No Racial Quotas Here
Critics made an issue out of race in rock music this year. They shouldn’t have.
By Kriston Capps
December 28, 2007
Design by Brendon Clark. Courtesy Black Kids.
Race relations in rock music got rocky in 2007. First, the New York Times Styles section published an account documenting the painless truth that young people sometimes dress to identify with some subculture—and that African Americans do this, too. When Jessica Pressler reported in that piece on the rise of the “blipster,” or Black hipster, she lent the credibility of the paper of record to an awfully reductive term, one that only seems to have any currency within the rarified realm of neologism. Then, to cap off the year, pop critic Sasha Frere-Jones declared in the New Yorker that miscegenation in rock music is a thing of the past. The fruitful relations that began when Elvis Presley opened White America’s eyes to Black music had all been for naught—or rather, had run their course. Frere-Jones argues that White musicians have turned away from the African-inspired rhythm and blues that inspired rock in the first place.
Judging music on race is distasteful at best and stereotypically limiting at worst. There are plenty of White artists who used blues influences this year and Black artists who didn’t. Frere-Jones made some broad generalizations about artists and fans that aren’t necessarily true. He’s thinking too much about the history of color when he should be thinking about the history of music.
The White Stripes’ Meg White is hardly the world’s greatest drummer. Frere-Jones has lambasted her in reviews of the band’s work before, and she would seem to be a ripe target this time around. His New Yorker essay lamenting the lack of soulful influence in rock music, after all, stems from his dissatisfaction with live performances—specifically, with the rhythm sections of popular rock outfits like Arcade Fire. Granted, Meg White’s nervous fits caused the band to cancel this year’s tour in support of a new album, Icky Thump, and in any case, the two-piece band only has half a proper rhythm section, so perhaps the band reasonably didn’t make Frere-Jones’s cut.
But to ignore The White Stripes, their new album, and Jack White’s prior musical achievements should be considered cherry picking. Jack White is the most talented and soulful musician in rock—a sentiment Frere-Jones might endorse, given his prior praise for the singer-songwriter’s “vexing brilliance.” White concertinas muddy blues and braggadocios showmanship in his spare rock compositions, the kind of sources that Frere-Jones alleges rock lacks today. Even if White’s not the best blues talent out there, he’s certainly one of the more visible ones. Two songs on Icky Thump reference blues in a literal way: “300 M.P.H. Torrential Outpour Blues” and “Catch Hell Blues.” A song like “You Don’t Know What Love Is (You Just Do as You’re Told),” the closer to Icky Thump, fully taps the blues-rock tradition inherited by Southern rock, and might be called derivative if White didn’t carry it off so well.
Frere-Jones is wrong to say derivative acts don’t exist today. The Gossip—a three-piece group that formed in Searcy, Arkansas, and relocated to Portland, Oregon—would not seem to be informed by a Black music tradition, geographically speaking. Nevertheless Beth Ditto’s saucy vocals have earned acclaim for the band and owe an explicit, even overarching debt to the ultimate White soul singer, Janis Joplin. Ditto’s voice distinguishes an otherwise lackluster indie-rock outfit. On a similar note, Amy Winehouse, a blues singer whose chart-topping single “Rehab” earned awards this year, is surely destined for one-hit wonder status and not merely because of her self-destructive tendencies. In the context of Frere-Jones’s argument, bad popular blues-infused music holds just as much weight—in terms of data—as substantive popular blues-infused music.
Perhaps critics like Frere-Jones are missing blues because it’s missing among some popular non-White artists as well. After all, there’s not a lick of delta soul on M.I.A.‘s 2007 release, Kala, but there’s a wealth of other inputs, American and otherwise. She fuses contemporary rock, hip-hop, and dance—as well as other genres from around the globe—genres that rarely find more than a sample’s worth of airtime among American audiences. Cross-pollination abounds even if the rich rhythm and blues hybrid is waning.
Hip-hop proved in 2007 that the distinction between White music and Black music today is little more than a matter of social context. For Good Girl Gone Bad, Rihanna repeated the formula that turned “S.O.S.” into gold. That single sampled Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love”; the 2007 release adopts New Order’s “Blue Monday” for “Shut Up and Drive.” Of course, that single has been eclipsed by the anthemic “Umbrella,” a chart-topping song that made fans of all but the most soulless of listeners—and which bears a casual resemblance, vocally and structurally, to a bygone rock anthem: “Zombie,” by The Cranberries.
The so-called Black experience remains in the forefront, but isn’t very accessible to White artists. Project Pat is not performing for a general audience on “Tell, Tell, Tell (Stop Snitchin’),” a song whose frankly reprehensible message speaks, however authentically, to a specific experience in America. Economic and circumstantial rifts that divide White and Black America persist, and are deeply troubling, and are born out by divergent popular cultures. However, music is the realm in which it’s safe, even encouraged, to explore a different cultural experience. It’s not as if Project Pat doesn’t have scores of White fans.
One of 2007’s sleeper acts was Black Kids, an upstart band from Jacksonville, Florida, whose 2007 release—Wizard of Ahhhs, an EP available via MySpace is their only release to date—recalls blissful ‘80s pop à la The Cure. The name of the group—two-fifths of the members are Black—suggests that there’s no divide that ironic detachment can’t bridge. Perhaps Will Oldham already proved the point by releasing a cover album—under his folk moniker, Bonnie “Prince” Billy—that included his take on R. Kelly’s “The World’s Greatest.”
If the suggestion exists that a Black member of a mixed-race band playing for mostly White audiences is some sort of musical Uncle Tom, the a capella choral harmonies that have made TV on the Radio such critical darlings would stand to prove otherwise. But what of Tyondai Braxton? The lineage between the swing eighth note and hard syncopated drumming that drives his band, Battles, gets lost among the erratic singing and math-rock guitar riffs—Braxton’s contributions. But to say that Battles plays White music writes off Braxton’s contributions as inauthentic or insufficiently Black—that’s a dangerous exercise. By holding Black artists to historically Black genres, even while praising their wonderfully rich rhythms, we risk holding them to stereotypes.
Instead of trying to bring the present in line with the past, critics should acknowledge rock’s reality: The borders between genres have mostly fallen, and egress is rich and free between musical territories. Instead of making racial arguments, critics should just tell it like it is: Sometimes a bad rhythm section is just a bad rhythm section.
Kriston Capps writes about arts from Washington, D.C. and blogs at Grammar Police.
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I would also toss out another glaring exception that hit pretty big this year, which is the indie rock band Spoon, which has always had a strong funk influence. Frere-Jones article also mentions freak-folk artist Devendra Banhart, whose last two records have featured R&B-style rave-ups. There is the popular soul singer Joss Stone as well. And up and coming blues-influenced rockers Grace Potter & The Nocturnals. And the whole of the the jam band scene (Gov’t Mule, North Mississippi Allstars, Bela Fleck are names that come to mind). Frere-Jones is simplifying the popular music world in order to craft his thesis of racial miscegenation.
— Kyle Petersen - Dec 28, 10:28 AM - #Yeah, Frere-Jones’ article has already been completely destroyed all across the blogosphere.
Amy Winehouse a one-hit wonder? Rehab isn’t her first hit, just the first one most people in America have heard. :) She’s had two really solid albums, “Frank” and “Back to Black”, each one channeling very different musical traditions — she has the capacity to be the next Christina Aguilera, shifting genres as she sees fit.
In addition to the list above, I’d also add in Swedish rockers The Ark’s “This Piece of Poetry is Meant to do Harm” as an example of ‘soulful influences’.
Oh, and “Umbrella” sucked. :)
— Joe - Dec 31, 02:48 AM - #This piece was lazy. Just because you’ve convinced yourself that music is colorless, that doesn’t make it so. The fact is, rock and roll has gotten away from its roots. (those roots, btw, are rythm and blues) I, for one, don’t think it’s good or bad. It just is. Amy Winehouse, given what i’ve heard, is not a rock musician. If she is then everything is rock. And if that’s the case, nothing is rock.
Stop catching feelings everytime race is mentioned. The fact is, for the most part, rock and roll doesn’t sound like it did in the ’50’s. Deal
— Damian - Jan 4, 12:09 PM - #