Music: David Brooks Shows Us Why NYT Doesn't Charge To Read Columnists Anymore

Brooks: "Evidently the disc jockey, or deeee JAY, places a turntable on either side of him or herself and proceeds to syncopate the revolving discs rhythmically..."

David Brooks, Bush lover (of the W. variety) and all around low-watt bulb, deigned to descend from his silver cloud and offer his predigested opinion on The State of Music Today in The New York Times. Put Sasha Frere-Jones (writer of the goddamn piece that wouldn't die), The Allman Brothers, Barack Obama and roots music in the word blender and voila! Instant punditry.

E-Street band guitarist and Sopranos Lieutenant Little Steven Van Zandt also shows up to lend authenticity to the musty ideas in Brooks' column. His prescription for the fragmented state of music today? Teach rock history in school. I think Sopranos scion Anthony Junior would agree that assigning rock and pop history to high school students is anathema to all that is great and transformative about the music itself. Seriously, that's what one credit college courses are for.

Brooks: Stick to bloviating about politics where your stupidity is a known quantity.

Van Zandt: Enjoy touring with Brooooooce, bring Sil out of retirement for a sitcom, just please don't be one of those old guys moaning about the lack of history in music and music history in people. For chrissakes -- your band is the hot indie touchstone this year! Arcade Fire fans wept -- wept -- at footage of their heroes playing live with Springsteen (the big wusses!) And don't return Brooks' calls!

Music: Watchoo Talkin' 'Bout Sasha Frere-Jones?!

This weeks indie-rock controversy continues to snowball (see my original post here) -- Yes it's Sasha Frere-Jones' Molotov cocktail of a New Yorker article (and blog posting and podcast -- can a video game be far behind?) suggesting that indie rock has eradicated all traces of "black" musical forms. Now comes Carl "not the Beach Boys one" Wilson's response in Slate which turns out to be actually pretty good. While taking Frere-Jones to task for all of his article's obvious shortcomings Wilson posits class as a bigger differentiator in indie rock, and makes a decent case for it. Of course any kind of reductive argument like this gets hung up on the exceptions but this is worth thinking about. He also puts some of the racial trends in music in a broader social and historical context -- both sorely lacking in Frere-Jones' original piece. The folks at I Love Music's board are already all over this one -- may the controversy continue!

Music: Sasha Frere-Jones Asks: "Why Can't We All Just Get Along in 4/4 Time?"

Pavement: "Let's try playing more 'black', fellas..."

The article that's been heating up the musical parts of Blogachusetts this week is Sasha Frere-Jones' New Yorker piece entitled "A Paler Shade of White". On the surface the argument appears to be a bold attack on a very early nineties music-crit trope: white people stole rock from black people (see Public Enemy's "Who Stole the Soul", Living Colour's "Elvis is Dead" etc., ) While carefully acknowledging the material and profile disparities between white and black artists Frere-Jones posits that this sort of musical mixing is a Good Thing (though terming it miscegenation is the sort of attention grabbing move that hints at the real purpose of the piece).

Whether or not you think cultural mixing is a Good Thing (I do), the argument that he puts forth goes further by suggesting that "indie rock" has undergone a racial purification that has systematically cleansed "black" music from the musical melting pot. Leave aside the lack of black musicians in indie rock, is this true? And how does one prove it? Brian Wilson, an acknowledged latter-day indie touchstone, is invoked as a touchstone of all things white, but how white can a guy be when his band steals their first hit from Chuck Berry? Arcade Fire is exhibit A in the articles first paragraph but can't the argument be made that "My Body is a Cage" is a descendant of blues dirges from the 20's and 30's.

No, says Frere-Jones, the beat isn't right. And here we come to the real nub of this piece: He doesn't like the way indie rockers drum. They don't swing, the bass players don't groove, etc. Which may be true (though not in the case of Spoon say, or Afghan Whigs) but so what? Is this a racial thing or just a mode of expression? Even one of Frere-Jones chosen whipping boys (to trade in another charged term) Pavement, fail to hold up under close examination. While pointlessly mocking the lyrics to "Grave Architecture" he fails to note the very swinging section of the song that occurs right before the final rave-up -- a section that could be described as jazzy.

Really what the article strives for is to make a splash and that it has done. Frere-Jones does a bit of extra-credit overreaching on his own blog, where he links the article to Lester Bangs incendiary piece on white supremacy and punk , which is a bit like appending an article on Grizzly Man to a piece on Winnie The Pooh.

There are a load of great/funny/stupid comments on this here at I Love Music's thread.