws and/or "blogrock."
(And how exactly would Gogol Bordello not be white music? It is ethnically white music!)
Maybe this would be the point to mention that I don't find "white music" to be a negative term at all--I think it very usefully and very accurately certain segments of the music I like. But hey, I'm white! I think people might be letting Sasha implicitly guilt-trip them into distancing themselves from what he's calling white (or redefine said things as black-inflected), but you don't have to do that.
Wilson's whiteness: "glee clubs and church choirs."
Your counterexamples do count, but he's not saying there's no black influence. The fact that everyone's bringing up the same two or three counterexamples seems indicative, though, and he does seem to be arguing that there's no MODERN black influence in indie rock, i.e. motown doesn't count.
7 times out of 10, solos sound bluesy because the guitarists don't know more scales.
"For instance, why not mention the whole crop of dancepunk bands, who were nothing if not indie with black influences?"
Is there any Black influence in Dancepunk? Now, I'm not completely up to date on my dancepunk (as the Coffee Talk lady would say, it's neither punk nor good for dancing, discuss). But I believe that dancepunk draws from the same wells of influence (easiest example is Kraftwerk) that some hip hoppers use?
Haha, I was about to come here to mention that I was thinking about dancepunk and they do fail to fulfill Sasha's qualifications most of the time--the bottom end is remarkably small for dance music (their bass sound is high-end and distorted), they favor straight on-the-eights rhythms and stay away from syncopations, and there sure ain't no blues scales.
The question, I guess, is: is modern hip-hop an almost entirely different music from original hip-hop, which did draw from ESG and Kraftwerk? I don't really hear any of that anymore.
Uh, I think my comment got eaten.
Anyway, Kraftwerk influence:
http://www.myspace.com/melodymuzic
of Montreal's Hissing Fauna has been garnering a lot of praise this year, and is definitely black-influenced, in a way. (It has sexy bass lines, if nothing else.) This is probably less a refutation of Frere-Jones than it is an example of the pendulum starting to swing back in an opposite direction, though.
Actually I was at their NYC show on Saturday and I was thinking about how they have a tendency to run roughshod over syncopation and turn it into straight beats, which is what I think I meant when I complained about them being too "bouncy." The new songs are very Princey, though, especially the sex jam.
My point/question, which I forgot to type before hitting send is that drawing from the same influence isn't the same as being influenced by something, even if it comes before something else chronologically.
Two, I think I have a pretty clear idea what Black music is. Is anyone else here old enough to remember when Billboard had a "Black Chart?" Not a Soul/R&B chart, I'm talking about the Black chart.
Which brings me to an unrelated point that bears repeating 'til I'm blue in the face: Black people loved Hall & Oates in the 80s. There. I said it.
Now to follow up on my thread clearing comments, I personally think of Black music as that which would have gone on the "Black charts" back when i was a young'un. Beyond that, it gets needlessly slippery.
The only substantive difference is that in ostensibly white music, "lo-fi" is seen as a virtue. There's some some sort of Neil Young-derived ideal that's entirely missing from Black music. You will never catch a Soul, R&B, Hip-Hop, or even gospel artist bragging about how their album was made in an abandoned farmhouse using olde-tyme electric generators, with amp-speaker cones made of rough-hewn birch bark, and what have you ... all done on an OG 1984 Mac for $163 (only available on wax cylinder).
I could see thinking, "Show some pride in your recordings, sirrah. And for pete's sake, polish those sneakers."
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