Sasha Frere-Jones, music critic for
The New Yorker -- and not a woman, to my friend Chris' disappointment -- has
written an article on the whitening of rock music beginning back in the early nineties and culminating today in what he describes as an indie rock scene with no soul.
While Frere-Jones uses Arcade Fire as his initial guinea pig, he points fingers at plenty of other bands. He asks:
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?
First off, I would argue that there are some indie rock bands who still fall in the tradition he describes, most notably The White Stripes.
He says the with the publication of Dr. Dre's The Chronic, with Snoop Dog front and center, everything changed. Up until then...
...young white musicians had been imitating black ones, it was partly because they had been able to do so in the dark, so to speak. In 1969, most of Led Zeppelin's audience would have had no idea that Robert Plant and Jimmy Page had taken some of the lyrics of "Whole Lotta Love" from the blues artist Willie Dixon, whom the band had already covered twice (with credit) on its d?but album. (After Dixon sued Led Zeppelin, the band credited him with the song.)
And here's one of the most controversial statements in the article...
By the mid-nineties, the biggest rock stars in the world were rappers, and the potential for embarrassment had become a sufficient deterrent for white musicians tempted to emulate their black heroes.
The cultural dominance of political correctness - and it's influence on art.
Frere-Jones talks about his own instrumental funk band for which he sang vocals when the piece of music called for it. He describes the difficulty he had trying to rap - concluding that even if he tried to not sound black, he still sounded black. "Playing black music never felt odd, but singing it--a more intimate gesture--seemed insulting."
A stinger: 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.
Here's a good discussion about the piece hashed out by two of the music critics for the Village Voice. LCD Soundsystem gets a lot of praise - as does Spoon!
