New Yorker essay on indie entropy

[garth cartwright]

The link should take you to a well argued essay in the latest New Yorker. Those of us who ponder on why rock music has become so dull, so lost its groove, may find some salient points here. Or perhaps not!

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/m ... frerejones

[Dayna]

I read this whole thing & it is all very interesting. I sort of lost interest in Pop music, after the 80s. I noticed it had all sort of become bland, or it sounded like they were all just sort of copying each other too me.


I've always known I've been drawn to music that has a mixture of things in it, but didn't understand why. But this makes it more clear, that the best music has been a mixture.

[ian russell]

an eulogy of youth, why does each successive generation believe it's their cultural trend that will prevail?

just don't get any more tattoos, that's my advice.

oh, and are four-page essays on rock n roll, rock n roll? ;o)

[Ian A.]

Those of us who ponder on why rock music has become so dull

It certainly reminded me how rock writing has become as retro as most of the music. Dull, dull, endlessly angstily dull! If we're going to do retro, where did I put my rusty old "fuck art let's dance" badge . . .

[Rob Hall]

Agreed there are some salient points in there, but Ian's right: it could have been (a) a lot shorter and (b) considerably less dull. I must say, I was mystified as to why they should use the clumsy "African-American popular music" on page one, and "black American music" on page three.

[David Flower]

the most interesting this is that when I printed the article I got different cartoons in the text to what was on the webpage. Doh! How dat done?

David Flower

[Dayna]

Some of that old tradional Gospel Music really was pretty, what I've been able to hear of it.
I was thinking about this, topic from reading that article that Garth posted about Rock being dull now days. It says a lot of Blues, Country, & Rock was rooted in Gospel Music, originally & I have heard that before. It's kind of easy to tell that it was, from listening to it. Even when I've heard Roll With it baby, by Steve Winwood, it sounds kind of like it was rooted in Gospel in some ways.
They've moved away from it now days, quite a bit. I wonder if that has something to do with it being dull now.

And also, maybe greed has had an affect too. Like maybe in the past people enjoyed the art of making good music, but since the 90s, it seems like they've just been interested in what will make some easy money in stead. Maybe that's why it sounds like they've copied each other so much, but haven't thought as much about being creative with it, like in the past. it's kind of the same with Hollywood movies. I noticed, if they see one thing that is going to make them money, then they will do kind of the same things again, to make more money ,instead of caring about the artisitic side of it.

[Adam Blake]

Yes, Dayna, that's true. But the mainstream media outlets for music are much more difficult to access than they used to be for anyone making music that isn't funded by major companies. It works both ways. People can distribute their music on the internet for free, but of course it's impossible to make a living from it.

The WHITENESS of modern pop/rock music is something I started a thread about here a year or so ago when I chaperoned my daughter and one of her friends to an "Emo" concert featuring six "Emo-rock" bands popular with teenagers. The most striking thing about it, and to me the most depressing, was the absolute complete lack of any black music influence at all. No blues, no funk, no soul, no r'n'b, certainly no jazz - no syncopation, no space or variation in timbre at all. Absolutely unutterably awful. Thank God she's got over all that now.

But it's far too easy to just present a knee-jerk anti-intellectual response to an article like this (I always hated that "Fuck Art, Let's Dance" pose). OK, it's rather poorly written, rather long-winded and clumsy in construction, but the writer is trying to make several serious points that are well worth consideration. The idea that black music no longer needs the likes of Led Zeppelin or The Rolling Stones to bring it to the attention of the white middle-classes is interesting. On the face of it, that should be a good thing. But if it means that white music is suddenly bereft of funk or space, or bass for that matter, then it's a terrible indictment of the Caucasian conception of how music is made. These pathetic children with their endless Marshall amplifiers and new Les Paul guitars, pounding away without a clue about dynamics or showmanship, no conception of tone, their only card their ostensible "Realness" - oh, it's enough to make an old person weep. There wasn't a single black person in the audience either.

The writer of this article suggests that white people are that much more self-conscious about borrowing gestures from black culture these days, because of Political Correctness. But all I see this producing is rigid cultural and physical segregation. Dreadful. How did things get so bad? This article certainly does not provide answers but at least it posits some real questions. Thank you, Garth, for posting it.

[Charlie]

The writer of this article suggests that white people are that much more self-conscious about borrowing gestures from black culture these days, because of Political Correctness.

I'm not sure if it is for reasons of Political Correctness, or a realisation that they can't do it very well. I've often thought that The Beatles and Stones and Animals were able to dare to do their versions of black American music because the originals weren't well known and/or easily available as live performers in the UK at the time. Once those Brit groups had the nerve to do it, and American media embraced them, for a while you had Americans doing it too. At which point black music changed again, as James Brown, Sly Stone and Funkadelic in effect said, OK, do this funk if you dare. And agan it was a British group, ithe Average White Band, that rose to the challenge.

When Vanilla Ice did white boy rap, he was soon seen off as a preposterous imposter. The Beastie Boys were accepted for longer but their heart wasn't really in it and they retreated into fashionable trip-hop. Only Eminem did it so well that he was embraced across the board. But nobody else has matched him. It's not easy to make great black music, is the point.

So for the past few years black singers and producers have ruled the American pop roost, and American R&B has become the main pop mode. Scandinavian writers and producers are better at it than white Americans or Brits.

I haven't been paying close attention but it has felt as if white groups have mostly preferred to stay off the pop map, avoiding melodic hooks targeting hearts and/or rhythms aimed at thighs. Where the Beatles and Stones led, they are afraid to follow. Instead, they either churn out stadium rock or wilfully turn their backs on the pop audience altogether.

[Ted]

I don't know about Political Correctness. Isn't it just that the ignorance which allowed the Stones and co to blunder into Black american music is no longer possible?

If some group of white guys from southern england brought out a recording appropriating music from anywhere in the world tomorrow, how long would it take me to get hold of the real thing? Probably a matter of minutes.
In 1963, for someone who wasn't part of any in crowd it would have been much harder. This gave bands who started off as performing juke boxes a bit of time to a) learn how to play, b) have some ideas of their own. The momentum they built up (and the adulation of those early years) carried the Stones through to Beggars Banquet by which time they were a considerably more interesting proposition.

Most of their fans never looked back into their influences, because most people are not quite as obessessive as some of us round here.



(Oh and I though a bit of editing would have made that article about half as long and much more readble without losing much thatw as important)

[Adam Blake]

Yes indeed, but all that just increases my already overwhelming sense of nostalgia for a time I can only vaguely remember and that I was too young to have participated in.

What I think has yet to be addressed is what is left when the influence of black music is surgically removed from white music. It's not pretty, folks, and this is disturbing as once upon a time it used to be exactly that: pretty and melodic. British folk music, Classical melodies and, to a lesser but still noticeable extent, Tin Pan Alley showtunes were the other ingredients in the white rock/pop mix but they also require a sense of rhythm, a sense of pacing and dynamics. Where have those skills gone? Some people would blame Punk Rock. Wrong. Good punk requires knife edge precision and understanding of rhythm - simple rhythms maybe, but get them wrong and it doesn't work.

I have mentioned before that I used to teach one of The Libertines and I remember going to many of their early gigs. I remember, to my embarrassment, advising my student (John, the bassist) that perhaps he should get rid of the lead guitarist as he obviously couldn't play properly. They didn't take my advice (!) and went on to become enormously successful. And that guitar style that I found unacceptably amateurish became the new norm for white British indie bands. It's characterised by sloppy rhythm that certainly would have got you sacked from, say, The Rezillos, a vague attitude to what version of what chord you're going to play (whereabouts is it on the guitar neck? Am I going to actually hit it in time? Am I too stoned to care?) and an apparently complete lack of understanding of how to get the best out of guitar controls or amplifier settings. Plain old fashioned shoddy musicianship in my book became How It Is Done Nowadays.

And before you all jump on me and accuse me of being an updated Bert Weedon (who advised his students not to bend strings in case it put the guitar out of tune), yes, I know. Things change. My point is that musicianship, the basic craft of making music is in such a sorry condition amongst young people precisely because they have lost sight of the cultural wellspring from which the music they admire originally drew from.

(Am I writing as badly as the New Yorker columnist yet? I fear I am.)

Someone else on the Forum (was it you, Ted?) made the point that much of modern white rock/pop is the product of music that only feeds on itself. I think that is the crux of the matter and as long as that remains the case then it's only a matter of time before rawwrk and all who sail in it becomes culturally non-existent and merely a vehicle for relieving naive middle-class white teenagers of their disposable income. Indeed, I daresay there are many who woud say that has already happened. (Like me for example, I'd say it's been a dead issue since about 1982 - apart from a brief period in the mid 90s when the likes of Blur and Pulp and Salad succeeded in hot-wiring the corpse for a couple of years.) Maybe that's what the problem is, after all, and what Dayna was alluding to earlier: it's the sound of music that only exists for one reason and one reason only - to make money.

[Ian A.]

bands who started off as performing juke boxes

Trying to avoid this descending into more of the same amateur soliciology student artspeak bollox as the original interminable feature that sparked this, but . . . In the mid 1960s we were on a different planet. I'm sure the early Stones etc jumping headfirst into being Muddy and Wolf were not that different to what I was when I decided to become Fred McDowell and Charlie Patton. We loved the music, it was almost impossible to find the records. The best way of turning other people on to the music you'd got so enthused about wasn't to email them an mp3 or web link like today, it was to get out there and show your excitement by playing it yourself as best as you could.

You could call it deluded crusading zeal if you like, but ripping off other people's music and claiming it as your own was the furthest from most people's minds. I'm sure you can find exceptions that prove the rule, but certainly it was turning people on to the original stuff that motivated people like Alexis Korner, who mentored the Stones and many others. Later on, when you've learned to play proper, it's inevitable that chops you've picked up early on will be incorporated into your own style (it's quite hard to lose that early stuff - it took me a long period of concentrated effort to stop myself singing in a fake American accent). But that's how it works, guys - evolving traditions. It's all much more innocent than rock thinkers with too much time on their hands claim. And sometimes the new music that evolves - often because in trying to learn something alien off a record you get it so wrong that something different crops up - is pretty smart going off on its own accidental tangent.

As for the pop record industry constantly recycling what's currently successful and holding anything else at arm's length, rather than inquisitively breaking new ground, wasn't it always thus? I'm willing to bet you could find people voicing that complaint 50, 60, 70 years ago. There's a challenge for the professors amongst us - go find the quotes.

[howard male]

Adam wrote -

Someone else on the Forum (was it you, Ted?) made the point that much of modern white rock/pop is the product of music that only feeds on itself. I think that is the crux of the matter and as long as that remains the case then it's only a matter of time before rawwrk and all who sail in it becomes culturally non-existent and merely a vehicle for relieving naive middle-class white teenagers of their disposable income.

Couldn't it simply be that black music has now been so fully assimilated that white rock musicians have decided to explore other corners of their soul, effectively being more true to themselves?

A band like Arcade Fire (discussed in the article) might not have soul in the sense we have become used to using the word, but they certainly express emotion. OK, so its a tight, contained emotion that seems to explode out of them like air from a tire, but, for me, that's what makes them interesting.

They've been honest enough to address their white fucked-up-ness which many of the best white bands (who don't try to paint it black) have also done: Joy Division, Devo, Magazine, the Smiths, even Talking Heads. All these band come from a time when black music could be seen as a given, and so, if it was part of their sound at all, it was not there as a direct, stylistic ingredient: Devo were funky in that angular and intriguingly awkward way only white boys can do, and the Smiths had a little bit of Congolese guitar influence twinkling away beneath the self-indulgent, very English introspection Morrissey liked to indulge in.

And now we have Arcade Fire who seem to have looked to composers like Philip Glass to find another way of doing intensity and passion. Rather than trying to swing, they simply push - push that primal four-four beat for all it's worth because that's the beat they naturally feel (rather than any complex polyrhythm.) But then they overlay that with churchy sing-along melodies and bleak yet somehow hopeful lyrics. In a way what they're doing is as white as the pure driven rock they grew up with, but it also has within it the intensity of gospel music without needing to sound like gospel music. I recently got sent a CD from a guy who calls himself 'Le Loup' who makes a prettier, more spacious version of the Arcade Fire sound, so it is catching, and that's fine with me.

Another contemporary rock/pop band I'm fond of is Spektrum. They do the art school funk thing but have a black female vocalist. The difference between then and now is this vocalist isn't obliged to play the black soul diva role in order to lend credibility to her white band. Her style is an arch mix of the sensual and the robotic which, again, perhaps can only work now because black music has already been so fully taken on board that these musicians no longer need to feel selfconcious about what they are doing - the singer can simply be who she is rather than feel pressured to play an already defined role.

But to return to Arcade Fire for a moment. I've always thought the very label 'independent' an absurdity: what's so independent about a guitar, bass, drums and vocals line-up? But Arcade Fire have broken that rule too by having all sorts of percussion, violins etc thrown into the mix. But don't get me wrong, I'm not a huge fan. I just recognise when I hear a band trying to step off in a new direction, and I admire them for it. But most of all I heave a sigh of relief that white pop isn't as dead, insular, and self absorbed as some of you might think it is.

Art rock is looked down upon by a few people here as perhaps pretentious and sterile, but, for me, it's beginnings represent the moment white pop musicians could move beyond the black influences their predecessors had passionately but awkwardly imitated, and reassert their own sensibilities on to the pop template which, by the mid 70's, had black music is a given part of its identity.

[joel]

Couldn't it simply be that black music has now been so fully assimilated that white rock musicians have decided to explore other corners of their soul, effectively being more true to themselves?

I can hear no evidence for this. On the contrary, as Adam has pointed out, the colour seems to be draining from white popular music.
While I really like Johnny Marr's guitar work, he's no Dr. Nico (and I don't think he's trying to be, either).
And if Talking Heads or any of the others could have played like Funkadelic or Sly & Robbie back in the day, they surely would have.

[Dayna]

Do you think Damon Albarn was trying to put those qualities back in with Gorillaz?