Magazine Music Writer War: The New Yorker Vs. Playboy
If you're anywhere near the Internet, you've likely heard (or read) that music critic and Ui founder Sasha Frere-Jones wrote a long essay titled "A Paler Shade of White" in last week's New Yorker, and that it's rubbed all sorts of folks the wrong way. In it, Frere-Jones uses Arcade Fire as a starting point for looking into -- as the article's subtitled -- "how indie rock lost its soul" (this has nothing to do with "rock being dead," kids ... or, wait, does it?). After the piece ran, an uproar ensued, with various folks weighing in variously from Idolator, to the Village Voice, ILM (the thread grows daily), good ol' Simon Reynolds, and etc.
A couple days into the dialogue Sasha-Frere responded at the New Yorker's blog, addressing some of the charges/questions.
Questions on my musical-miscegenation article—they’re already coming. Hasn’t indie become more rhythmic in the last five years? Aren’t there a host of reasons—most of them not related to race—that white musicians might avoid playing hip-hop? Where are you drawing the lines between rock, indie rock, and all other forms of pop? Is indie, in part, a return to a pre-rock version of pop? Is there really a problem here? What if we never have another Clash? We have M.I.A. and the Hives and Lil Wayne and Fountains of Wayne and Gogol Bordello and R. Kelly and so on—why does anything need to be combined? Is syncopation (or any single variable) really what’s missing from “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot”? Isn’t some of this simply a question of preferences? Are you really crazy enough to think that Hall & Oates and Michael Jackson are “equally gifted”? And what are some examples of miscegenated music?He then goes on to offer four examples of "miscegenated music": Led Zeppelin's "Custard Pie," OutKast's “Bombs Over Baghdad,” Prince's "I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man," and Miles Davis's "On The Corner."I can think of ten others, the most pressing being: What is the social implication of combining (or not combining) certain forms? But we have to start somewhere. Regarding Hall & Oates: my “equally” was slightly mischievous, a little like brushing a batter back. I wanted to make a case for the group—who doesn’t love “I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do)”?—but also to reinforce the idea that what I’m talking about is a largely formal, musical thing, and that once it has been unleashed the form belongs to whoever pulls it off most convincingly. Who is a better Michael Jackson now, Chris Brown or Justin Timberlake? And what happens when Usher comes back?
We'd thought the hubbub had died down and were ready to let it go, but then bam! the most entertainingly thorough and smartly argued response to Frere-Jones's initial essay we've read showed up today on Playboy's blog (thanks for the tip, Ningun). In "Paint It Black," the author, staff editor Tim Mohr, calls Frere-Jones a jackass, among other things. A few of our favorite tidbits after the white-men-can't jump.
[photo by Piera Gelardi/Refinery29]
Love that he's wearing a Sunn O))) Black One t-shirt in the photo provided at his site. Oh, irony! Or something.
Via Playblog:
Frere-Jones’ argument is predicated on two bullshit dichotomies. Early in his essay he describes how “Elvis Presley stole the world away from Pat Boone and moved popular music from the head to the hips.” There are two glaring problems with this assessment. First it subscribes to the age-old notion that mind and body represent opposing forces, the idea that intellectual urges and sexual urges are mutually contradictory and thus forever locked in a Manichean battle for the souls of teenage pop music listeners. It should go without saying in this day and age that this notion is rubbish: The desire to read and the desire to fuck live comfortably side by side in many well-adjusted teens of both sexes.Damn! We don't have much to add to that, but are curious to see where this goes next. Imagine it's the first time in a while some folks have bothered picking up a copy of the New Yorker for anything beyond the unfunny comics. Actually, we read it every week ... love that motherfucking Talk Of The Town section!Worse still, Frere-Jones ascribes racial attributes to the two sides of this outmoded dichotomy: Mind is white, body black. Thus, to Frere-Jones, the Arcade Fire (“the drummer and the bassist rarely played syncopated patterns or lingered in the low registers”) is pedantic, sexless and indicative of whiteness, while Mick Jagger (“He sang with weird menace and charm”) is lusty, soulful and indicative of blackness—or rather, in his parlance, miscegenation. Frere-Jones even discusses Jagger’s dancing!
...Frere-Jones also ignores—whether willfully or not—huge swaths of indiedom that might undermine the particulars of his premise. In fact, even the band he uses to set off the entire discussion, Arcade Fire, seems a poor choice. Arcade Fire’s sound is a dead-ringer for that of the Talking Heads; the distinguishing aspect of the Talking Heads was their study of, enthusiasm for, and use of African polyrhythm and percussion. Hardly the best example of a band bleaching the black out of its influences.
...Frere-Jones skips the rise of dance-oriented indie genres such as Big Beat (Fatboy Slim, Chemical Brothers) and Electroclash (Peaches, Miss Kittin). He passes over the showmanship of the Britpop movement (Blur, Suede, Pulp), a scene in which fashion, haircut and personality played nearly as much importance as hook, melody and beat. The blues riffs of the White Stripes, Black Keys and Cold War Kids must have escaped his attention. He misses the melding of indie and hip-hop that produced the trip-hop phenomenon. LCD Soundsystem and the DFA, Le Tigre, Daft Punk, the neo-Stax sound of Amy Winehouse and Mark Ronson—all go unnoticed by Frere-Jones. He must also not be familiar with a currently booming strand of indie typified by Calvin Harris, Simian Mobile Disco, Chromeo, MSTRKRFT, New Young Pony Club and others—syncopated, bass-heavy, electro-fried indie dance music that he might encounter in all the indie clubs where kids—newsflash—shake their asses (sorry—hips) to this stuff.
So what has Frere-Jones been listening to? It’s difficult to say. But one thing is clear: Frere-Jones beats up on a mere straw man in this piece. His arbitrary definition of indie—white guitar bands descended from the Beach Boys rather than the blues—is a make-believe genre from which he has already eliminated anything he sees as black-influenced music, making his criticism of it as not sufficiently black absurd. Only when he forces this twee subgenre of his own creation to stand in for the broad totality of indie can he make his argument at all, and even then it must be made with obnoxious insinuations based on an embarrassing set of racial and sexual anachronisms. Since his stock in trade is calling other people names—he famously branded Stephin Merritt a racist because Merritt published a list of his favorite musicians of the 20th century in Time Out New York without, Frere-Jones insisted, a sufficient number of black artists on it—Frere-Jones’ alarming lack of self-awareness must not be laughed off or excused. With this piece Frere-Jones has demonstrated himself every bit the racist—for buying into this pathetically regressive set of ideas—as any 1950s Southern preacher who decried white interest in animalistic, vulgar race music. That Frere-Jones’ delineates and fetishizes the other—this carnal, black backbeat, this jungle sexuality he insists on placing in contradiction to cerebral, “oblique,” “flat-footed,” white rock—should damn him alongside those who delineate and vilify the other; both visions assign the same traits to blackness.
Perhaps Frere-Jones should spend less time trying to reconcile his white singing with the would-be black funk of his (all-white) band, and a little more time poking around indie clubs, where his shameful philosophical starting point was discredited so long ago that his current epiphanies sound like unwelcome posts from a time machine. He needs to get on with it—read a book, have a dance, sex it up once on a while. None of those things will make him any whiter or blacker than he is; alas none will make him any less a jackass, either.
Posted at 6:26 PM
Tags: Arcade Fire | Sasha Frere-Jones
totally spot-on assessment by Mohr. i was outraged when i read Frere-Jones article. even more upset that no one challenged it before it went to publication. there aren't indie fans working as fact-checking interns at the New Yorker? hard to believe.
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I'm not worried about the Indie fact checkers at The New Yorker, just the regular editors there. Did they really just let this slide? It's pretty clearly racist and terribly, terribly generalizing. But bravo on the playboy article.
By the way, did you know black people can run faster because they have an extra muscle in their legs? Plus they've been bred to be strong since slavery. True story.
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Frere-Jones shouldn't try to rise above his station as the sour, acid-tongued critic of daytime television and sitcoms on his Onion AV Club blog.
Stay out of my New Yorker, please.
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WTF? If you're going to piss and moan about Arcade Fire not playing hip hop, why not piss and moan exactly equally about Kool Keith not playing whatever it is that AF plays?
But the Playboy thing is even more cretinous, and that takes some doing. He babbles the following:
"Arcade Fire's sound is a dead-ringer for that of the Talking Heads; the distinguishing aspect of the Talking Heads was their study of, enthusiasm for, and use of African polyrhythm and percussion."
Hogwash within bullshit wrapped in nonsense, though he gets sympathy points for the definite article in front of "Talking Heads"; the band didn't use one, and nobody should encourage that kind of pretentious nonsense.
Moving right along, the comparison is idiotic:
1) Arcade Fire doesn't sound perceptibly like the Talking Heads except in that both singers are whining dickless narcissistic twats. But lots of singers are like that; consider Neil Young, who that pathetic aping fraud in AF imitates far more often.
2) Arcade fire is one of the most rhythmically unimaginative bands on Earth. They've been compared to Bruce Springsteen for God's sake. Everything they do is bang bang bang on the downbeat; they're incompetent even as a rock and roll band, never mind funk. They're as stiff and soulless as a band can be. They may resemble the Talking Heads in some other arbitrary respect, but it does not necessarily follow that they must therefore also resemble TH in all other respects. That's a non sequitur. There is nothing on Earth they sound less like than Remain in Light. There's more imagination and ingenuity, rhythmic and otherwise, in any eight bars on that album then there is in AF's entire catalog. My God! The Talking Heads in their heavy African mode weren't just polyrhythmic; they were genuinely funky.
Watch this now:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaMzKpNC2Jk
I'm not kidding. In mere moments, you'll be saying "Arcade who?" and thanking me.
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orson, wow you're my hero.
thats what you want to hear is it not?
the best way to react to these bullshit articles of ignorance is to act like they were never written. anyone who doesnt recognise that article as utter shite probably has no interest in indie music anyhow.
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Hilarious, given that indie rock hasn't been so creative in years and hip-hop, sadly, is in the doldrums. Musical miscegenation --SFJ's great ideal -- is alive and well just about everywhere, but only some genres are flourishing despite this.
Indie is one of them and that wasn't the case for a long period. Taking aim at YHF is silly. Besides, didn't rhythm disappear with plenty of albums before hand? What about OK Computer, for instance, the child of a band SFJ celebrates in that very same article (or maybe it was in a podcast he recently put out)? Or Painless? Incidentally, one of the strongest bands rhythmically these days, Interpol, has been faltering despite this strength.
Strange days when Playboy publishes more insightful articles than the New Yorker.
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i love that frere-jones cites the stones' seminal (and possibly most brilliant [tho that doesnt make it my fav]) cut "(i can't get no) satisfaction."
fuck otis redding. what do we make of the greatest cover of that song to date, by arguably the whitest band on the planet?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvcuaJy9OwI
so let me rehash it: whites steal from blacks who are stolen by whites who steal from each other to make it sound even more black?
sigh.
when are assholes gonna learn:
s k i n c o l o r d o n t m e a n d i c k
(at least not to my ears)
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no, the best cover of that song is by cat power. easily.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yon18DBsU_c
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Everyone keeps assuming that being influenced by Talking Heads equals musical miscegenation. Um. . . Talking Heads were white. Hiring a black background singer doesn't count.
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The sad thing is that a faulty premise has led to a small deluge of ink—figuratively speaking, of course—being devoted to a flawed discussion. Sasha Frere-Jones is a noted music critic, and if people start delving into and repeating an erronesous statement of his—such as indie rock losing a soul/R&B influence it never had in the first place—and using it as a springboard that eventually leads to other perhaps flawed conclusions, I feel those who know better should speak up. (And where the hell was his editor, anyway?)
That a subject originating from a fallacy is getting so much more play than other more pertinent and relevant music-related topics is quite disappointing, to say the least.
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My take on SFJ has always been that he doesn't seem as though likes, understands or has ever really enjoyed listening to rock music. He's more into hip-hop and R & B which is totally fine and cool, but it means he probably should not be writing rock reviews/commentary for the New Yorker.
Some of the blame has got to go to Remnick & co. for being so in the dark about the subject and author of these pieces.
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I think Kanye West doesn't care about black people.
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@d,
musical miscegenation, at least as sfj sees it, is a more figurative intermingling or mixing of black + white influences/mores/memes/etc, not a strictly-speaking (or singing!) white man and black woman, or any combination there-in.
fallacy or not, and there's a lot of misreading (where's harold bloom?) going on, it's led to me reading the whole piece, which is good. now i know. and....
hybridity and creolization, particularly with regard to anglo and african musics, has been going on since the first horn blew the first note or first drum hit the first hand. it's still going on today! sfj MUST live in a closet to have missed the likes of jai alai savant (who draw heavily on the orignal bastard child of punk + reggae, the police), whose fearless leader, major ralph, spits some serious energy up on stage.
is iggy pop black?
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yeah, Frere-Jones is not a very strong analytical thinker, but I think its a bit silly to say the closest comparison to the Arcade Fire is talking heads. that's just silly. and why does everyone, EVERY FUCKING ONE, need to make these asinine comparisons in the first place. yeah, everyone's influenced by some shit or other in some combination, but does EVERYTHING have to be "the new" something or other? can we get more creative thinkers, and maybe even, gasp, some ACTUAL ARTISTS writing about music instead of masturbatory losers who think everyone finds the contents of their brains totally interesting at any given moment?
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Orson's citing of the Springsteen influence on the Arcade Fire above just goes to show how relative this all is.
He meant to associate the Arcade Fire with a "rhythmically unimaginative" act in a way to downplay their relation to the Talking Heads (which is stupid, because, while the Playboy article overstates the similarities, they're impossible to miss on songs like "Laika" and "Haiti"). Unfortunately, Springsteen is a terrible example to use. He and his band made their name on being, among other things, an absolutely terrific R&B band in their early days. In many ways, Springsteen's early style, in its adherence to classic soul, is more tied to black culture (especially American black culture) than Talking Heads' music is. Their approach to African music and funk is studied and a little removed. It has the requisite grooves, but not always the soul. I'd argue that what makes their music interesting is that it puts an angular spin on rhythms that are ordinarily more rounded. Especially if you listen to their pre-Remain in Ligh work, it becomes clear that they WEREN'T genuinely funky, though they were TRYING to be.
In any case, Bruce isn't a good influence to cite if you want to prove a poor grasp of "black" rhythm on the part of the Arcade Fire. Heck, even their most Bruce-like song, "Antichrist Television Blues" is basically a take on "Ramrod" or "Open All Night," which are practically Bruce channeling Chuck Berry. Maybe try Bowie next time or something.
(Interestingly enough, haven't the oh-so-funky David Byrne, Springsteen, and Bowie all expressed admiration for the Arcade Fire?)
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Jesus fucking Christ, a post about literate opinions on music solicits literate comments on music.
Fascinating.
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tip: if you want people to read what you write, don't write so much. get to the point. nobody has time to read novels in a comments section on stereogum. gosh.
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tip: The adults are talking. If the lengthy posts are too much for you, stick to the one-sentence joke posts and shut the fuck up.
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nobody cares. you're writing in the wrong place dude.
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write on, literati. write on.
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Seriously, if it took you more than 20 seconds to read through any of the responses here, that's your problem, not the author's. Skip it or learn to read faster.
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But then slowly devolves into personal attacks and name calling.
Typical.
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When I have to grab a dictionary to understand an idea that someone is trying to convey, I get a little upset. Maybe I should be more literate but it shouldn't be like a collection of David Rakoff short stories either.
SFJ seemed to be all over the place. He's mad that indie and rock acts aren't 'black' enough but praises Grizzly Bear for having "no apparent links to black American music." He cites Devendra Banhart's admiration for R. Kelly's new album but says "Thirty years ago, Banhart might have attempted to imitate R. Kelly’s perverse and feather-light soul." Exactly, we aren't living thirty years ago when this was all new and exciting and scary. So should we rip off black artists just enough not to get caught? Should we embrace the roots of original rock and roll? Some rock and roll is fucking boring.
When I listen to music, I'm interested in the music. Very rarely am I thinking "this music just doesn't have enough soul." If something doesn't sound good to me, I won't listen to it. It's called musical taste.
As Billy Corgan, among others, has said, every rock and roll band today owes a debt to Led Zeppelin. Somewhere down the line you like a band that was influenced by another band that was influenced by another band that was influenced Led Zeppelin. I don't really like them, but I think it's true. So if you're inspired by Led Zeppelin, you're also inspired by everyone they listened to as well.
How can indie rock or rock music progress? This is an old question. I was wondering this when I was in my teens. When it feels like everything has already been done, what do you do? You can rip-off the bands you love but put a different spin on it (ie Nirvana) or you can do your own thing and probably wallow in obscurity for years and be seen as a talented but overlooked artist long after you've quit or died (ie Nick Drake). (Oh no, those are both white acts... am I a racist?)
I can't understand someone who'd take the time to write a long article about current music not clinging to its roots. Music is incestuous. You can like soul and r&b and rap but not play it, which seems to be SFJ's real issue here. If you're not rhythmic, you're not interesting? Says the man pictured in a Sunn 0))) t-shirt.
This isn't a new issue, though he tries to make it seem that way, but he did his journalistic duty of pissing people off and making people think about it and want to write about it. Sometimes I hate being a journalist.
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well done kurt.
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Also, let's not forget the fact that Frere-Jones article was just plain stupid. I mean, to take a few narrow bands of rock music -- Sun and early British classic rock and the Clash -- and say that those two teach us all we need to know about how rock is or isn't, well, that's idiotic. I'm sure I am misrepresenting his argument, but to be honest, I can't be bothered to pay attention to anything so silly. He had a good headline for his piece but not much of anything else. I don't like Arcade Fire. I don't care about them one bit. To me, the guy who said that they'll disappear in a year has it exactly right. But hasn't there has always been white rock music (no hips, as he says), whether Jackson Browne or Fairport Convention? Hasn't there always been every kind of music? And when he says that white artists don't learn from black music these days, you could make a strong argument that neither do black artists. Where are the "full-throated" soul singers of any color, anywhere? His list of miscegnated music, also idiotic. He got in way over his head, and his need for attention seems to have taken over his not very good brain. I mean, I don't even want to start saying all the ways I think his piece is stupid. The guy from Playboy did a good job, but isn't anyone else outraged that a critic at a major national magazine even got away in the first place with reasoning this selective, reductive, and shoddy? Can all of us just make up a harebrained and not even very interesting theory, pass it by an editor who knows nothing about music, and get ten days of national Internet and blog coverage? I think that the best way to deal with someone like this is just to ignore him. Maybe he'll go away, or his bosses will stop being rewarded by the attention, which is unearned and unhealthy, and show him the door. Are there no standards at the New Yorker for even knowing anything?
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is he suggesting a revolutionary combination of rap and rock? um...psst...limp bizkit and linkin park pretty much ruined that idea...but maybe he's on to something...maybe it's 1995...
seriously though, this new yorker guy is a racist. to assume black music is tribal and body-oriented and white music is in the brain is to suggest black people can't make music intellectually. bigotry, plain and simple.
when playboy is writing circles around the new yorker, something is wrong.
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kurt: I don't agree with you that the point of criticism is necessarily to piss people off and make people think. women are inferior! kurt is inferior! did that piss you off and make you think? sometimes the point is to survey the subject that you're paid to look at expertly and draw real conclusions with real evidence.
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Maybe pissing people off wasn't the best term for it.
What I mean is that he made a point and backed it up and it's rubbing people the wrong way. Criticism is essential, I'm not denying that, but he couldn't have thought that his essay wasn't going to agitate people and cause this kind of discussion.
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Oh, he definitely knew it was going to agitate people. Here's his blog post from 10/10:
"You remember last year when everybody got all mad at me? If that was—to choose a physical analogy—a rowboat, on Monday we launch the QEII. All I will say is this: listen to the podcast before you write your scathing letter. But by all means—write it. Or anything.
Bye!"
The "last year" thing he references is the same Stephen Merritt incident that Playboy Dude mentions.
My question: What kind of journalist writes "nineteen-nineties" and so on?
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Honestly - why aren't folks calling SFJ what he really is - a bitter, failed musician whose awful approximation of an r'n'b-electro-jazz clusterfuck was not able to gain much a following?
Since Ui has multiple, multi-cultural influences and in SFJ's mind they were the bee's knees, then all indie bands should follow suit. Seriously... fuck you.
And while Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is truly an exercise in art-wankery and it does suck, its not due to its lack of syncopation. It's due to its lack of good songs.
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Music reflects the culture. There isn't a lot of musical miscegenation in indie rock because there isn't a lot of miscegenation in the audience that consumes indie rock music.
I've been to several indie rock shows in the last 5 years (Bright Eyes, French Kicks, Aqualung, Franz Ferdinand, TV on the Radio)and countless others.
I always play a game while waiting for the show to begin: count how many other Black people (other than myself) are in attendance. I usually never get past one hand.
I listen to all types of music (R&B, hip-hop, indie rock, pop). I just love great melodies and great rhythms. I've gravitated more towards indie rock lately because I really prefer bands and the interaction among musicians. R&B and hip-hop tend to emphasize solo peformers more than bands (there really aren't any current R&B bands and the only hip-hop band is the Roots).
I understand the wider point Sasha is trying to make by saying that indie rock is segregated: all music is segregated these days. I see it each time I attend a popular music show in Los Angeles. It interesting though that when I attend jazz shows the audiences are much more integrated (though much older than the average rock audience).
I have to be honest: I just don't get the Arcade Fire hype. I've heard critics rave over them for the last year -- I've never seen them live, and I'm sure they are fine musicians -- but listening to their music on the radio I'm just not drawn in enough to want to hear more via a live performance. I really don't get the comparison to the Talking Heads either, because I really love the Talking Heads and Arcade Fire just does not come close.
There are some bands in indie rock that have incorporated sounds/styles traditionally associated with music created by African Americans (blues, rock), like the White Stripes, but the term 'indie rock' really requires a definition because the White Stripes are hardly 'indie' anymore, even though that's where they started.
I think the bands in the genre are doing what they can -- they have to have artistic freedom to play what they want to play. Who knows, if these bands had more Black fans in the audience it might make them more self conscious about incorporating African American influences in their music.
While I agree that everyone borrows liberally across music genres these days, one must still give credit where credit is due: without rhythms brought over by African slaves to the U.S. there would be no blues music and without the blues, there would be no rock & roll.
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"I read Playboy for the articles" could now pass for a reasonable statement. That piece was solid.
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What are we spending so much time on giving SFJ more publicity than he already stole?
Unfortunately, his piece has always been the weakest section of the New Yorker (which is fantastic, otherwise.)
I think we'd all be wise to do what I did, read the article, say 'What an asshat,' and leave it at that.
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Nobody ever made a record hoping someone would write an essay about it.
Talk about literary masturbation.
All of it.
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To: themail@newyorker.com
Subject: Letter to the Editor: in regards to "A Paler Shade of White" by Sasha Frere-Jones
Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2007 19:49:43 +0000
Dear Editor,
I normally find Sasha Frere-Jones' New Yorker articles incredibly uninteresting critiques of popular music, but his most recent article, "A Paler Shade of White," could be one of the most misinformed and illogical pieces on music I have ever read. Just because Mr. Frere-Jones believes indie rock has lost its way by not having "African-American" sounds and beats doesn't mean the music is not accomplishing what it is setting out to do. It is true that rock has grown out of soul, jazz and blues, but this doesn't mean it can only incorporate these genres. Our society has become too integrated for rock music not to be influenced by all types of music, literature, and thoughts from around the world. For example, R adiohead has a distinctive "indie rock" sound and they are exploring that sound, which has evolved and will keep on evolving. Radiohead's influences are Beethoven and Mozart as much as world music, which is not always heard in the music. Johnny Greenwood is heavily influenced by reggae, dub and rock-steady. Also, what is the purpose of the random, off topic diss of Wilco's music and lyrics? These comments have nothing to do with the article's thesis.
Do me a favor Mr. Frere-Jones and listen to the new Iron & Wine album, "The Shepherd's Dog," and recognize all the influences-including blues and reggae-pouring out of every song, but certainly the album doesn’t sound like a blues or world music album. Isn't it the point of rock-n-roll to push and evolve the boundaries of music? Arcade Fire create lush, anthemic arrangements with diverse instrumentation which are influenced by both post-modern rock and French-Canadian and Eastern European music. Sorry if you don't like this sound, but just because it doesn't align with your narrow, prescribed view of what the formula of indie rock should follow doesn't mean the music is weak.
Maybe it is time you give up your music critic position at the New Yorker and go listen to The Dave Matthews Band or, better yet, your own failed band.
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Like the PB article mentioned: the most irritating thing to me about the SFJ piece is that he selects such a narrow and biased field sample of "indie rock" (Wilco, Devendra Barnhart, Arcade Fire) while blatantly ignoring prominent bands or movements that don't fit into his argument.
Arguably the most popular "indie" band of last year? TV on the Radio. What about Dancepunk? !!!, the Rapture, etc. The Make Up and on and on
I really hate that guy. In a perfect world, he'd be writing for free CDs and t-shirts at pitchfork, and not for $5 a word at the New Yorker.
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we have a winner! [John PDX]
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I don't understand how SF-J has the New Yorker job. Sure, he's a pretty good writer, but can't there be any talented writers in NY at also have interesting things to say about music? I've been reading the New Yorker weekly for as long as I can remember (certainly as long as he's been their music writer), and I've never once finished his section and thought "well, that was interesting" or felt informed. I think it's interesting that this article is making so much noise because it's such a good (albeit very extrapolated) representation of his work in general.
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lastly, my take on this article: this is clearly a guy who (used to be in a funk band and) decided indie isn't funky enough for him. i'm sure this happens to former funksters all the time - they just don't have a column in the New Yorker.
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I agree with Sascha about Arcade Fire, disagree about everything else.
Singin' in Th'rain or My Mind's Playin' Tricks on Me are both nicely done.
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i'm seeing many typical "attack the messenger" responses here.
SFJ touched on the third rail of musical politics by pointing out the obvious: that over the past thirty years, the emergence of both punk/new wave/indie and hip-hop demonstrate a (subconscious?) cultural re-segregation along race and class lines.
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