Via maura

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/musical/2007/10/22/071022crmu_music_frerejones

- I would imagine there'll be lots of blogtalk about this one. It feels to me like he's fighting old battles, or maybe telling old war stories that aren't quite as tightly relevant to now as they should be. But the point about the shift from imitator to fan seems an interesting one.

Meanwhile there's still a couple of hours to vote in the Pop Open.

Comments

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

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. Rock and roll was never a synonym for a polite handshake. If you’ve forgotten where the term came from, look it up. There’s a reason the lights were off.

I was up too late trying to articulate a position that a bunch of other people have already expressed. But I will say that the ending still makes me uncomfortable, as it's identifying "black music" as sex-ful ("risky") and "white music" as sexless ("safe"), which seems like a variation on a pretty old (and itself racist) line of reasoning about the "inherent" sexual power of African-derived music. It's (even half-jokingly, sort of a pun on the origins of "rock and roll") suggesting that miscegenation (<--eek) will lead to, um, reflowering in indie rock.

Don't see how Americana (Wilco etc.) or choir/gospel (Sufjan, Arcade Fire) is "out of touch" with "black music," it's just out of touch with what Sasha (and most people, I'd bet) would call "black music." (And I think that even in terms of "contemporary black music," e.g., hip-hop beats are used prominently in plenty of stuff that "codes white" to most people: Caribou, Radiohead, Go! Team, etc.)

Anyway, if there's a racially based "indie rock problem," it's that its audience is almost exclusively white regardless of what it sounds like (as true at a Busdriver show as it is at a Wilco show, if Busdriver's lyrics are any indication). But that isn't the result of bands being influenced by "white music," it has to do with how the community perpetuates itself; it's subject to the same social/economic disparities based on race and class as any other media. If we're just talking about certain aspects of music (syncopation, funk, dub, reggae) then I don't know if I'd bother invoking "white music"/"black music" split, since the argument is 1000x more complicated than that and besides which for any given criteria (arbitrarily chosen) you could find counter-examples.

How long does it take to reflower?

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

*I think I meant redeflowering.