I was just talking about this article with a friend. It's a total backwards, waste of time. It's hard to believe that people take this guy seriously.

It's one thing to say "I don't like this music" but it's another to say "Why can't the music I don't like sound like music I do like?
Probably because of racism."

Also, the bit about the magical week when SFJ could rap has had me giggling all morning.

Well, he certainly believes he's correct, doesn't he? I like Ui all right (although I had no idea they were a "funk band"), but what a pompous windbag that guy is!

And what's up with the New Yorker's style? Album titles in quotes? The Clash referred to as "it"? What a mess.

first of all, hes totally wrong about wilco and YHF. lets just get that out of the way.

i wonder what prompted SFJ to write this story now. a lot of it has been said before. and the "trend" that he describes--segregation bt black and white music (i think--im not exactly sure what hes getting at) misses some major happenings in pop over the last few years: dance rock, like !!!, the rapture, LCD soundsystem, and neo soul, like justin timberlake, xtina, and amy winehouse. all of those are bands w a beat.

"But, in the past few years, I’ve spent too many evenings at indie concerts waiting in vain for vigor, for rhythm, for a musical effect that could justify all the preciousness."

theres sfj's problem: his expectations lead him astray. its like going to the 7-11 and expecting a good cup of coffee. hes looking in the wrong place. thats either really dumb or really manipulative.

he clearly hasnt listened to devendra banharts newest all the way through: theres a bald-faced jackson 5 riff, as well as a reggae track, as well as a bunch of bossa nova. banhart--ever the dilettante--is the wrong example to pick.

also: korn? limp bizkit? sure they suck, and thats why he leaves them out, but theyre HUGELY popular.

you could go on. kanye and jay-z love them some coldplay and daft punk. the roots play dylan. she wants revenge. etc.

SFJ seems to be distorting the facts to fit his thesis and i dont buy it.

my man sam just nailed it on IM: "he's become the ann coulter of music critics."

ouch. maybe that's extreme, but yeah.

jz - exactly. I was thinking I could have constructed an equally accurate history of american music, proving an exactly opposite point, by cherry-picking a different bunch of bands (such as those you mention).

I kind of smiled internally at his description of YHF, though. I don't feel quite that way about it, but I never really felt it deserved the praise and acclaim it got. Speaking of which, though: I don't think I've ever heard Wilco referred to as an "indie rock" band, except maybe by people who don't know what the fuck they're talking about. Right.

Oh yeah...the Wilco bit is just totally 100% wrong.

And good call on the whole "post-punk revival" thing...seems like he just leaves out The Raputre, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Liars and all the others simply because those bands didn't fit his thesis.

But I will concede that a big reason that I personally don't find acts like Band of Horses all that compelling is because they simply lack a lot of the soul that is found in "black music" (ug, I feel gross just typing that). And that is what SFJ is getting at here...at least, I think. I still can't get past certain lines without laughing. Example: "Hip-hop became music for driving; it was designed to soothe. (The heavy bass frequencies cause car seats to vibrate, literally massaging the passengers.)"

Jesus...

I just got annoyed by the accent on the e in debut. I hate New Yorker style so fucking much.

However: I enjoyed this article, and I think it's more true than we want to admit--popular (indie) music is definitely less mulatto than it used to be. Whether Frere-Jones is a windbag or not is irrelevant, his reasoning is entirely correct.

Right now, I feel like when white people make black music, it's a throwback instead of an adaptation (or, to overuse the word, a miscegenation). Think Joss Stone or Jamie Lidell or all the other soul-apers.

Bands that are breaking the mold: the Black Lips, who seem to draw from Motown LPs and White Whale LPs equally; Architecture in Helsinki, for whom the simple addition of a steel drum seems to have brought their sound to it's logical holding place; Clinic, whose drumming has always reminded me of Afrobeat; The Dirty Projectors, where the dude sings like Prince and annoys me to no end, but for some reason I still listen to it.

Oh--I hate Wilco. Talk about windbags.

im most surprised by the implicit denial of variety. i like beethoven. i like coltrane. can i not appreciate them on their own merits, independently?

@6--jamie lidell isnt at all a throwback, but the difference bt "throwback" and "miscengenation" is semantic, anyway. one mans throwback is another mans innovation (as our differences in opinion prove). i still dont agree about the "trend" that SFJ raises.

hiphop has never been more racially diverse as it is now--in terms of artists, in terms of fans. does that count as popular music? or are we going totally rockist here? SFJ drops that whole thread halfway through the story. theres nothing more pop than rap, in fact, and theres nothing more mulatto, either.

and hey, ari, its OK if you dont get wilco and YHF. its certainly not for everybody.

It was a fun article to read but it sounds like he's been let down by one too many "indie rock band" performances.

What about The Gossip? It's "indie soul/rock" which sounds like it should be right up SFJ's sleeve (I still think it's crap).

Bleh, SFJ is tiresome. I think the point's been made by just about everyone in this thread that his thesis is wrong, his evidence selective and onesided, and that his own critical tastes are seriously suspect.

I think his observation of indie rock's lack of rhythm/syncopation was somewhat interesting to a point-- but he contradicts himself even in making points about bands drawing from "whiter genres" when he spends so much time establishing the roots of those genres as fully miscegenated, or at least impossible to discern except by an individual artist's inflection.

SFJ is frustrating b/c he attempts myopic and inflammatory theses he can't backup even within the context of his own circuitous reasoning.

Hey Line Out commenters,

You have really great working vocabularies.

Thank you,
Eli

His core point, that white indie music has cut itself off from black influences, hasn't come from a vacuum. It's a multicultural drain, a growing lack of dialogue between white and black music, that's been observed for a number of years now, probably most famously by Simon Reynolds or bands like Hadouken!, Scritti Politti, and Kasabian. And, for the most part, he's right.

"I think that there's just as many white listeners who are obsessed with black music as ever there were and who identify with it," Reynolds writes, "but what’s changed is the confidence of thinking you can add anything to black music has faded significantly. There does seem to be a bit of a go-our-own-way, unconscious segregation impulse at the moment."

To back up Frere-Jones, Arcade Fire, according to Green Gartside, "is an agglomeration of mannerisms, cliches and devices. It's monotonous in its textures and in the old-fashioned, nasty, clunky 80s rhythms and eighth-note basslines. The melodies stick too closely to the chord changes. It's rather flat and unlovely."

LCD Soundsystem, !!!, and the rest of the post-punk disco revival also don't reflect an argument-destroying black music influence, at least not any modern one. It's dance music of a sort, but it's tight-ass as hell, displayed by the only way you can dance to it. A lot of the post-punk these bands are based on are the ones that experimented non-racially, often explicitly, with shaving all of the black influences out of the music.

The way he puts out the argument, though, and the evidence he tosses in, are embarrassing, helping anyone to realize Frere-Jones is not only late with the story, but a stuffed shirt.

im not certain the stones thought they were adding anything to black music, though. or zeppelin. if anything, they believed they were adding to music in general.

having interviewed the rapture about their influences, i can tell you that their drummer worships guys like elvin jones and idris muhammed.

i still offer justin timberlake and xtina as examples of major pop stars straddling black and white idioms.

also: SFJ writes off the beastie boys far too quickly.

@13 jz: I think you are spot-on in those examples of how white pop artists are blending the (supposed) binary influences SFJ posits, and I think ironically enough, his focus on indie rock and more canonical rock bands is the sort of reductionism he has accused "rockists" of in the past.

And not to spend too much time on this essay, but the mention of Elvin Jones and jazz drumming brings to mind the hordes of "indie" bands that are broadcasting pretentions of mining the free improv movement, which is certainly rooted in Afro-American musicians (who often interacted with their white/euro classical counterparts).

In that regard (and many others) I think it's really difficult if not completely untenable to try and argue the way SFJ so often does.

Underlying SFJ's thesis is the accusation that any white musician who does not actively incorporate black musical idioms into their music is latently racist. He has made this point directly in the past and, frankly, anyone who could possibly decide that Stephen Merritt is a guy who needs to be publicly attacked for anything besides possibly drinking the last Zima during the Gilmore Girls marathon is guy whose head needs to be on a pike outside my house. Right next to Ann Coulter's.

Why aren't there serial killers for blithering, self-righteous cunts like this? Maybe some sort of terminal disease spread through sharing copies of The New Yorker or David Foster Wallace novels?

I'm surprised how many of you not only disagree with SFJ, but also seem offended by his argument. His essay points to exactly why bands like The Gossip, Kasabian and Justice are the only "indie" bands I can listen to. The haters are just racist :)

I have to confess I am torn between my delight in mocking indie rock for so often being hopelessly soulless and square and my desire to mock a rock critic whose main complaint seems to be that he's seen so many bands that he's become jaded and nothing really does it for him anymore.

It's a quandary, I tells ya.

the stranger isn't black enough

yeah. ari .its totally cool if you dont like some music. duhhhh.

I am totally selling all of my Ui records. Those crackas so faked the funk.

And why is the New Yorker's style so idiotic? nineteen-nineties? R. & B.? Talk about a lack of melanin...

looking back at this story, im glad SFJ wrote it, and im glad i read it. i still thing his argument is faulty, but i do like that hes pointing out some of the more boring facets of indie rock.