Introducing BarkerRant -- an infrequent, but frequently mind-blowing, column from our esteemed critic/curmudgeon Andrew Barker. In today's episode, Barker takes Simon Reynolds and Sasha Frere-Jones back to school. Bring a notebook, sucka.
When I was in high school, I spent a year taking jazz lessons on bass guitar. My initial reason for doing this was to become a better rock bassist by tackling a much more complex, difficult genre. After a while I started to get into it pretty heavily, and began to seriously wonder if I couldn’t someday become a Pastorius-level jazz bass genius myself, eventually dying of a morphine overdose and jamming in heaven with Coltrane, who would immediately kick Paul Chambers out of his angel band and rename the song "Mr. A.B." in my honor. Then my teacher invited me to sit in with his quintet at one of their gigs, and I got my ass handed to me on a platter in front of a good five-person crowd at a coffee shop in Riverside. Seriously, after two songs I had fled to the bathroom -- sweaty, thirsty, hands jittering and pondering faking a seizure just to get out of there quicker. So I quit jazz lessons and went back to the rock a far better player for the trouble. It was kind of like getting kicked out of the marines and subsequently becoming a mall security guard. Hey, at least I can handle this shit now.
Anyway, the point is that we would spend most lessons playing through certain standards, him on piano and me on bass, and at an early lesson we ran through "Night in Tunisia," which I’d been practicing for weeks, and had a pretty thorough academic grasp of. My teacher was unimpressed with my studied accuracy, telling me contemptuously afterward: "You sound like a white bass player."
Being as I was a white boy in there for bass lessons, this comment struck me as a bit strange. I asked him what I should sound like, if not a white bass player. "A black horn player" was his immediate response. Meaning, of course, he didn’t want me WASPing up the rhythm, or being too soullessly structured, or playing on top of the beat when I should be laying behind it. And it worked; imagining myself as Clifford Brown helped me avoid playing like Kenny G. Sometimes during our sessions he would just lean back from the piano and yell "too white!" and I would usually get back on track.
But while such easy racial divisions provided for useful shorthand during my shamefully aborted jazz studies, they’re gloriously useless in critiquing contemporary pop music, as Sasha Frere-Jones of the New Yorker and Simon Reynolds of Salon have ably demonstrated in two very, very stupid recent articles.
Frere-Jones, in his endlessly digressive, smug rock historian way, bemoans the lack of danceable indie rock, which he blames on a lack of "musical miscegenation" (not the term I would use, given its origins in a bogus pseudo-science designed to prove European racial superiority, but hey), which by Frere-Jones’ definition is limited almost exclusively to white guys ripping off black guys. Reynolds bemoans the loss of groove-oriented dance music and rise of overt Britishness in Britpop, a loss he blames on too little reliance on the American black music that gave the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds their backbone.
They’re not wrong to point out that many black-originated forms of music tend to groove significantly more than white ones. Nor are they wrong when they note that white American and British groups of the ‘60s got their respective grooves on by largely co-opting blues and R&B styles. But both writers espouse an ugly logic that equates a lack of clear black influences in white (or even multi-racial) groups with a lack of rhythm, and in Reynolds’ case, hints of racism. Both are also guilty of a hideously reductive view of black music, which by their standards consists only of those neatly progressing genres along a continuum beginning with blues and leading straight to R&B, rock, soul and funk. (Not all "black music" is dance music, by the way, which I would hope any professional music critic would know.) And perhaps most importantly, their respective theses are wrong at the most basic level -- rock music hasn't been so dance-oriented, rhythmic and club-friendly since the '70s, and by stacking the deck to claim otherwise, the authors merely make a show of their own personal prejudices.
Of the two, Frere-Jones’ article is the most hopelessly confused. Using a roster of indie artists carefully cherry-picked from both the extreme underground and the mainstream, he builds a case for a hopelessly white, undanceable indie-rock scene. Conveniently, he never takes into account the current popularity of acts like LCD Soundsystem, Beck, Franz Ferdinand, the Killers, Hot Hot Heat, the Klaxons, Bloc Party, Lily Allen, the Rapture, Bjork, Junior Boys, Go! Team, Interpol, the Editors, Futureheads, and a few dozen other big-draw bands with indie cred who make dance music that isn’t obviously rooted in anything black (or white) Americans were doing in the ‘60s.
Instead of allowing these names into his argument, he relies mostly on folk-oriented artists, like Sufjan Stevens and Wilco, who would never have had any reason to incorporate R&B or funk into their music in this or any other decade. (Here F-J's loose interpretation of "indie rock" serves him well, allowing him to pick on easy targets like Stevens and deliver hilariously unnecessary advice to Wilco: "A little syncopation would have helped," F-J advises the band, referring to their now-legendary album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Thanks Sasha -- I'm sure Jeff Tweedy is taking notes.) In a particularly moronic comment that the proprietor of this blog has helpfully pointed out to me, Frere-Jones writes:
"Last month, in the Times, the white folk rocker Devendra Banhart declared his admiration for R. Kelly’s new R&B album Double Up. Thirty years ago, Banhart might have attempted to imitate R. Kelly’s perverse and feather-light soul. Now he’s just a fan."
Ignoring, for a second, that the notion of Banhart co-opting "Ignition (Remix)" into his music would be patently ridiculous, the central notion seems to be that if not for F-J’s argued current stigma on "musical miscegenation," Banhart would simply be picking up pieces of music left and right, tossing them all into his musical blender, and spitting out some sort of hybrid.
As Mr. David Lewis wrote to me in our email exchange that prompted this little rant:
"Why should a unique guy like Banhart imitate anybody, regardless of race or genre? Would that make him better? And anyway, Banhart clearly integrates music form other (non-black) sources, namely Latin sounds. Growing up in Venezuela, that was probably inevitable. Should indie rock ignore OTHER cultures (Latin, East Asian, Indian, Middle Eastern, Eastern European, etc...)?"
And that cuts right to the chase. In the early ‘60s, suburban British kids could all huddle around a Muddy Waters 45 have their minds collectively blown, and then by attempting to copy that sound, create music that few people in their surrounding community (London, Liverpool, wherever) had ever heard. Today this is impossible. That’s why you can have a white indie folk rocker raised in Venezuela listening to R. Kelly, but seeing no need to co-opt him. There’s no one musical stream anymore, and the increasing musical eclecticism and internationalism that replaced it has long since moved things beyond the simple white American music/black American music dichotomy. White people in ‘60s Britain who’d grown up with skiffle and swing on the radio 24/7 suddenly heard a blues record, which was like nothing else they’d heard before, and they all suddenly wanted to be Robert Johnson. A kid in Britain today can turn on the radio (or more accurately, the computer) and hear Jay-Z, Daft Punk, the Killers, Manu Chao, Guitar Wolf, Tiromancino, Mana, Kylie Minogue, Punjabi MC, Shakira and Haifa Wehbe all competing for his attention. They may all find their way into his musical unconscious, but it’s unlikely he’ll want to imitate any one of them.
All this musical internationalism can actually birth a certain regionalism, and that’s a good thing. It used to be that aspiring artists would seek out bits of foreign esoterica to hold up like a shiny little novelty (Jagger’s fake accent, Harrison’s sitar). But now it’s all more exciting to add something to this multicultural mishmash, rather than merely trying to synthesize it. That’s why you have British bands like the Libertines using a variety of global influences to build their little Byronic dreamworld Albion, or British rappers like Dizzee Rascal and Mike "The Streets" Skinner rhyming with a dense regional argot that should be impenetrable to anyone not presently playing darts in a London pub.
And that’s precisely what seems to bother Reynolds so much, in his review of Rhino's Brit Box. Pinpointing the Smiths’ heyday as the moment that Britpop began its sad decline away from rhythm (and making a mountain out of a few decontextualized Morrissey statements), Reynolds implies a far more sinister force at work than mere musical provincialism. He writes:
"Racists in Britain used to chant 'There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack.' Draping themselves in this flag, Britpop artists inadvertently sealed themselves off from the invigorating stream of new ideas coming from black music in the '80s and '90s, a good proportion of them -- genres like jungle and 2step -- spawned on Britpop's own doorstep. Cultivating their quintessential quaintness, clinging tight to a glorious and storied past, the British groups instead concentrated on appealing to patriots at home and Anglophiles abroad. But in the process they lost the world."
Now granted, he never explicitly comes out and says that Britpop is racist. But there’s little else he could possibly be implying -- otherwise the mention of British racist groups has no place in the paragraph. (Imagine an American corollary: "The KKK frequently used the American flag in their ceremonies. Also, Bruce Springsteen used to wear an American flag in his back pocket, so...")
Mr. Lewis doesn’t see it as a full-scale racism accusation, but rather as "a criticism for trying something different." And he's right. For proof, he points to the following from Reynolds' article:
"...maybe the failure of U.K. indie, shoegaze and Britpop comes down to these genres' gradual divorce from black music. Fetishizing the guitar sounds of the '60s, they forgot about its rhythmic base and impulse toward sonic hybridity."
Of course, Reynolds is also selective with his examples, skipping heedlessly around two of the most influential groups in the Britpop pantheon that would call his thesis into question. The Happy Mondays, whom he dismisses as "more club-footed than club-friendly" were, in fact, the band that birthed thousands of dance clubs across Britain and elsewhere. And Blur, who are only mentioned in passing, were perhaps the definitive band of the Britpop era, with a sound that incorporated liberal amounts of disco, dub, afro beat and gospel, and a frontman who later launched a massive side project anime band, Gorillaz, that trafficked in heavy trance, J-pop and hip-hop influences. Though both bands wear their Britishness on their sleeves, there's nothing even remotely insular about their music, and they both worship the almighty groove as much as any band this side of P-Funk.
Perhaps what Reynolds finds so distasteful about the aforementioned is that they find their groove not in the well-trodden paths of American R&B, but rather in the European music that birthed the ‘90s electronic scene (which also amounts to a footnote in his article, even though British electronica was nearly inseparable from ‘90s Britpop, and was easily the most racially diverse music of the time -- just look at its onetime power-couple, Bjork and Tricky). Bands like New Order, Gang of Four, Roxy Music, and the Clash (and their German forbearers Kraftwerk, Can and Neu!) produced reams of transcendent dance music that owed nothing to American blues and classic R&B, and influenced not only British rock bands, but also American hip-hop and contemporary R&B in the process.
However you look at it, Reynolds’ article ultimately amounts to little more than a criticism of British bands for being too British. Implicit in this criticism is a nostalgia for times past when British bands both mimicked American music and desperately wanted American attention. These days, there’s a lot going on musically in London to take in, and they’re all living pretty comfortably without our support, thank you very much. They’re fucking British, man -- if they want to write tea and crumpet music for Brits and only Brits, that’s their prerogative.
And as for black music, presuming such a designation still has any validity, it’s doing pretty well for itself as well. The elephant in the room during this whole discussion of racial musical intermarriage, of course, is that the white co-option of black music was only possible because of racism. Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters were black, and thus quite unlikely to make it onto the Sullivan stage, so when telegenic white guys like the Stones, Elvis and Zeppelin came along and provided a few pale faces to go with their (significantly watered-down) mutation of black music, guess who got paid? Hip-hop has somehow managed to remain an overwhelmingly black genre (though hip-hop artists have shown no hesitation accepting talented white and Latino artists into their midst), and for once those getting the checks and the media coverage are the same people who started the music in the first place. But hip-hop too is a melting pot of genres and influences, and even if today’s crop of rock stars wanted to do to hip-hop what their forbearers did to the blues, they would just as often find pieces of their own music staring right back at them, chopped up and recontextualized.
Whatever else the world's myriad racial conflicts may bring, racial lines in music have grayed considerably: white people are welcome in black music, black people are welcome in white music, and so much music falls into a multiracial category in the middle (or out of the dichotomy entirely) that the division becomes all but meaningless. There is far more in the world of music than is dreamt of in Frere-Jones and Reynolds’ philosophies. So please leave the racial designations to the jazz teachers, for whom such things are all in good fun.
--- Andrew Barker
Further reading:
Simon Reynolds' "Brit Box" review, "Whatever happened to Britpop?
Sasha Frere-Jones' New Yorker piece, "A Paler Shade of White".
L.A. Times' Anne Powers addresses similar issues, with VERY different conclusions, in "Hail indie rock, in all its diversity". Powers gets help from Richard Cromelin, Randy Lewis, Todd Martens, Margaret Wappler, August Brown and Charlie Amter.
