You Got Miscegenation in My Fusion

A day or two after I originally posted my two cents about Sasha Frere-Jones’s New Yorker article, I updated the post to include a few comments from my brilliant wife. One of them was her questioning why SFJ would call out Devendra Banhart for not appropriating black influences, when it was quite obvious that Banhart has no trouble practicing musical colonialism—i.e., his albums are filled with references to music from various parts of Latin America. His music is miscegenated—just not in a way that SFJ seems to notice.

My wife also wondered why SFJ insisted on placing a judgment on his observations. So there’s less African American influence on “white” music—why does that need to be portrayed as a negative assessment, when the acts SFJ points to are busy making great music without that influence? It seems an arbitrary critique. Part of what makes SFJ’s article so unappealing is his insistence on using the racially charged word miscegenation. Another word, more benign but more accurate, would be fusion.

I was pleased to see this article by Will Hermes in Sunday’s New York Times, therefore, which in effect elaborated on both of those points; and though it is not an explicit answer to SFJ’s article, it could easily be read as such.

On any given night in an American rock club you can hear bands like Gogol Bordello, Man Man, Beirut and Balkan Beat Box playing odd-metered songs drawing on the rhythms of Eastern European Gypsy music. You might encounter Antibalas or Vampire Weekend riffing on African sounds, Dengue Fever making psychedelic Cambodian pop or a D.J. like Diplo spinning Brazilian funk. On the recent “Kala,” a contender for the year’s most exciting pop album, the British-Sri Lankan rapper M.I.A., who works from Brooklyn, draws on Indian, African and West Indian sounds. The folk-rocker Devendra Banhart creates fusions with Mexican and Brazilian musicians on his recent CD, “Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon.” And the veteran musical adventurer Bjork toured this year with a West African percussion troupe and Chinese pipa virtuoso.

In an implicit critique of SFJ, Hermes even points to these artists as being directly influenced by hip hop in their eclecticism.

[R]ather than replicating an “authentic” sound… [Vampire Weekend] is more interested in collage, understandable for a young group weaned on the cut-and-paste aesthetic of hip-hop.

Hermes spends a good portion of his article addressing the issue of authenticity in these artists’ music, which is certainly something every band must consider on some level, no matter the influence—hell, even hewing too close to the sound of the Velvet Underground or Led Zeppelin will invite jeers. In terms of the black influence in American indie—frankly I’m still uncomfortable with the notion of what even constitutes “the black influence” in this day and age—both SFJ and Carl Wilson, in his excellent response at Slate last week, speak to the delicacy of making that influence too apparent.  It has become an extremely racially charged act for a white American artist to appropriate black American music in way that is not “authentic.” Importantly, Wilson notes that "at least half of Frere-Jones' lauded precedents are British, a context in which appropriating black American music has vastly different connotations."

With those connotations in mind, perhaps it explains why so many indie bands are more quick to take on Balkan or Brazilian influences. As Hermes’ article articulates, many American indie rock acts are indeed practicing musical colonialism. Nick Urata of DeVotchKa

noted that while some of his band mates were schooled in Eastern European music, he was not, and in any case stylistic accuracy was not the point. "The ‘authentic’ Gypsy brass-band stuff is great, but it’s better to leave it to the masters,” he said. “We figured we were never going to nail it exactly, so why not just take it into our own realm?”

Hermes’ article seems to reflect how many indie bands have internalized a hip hop philosophy—every sound, genre, and culture is fair game in songwriting—yet look outside of North America for their overt musical references.

Unlike hip hop, however, this culture-grabbing in indie music requires more than crate-digging and sampling; it requires studied musicianship on the part of at least some members in each band, as in DeVotchKa or Beirut. This points in some way to the corollary Wilson, in his Slate article, draws between contemporary indie rock and class, insomuch as indie rock is largely made by collegiates, or at least people for whom higher education is an option.

With its true spiritual center in Richard Florida-lauded "creative" college towns such as Portland, Ore., this is the music of young "knowledge workers" in training, and that has sonic consequences: Rather than body-centered, it is bookish and nerdy; rather than being instrumentally or vocally virtuosic, it shows off its chops via its range of allusions and high concepts with the kind of fluency both postmodern pop culture and higher education teach its listeners to admire.

Mind you, this is nothing new. Twenty-five years ago, the music Wilson and SFJ are both talking about was not defined by artists’ business decisions (“indie”) or their proximity to the pop charts (“alternative”). Rather, it was defined exactly by what Wilson describes: college rock. That you listened to R.E.M. or 10,000 Maniacs at all signified on some level that higher education was within your sphere of possibility. That largely hasn’t changed—lest we’ve all forgotten about the College Music Journal Festival that ended less than forty-eight hours ago.

Which brings me back to my wife’s original comment: why are we placing a judgment on such influences? Wilson titles his article "The Trouble with Indie Rock," the subhead "It's Not Just Race. It's Class." But indie rock as we know it traces its roots directly back to the college campus, when its sound was disseminated by the original arbiters of cool, those forerunners to today's mp3 blogs: college radio DJs. No wonder, really, that pseudo-intellectual bands like R.E.M. or Pavement ascended as they did. Why has that become "the trouble with indie rock" today? To make that claim—to label it a problem—would call into question the trajectory of the entire genre.

Any takers?

Comments

[Matthew]

Well it certainly does make my soul cry a bit to see R.E.M. and Pavement referred to as "pseudo-intellectual bands." I'm curious, who are the properly intellectual bands?

[scott pgwp]

Didn't really intend it at a diss, other than to note that both bands walked the line between sophisticated lyrics and nonsense.

[curm]

Sasha, like many critics today (and folks who on the I Love Music chatboard talk about "corny indie-rock fuxors") is unhappy with lots of indie-rock made today. That is not news. See Simon Reynolds "Gloom" posting on blissblog, see last year's pazz & jop and idolator critics poll comments. There's a certain concensus among folks on this judgment(although Sasha praised Arcade Fire heavily awhile back). With Will Hermes highlighting acts incorporating international/'ethnic' influences, and some commenters on last year's polls highlighting alternative/underground metal, there is certainly a message being sent that some folks are unhappy with the trajectory of indie rock(or at least the folkier and/or Pet Sounds influenced form of it).