For the .01 percent of music listeners who care about these issues, this past few weeks has seen a pretty exciting clash between two well-established music critics.
The New Yorker’s Sasha Frere-Jones (a high brow magazine’s expert on low brow music) published an article recently trying to unpack his personal boredom with current “indie-rock.” His final analysis was that it lacked the borrowings from “black music” that have, by many accounts, defined rock ’n roll’s popularity since its birth from the blues. Musical miscegenation, or the borrowing of distinctly African-American musical traits like syncopated rhythms and “a bit of swing,” in his words, were integral in independently minded rock up until the 1990s, when this music underwent a “racial resorting.” It lost its “blackness,” and moved towards the distinctly unfunky styles typified by bands like Arcade Fire, Wilco and the Decemberists. “A little more syncopation would have helped,” suggests Jones, referring to Wilco’s 2002 record Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.
Jones ascribes this shift to the increasing popularity and success of black artists such as Snoop Dogg and R. Kelly who received the same major-label success as any white musician who could borrow from them.