SFJ on How Indie Rock Lost its Soul

by Sam Chennault

Okay, if you're a music critic or you follow music criticism,  you've probably already heard the noise. New Yorker critic Sasha Frere Jones, anointed as the contrarian  bellwether for music critics, published an article in this week's New Yorker detailing how he feels that the dialogue between white and black music has come to a stand still. I'm glad to see someone discussing race, and I don't totally disagree with everything he says...he does make some good points about how the idea of political correctness has led to an awareness of cultural appropriation and thus a fear of true integration (at least by white musicians). But I disagree that this new racial segregation started in earnest in the mid-90s with Pavement (look at the Smiths or Bauhaus). I know on his podcast (yes, I listened to his podcast), he cites Bob Dylan as a prime example of music miscegenation, but Pavement can be seen as a riff on absurdist era Dylan, and I've always liked Malkmus singing because it seemed to be more about rhythm than melody.

I got off the Pavement bandwagon pretty early, and I'm no expert on indie rock by any stretch of the imagination,  but what strikes me as essentially wrong about this piece is that he doesn't really define his terms and he ignores examples that don't fit into his critique. He treats indie rock as a monolith consisting of groups such as the Decembrists, Wilco and Devendra Banhart. When I think of indie rock that hipsters currently fetishisize, I think of stuff like DFA, Justice, Girl Talk, !!!, or maybe Hot Chip.

Anyway, I'm rambling, here's a link to the article.