Note: this was originally written a year ago, and misplaced on the hard drive somehow. And now here it is back again.

So I'm writing an article inspired by this article in Slate which is mostly about an article in The New Yorker. Maybe somebody else will write an article about my article, although I doubt it. But it could be fun! How many levels deep can we get before we achieve reverse transcendence?

Anyway, the New Yorker article can be summed up pretty well by this quote from it:

"I’ve spent the past decade wondering why rock and roll <..> underwent a racial re-sorting in the nineteen-nineties. Why did so many white rock bands retreat from the ecstatic singing and intense, voicelike guitar tones of the blues, the heavy African downbeat, and the elaborate showmanship that characterized black music of the mid-twentieth century?"

So from this you know that Sasha Frere-Jones is kind of an idiot (the very erudite New Yorker kind of idiot) and probably not black.

The structure of the article is like this: "Indie" rockers Arcade Fire are kind of boring, that is to say, white. Back in rock's golden age of the 50s and 60s and 70s, the performers were not so white. Of course, they were technically just as white, but their music was, in SFJ's opinion, more obviously influenced by blues and soul. So they weren't really so white. Then in the 80s there was Michael Jackson. Who wasn't actually white at all! At least, he wasn't white in the 80s when he was, like, the biggest superstar of all time! And there was Prince! Also not white! And then, starting in the 1990s, there was rap!

"You could argue that Dr. Dre and Snoop were the most important pop musicians since Bob Dylan and the Beatles."

(Er... I suppose you could argue that. You could argue almost anything. But my hyperbole-meter automatically goes into the red whenever anything is "the most important X since the Beatles!" or "the Beatles of X!")

Anyway, at this point the article proposes that during the 80s and 90s "racial sensitivity" caused white musicians to stop stealing from black musicians. Then SFJ goes on to talk at length about his own band, a funk band made up of white boys. (Okay, so SFJ is, as I suspected, white.) He seems to find it very telling that he couldn't quite find the right way to sing for the band's music, because he couldn't rap. In fact, he says "the problem was clearly related to race. It seemed silly to try to sound "black," but that is what happened, no matter how hard I tried not to."

I already know from panels at science fiction conventions that it is very hard to say, "well, in my book I do X" without sounding like a complete git. Turns out the same thing applies to, "in my band we do X." As a reader of the article, I keep thinking, "Dude, you seem to think there's some kind of racial politics involved, but maybe you're just not a very good singer."

Now, moving on to his main point, about "indie" rock, he says, "The indie genre emerged in the early eighties, in the wake of British bands such as the Clash and Public Image Ltd., and originally incorporated black sources, using them to produce a new music, characterized by brevity and force, and released on independent labels."

But what, exactly does he mean by "incorporated black sources"? English bands in the early 80s had a ska and reggae influence that eventually faded, but SFJ doesn't seem to mean "reggae" when he says "black." His example of the "blackness" of early indie rock is a single group, The Minutemen, and their blackness is established by "frantic political rants that were simultaneously jazz, punk, and funk, without sounding like any of these genres."

Okay, but. But. According to Wikipedia SFJ was born in 1967, which means that he was roughly my age while most of this was going on, and I don't know if he was listening to indie rock in the early 80s, but I know I was, and I know that we didn't call it "indie" then, we called it new wave or punk, and if there is a whiter style of music than new wave, I simply don't know what it is.

There is no discernible funk in new wave. Maybe there's a hint of jazz, sometimes. There is syncopation, of course, a bit of swing. Is swing "black" according to SFJ's criteria for blackness? Cab Calloway was black, anyway. I mean, he looks black in the pictures. Huh, this is weird, according to Wikipedia "In 1941 Cab Calloway fired Dizzy Gillespie from his Orchestra after an onstage fracas erupted when Calloway was hit with spitballs. He wrongly accused Gillespie, who stabbed Calloway in the leg with a small knife." Mr. Gillespie went on to a memorable guest spot on The Muppet Show, and Mr. Calloway appeared on Sesame Street, though I don't remember if I saw that one. But I really liked Mr. Gillespie on The Muppet Show.

Okay, back to SFJ. At this point, after making an assertion about early 80s rock that I don't buy, he makes an assertion about mid-90s rock that I also don't buy: "But by the mid-nineties black influences had begun to recede, sometimes drastically, and the term 'indie rock' came implicitly to mean white rock."

While it is true that "indie rock" of the 90s did, pretty much, implicitly mean "white," I seem to recall in the 80s and 90s that "rock" of any kind meant white. There was "rock" and that was white, and there was "R&B" and that was black. Remember the band Living Color? Late 80s rock band, one big hit "Cult of Personality"? They were black, and it was treated at the time as kind of a novelty, because rock bands just weren't black. Even when the bands did "funk metal."

Oh, right, I forgot -- SFJ isn't talking about actual blackness of performers, he is talking about "blackness" of music, so I suppose by his criteria a funk metal band would be sufficiently "black" on account of the funk. Which would make popular indie bands of the 90s Jane's Addiction, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Faith No More... blow his theory.

On to the next round. "During the same period, indie-band singers abandoned full-throated vocals and began to mumble and moan, and to hide their voices under noise. Lyrics became increasingly allusive and oblique." Erm... I'm getting from this that he really doesn't like Nirvana, which would explain why, in an article about musical trends over the past 20 years, he has somehow managed not to mention them. (Of course, he also manages to talk about early 90s rap without mentioning Public Enemy.)

Oddly, the absence of Nirvana -- which jumped out at me -- totally missed the author of the Slate piece, who blithely sums up from SFJ's article:

"To give bite to the accusation [that modern indie rock is boring], Frere-Jones names a few names, beginning with the Arcade Fire and adding Wilco, the Fiery Furnaces, the Decemberists, the Shins, Sufjan Stevens, Grizzly Bear, Panda Bear, and Devendra Banhart, plus indie-heroes past, Pavement. He contrasts them with the likes of the Clash, Elvis, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Cream, Public Image Ltd., Bob Dylan, the Minutemen, Nirvana, and even Grand Funk Railroad as examples of willful, gleeful, racial-sound-barrier-breaching white rockers of yore."

According to SFJ, 90s indie music just kept getting whiter, because it was drawing on super-white 60s trends like psychedelic and country music. And now "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. How did rhythm come to be discounted in an art form that was born as a celebration of rhythm’s possibilities? Where is the impulse to reach out to an audience -- to entertain?"

Okay, so, maybe neither one of us likes Cat Power, or Low (perpetrators of what I like to call "quaalude rock").

But, again I feel like he's missing the point. True, a lot of indie rock of the 00s isn't terribly danceable. I like to dance, so I notice things like that. But I don't find most "dance" music of the 00s terribly danceable either -- I don't really like to dance to electronica, and I don't really like to dance to modern rap/hip-hop/Justin Timberlake. In fact, that sexyback noise thing will hypnotize me into simultaneous immobility/murderous rage. Try it, if you have the stomach for it. It's fun. Play sexbacknoise and watch me glare at you for three or four minutes without being able to move.

So, my question would be, why is there generally such a deep chasm between "music that doesn't suck" and "music you can dance to" these days? Is it just a bad fit between my personal tastes and the whims of pop culture? Or is it a side effect of the increasingly minute stratifications of pop culture marketing? Is it the fault of those weirdly immobile Seattle audiences The Stranger liked to complain about, who set the stage in the 90s for the idea that indie rock and dancing were not in any way linked?

No, according the SFJ it seems to be related to laws against sampling. Except that he says, "For twenty years, beginning in the mid-eighties, with the advent of drum machines that could store brief digital excerpts of records, sampling had encouraged integration." Which, let me think, twenty years on from the mid-80s -- hey, that's now! Which, er, fails to make a case for something he claims started to happen ten years ago. Anyway, now he's talking about rap musicians having to write more of their own music, which I am having a hard time seeing as any kind of tragedy. But his point seems to be that anti-sampling laws discourage cross-genre musical influences. Which seems a little at odds with his main thesis, considering that in the 50s, 60s, and 70s they didn't have sampling. So, actually, I don't know what he's talking about here.

The Slate piece proposes an alternate theory: that you can't dance to modern indie rock because "compared to previous post-punk generations, the particular kind of indie rock Frere-Jones complains about is more blatantly upper-middle class and liberal-arts-college-based, and less self-aware or politicized about it."

So, it's not race, it's class. I suppose there might be something to that -- "indie rock" does have a long tradition of being interchangeable with "college rock." But when you look at what college costs these days, and how in debt your typical graduate is, and look at the jobs they're likely to get, and compare that to what the guy who fixes your car makes... well, maybe it is class, in a sub-culture sense, but I'm no longer sure that class has any predictable relationship to money.

(And I'm also not sure why, knowing that, we don't encourage smart kids with a mechanical inclination to learn how to fix cars, but that's a whole rant of its own.)

But now we're in the home stretch, the beginning of SFJ's final paragraph:

"The most important reason for the decline of musical miscegenation, however, is social progress. Black musicians are now as visible and as influential as white ones. They are granted the same media coverage, recording contracts, and concert bookings."

Well... yes and no. When you're not a big fan of rap or R&B ballads, it's easy to notice that black recording superstars are indeed huge, but only within a fairly narrow range of musical styles. Anybody working in a different black musical tradition -- blues, jazz, swing, funk, motown, gospel, reggae -- is kind of left out.

(Although white British chick Amy Winehouse seems to be doing pretty well with her own little motown revival, how does that fit into the overall picture? And, here's a thought, if white artists borrowing from black musical traditions is what SFJ wants more of, how does he feel about black artists borrowing from white musical traditions? When I saw Kanye West at Bumbershoot he was accompanied on stage by a string quartet. Or, what about the grand tradition of black opera divas?

There seems to be an underlying assumption in SFJ's piece that musical influence goes one way and means one thing -- white artists borrow "ecstatic singing" and a "heavy African downbeat" from black artists. But rock & roll has been around for generations now. If Led Zeppelin broke new ground by going back to nearly-forgotten blues greats like Muddy Waters for inspiration, somebody Kanye West's age might have grown up listening to Led Zeppelin. Or, you know, not Led Zeppelin. He might have grown up listening to new wave. He might have grown up as fascinated by obscure, forgotten psychedelic garage bands as Zeppelin was by blues artists.

SFJ seems to be creating a narrative where black musical traditions come from some pure, primitive, untouched well of generic Africanness, which all European-descended musicians must drink from in order to achieve authentic rock soul. This narrative is naive, patronizing and reductionist. Why all the fuss about ecstasy and downbeats, and no mention of the blistering political and social conscience or the intricate poetic devices of modern rap lyrics?

(Although, you know, nowadays those intelligent lyrics are mostly found in indie rap of the kind I'm likely to hear on the college station.)

"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."

Notice the way we have gone back and forth between talking about "popular music" and "indie music"? Which one has lost its soul? Both? Aren't we all just victims of the ever-increasing commodification of art?

Popular music used to be like a big open-mike night, where everybody would go and listen to everything and latch on to what they liked. Now we have headphones on all the time, listening to a pre-selected narrowcast of music by artists and sub-genres we already know we like. How can any cross-pollination occur under those circumstances?