Rules Of The Game #22: Night doesn't work, day doesn't work

[koganbot]

Latest column. I belatedly jump into the Sasha-Carl convo, though I guess my point was that the convo wasn't yet happening in their pieces. And I assert that the Backstreet Boys belong to the discussion.

The Rules Of The Game #22: Night doesn't work, day doesn't work

Not sure I connected my dots or made my points emphatically enough. In any event, when I start the paragraph "I had a lot of trouble getting traction from these two articles," I was no longer talking about "technical" problems but rather about how Sasha and Carl were flubbing their main tasks, which was to say what was actually going on with some of those indie bands and why it would matter whether or not they started using black idioms or expanding their social range, and Sasha didn't say which black idioms they ought to use, or why.

Also, you have to guess from this what I think the Backstreet Boys et al. are doing with their style, since I don't tell you.

At the end I'm vaguely suggesting reasons why a couple of indie performers are making the choices they do, but I extend my thoughts too little.

What indie performers are you guys listening to, and what do you think underlies their musical choices?

What Sasha and Carl point out is real, but they don't answer the question "So what?" What difference would it make if Arcade Fire put space in their music? Why shouldn't a bunch of indie guys choose to mumble?

If the potential of being compared to black sources is a block to indie guys effectively playing in the black idioms, why wasn't it a barrier to a bunch of ex-mouseketeers? Or why didn't it scare off liberal arts types like the Gang Of Four and Pussy Galore back in the day? For that matter, why isn't it a problem for emerging black artists, who are consistently being told they're getting it wrong in comparison to the Bronx standard, but seem not to give a shit?

EDIT: Here are links to all but three of my other Rules Of The Game columns (LVW's search results for "Rules of the Game"). Links for the other three (which for some reason didn't get "Rules Of The Game" in their titles), are here: #4, #5, and #8.

UPDATE: I've got all the links here now:

http://koganbot.livejournal.com/179531.html

Comments

[koganbot]

If you're interested, here's a link to my Barr review and a song stream, and here' a link to my Nicole Atkins review (plus song stream), which contains a terrific interview.

[koganbot]

(Nicole Atkins is signed to Columbia, but I still think she counts as indie.)

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

I think part of the problem with SFJ's article, as you say, is that he doesn't say 'why' this is a problem. I think he feels this is a social problem, but can't call it as such, so has to present it as an aesthetic problem i.e. Q: 'why does indie rock suck now', A: 'because indie rock kids racially self-segregate'. Of course if that were the case (I'll suspend judgement for the purposes of this comment!) SFJ would have to make social arguments rather than musical ones, which would be a lot harder than saying 'you guys should feel as conflicted about this as I did'. But what people listen to doesn't necessarily reflect their social actions and choices: of course it can do, and I think Carl Wilson's piece was more interesting but that's because I'm predisposed to find 'class' more compelling than 'race' as an explanatory category.

Part of the problem seems to me that both pieces were reacting to a predominance of indie rock within rock criticism and writing, which is de facto 'mainstream' music crit. So what they might really be feeling is that music crit is drawing on too small a social pool (class), that music crit is unable to bring into focus its own social / class commitments, and that this is leading to an exaggeration of musical, critical and class problems. Will think about this and post more later maybe.

[dickmalone.livejournal.com]

I think that at the end of the day most rock critics think great music is going to come from either indie music or the kinds of people who make indie music; for all our endorsements of the mainstream or other kinds of cultural streams, we still essentially look to indie (which you could also call "art-rock") to be the site of truly great art.

[koganbot]

Is this true? Maybe I'm showing my age here, but I can't imagine that the average rock critic thinks that indie is the vanguard of great music in comparison to hip-hop and R&B and Latin and African and Asian and classical music. Rather, indie rock is the music that a lot of rock critics feel, and that they feel comfortable talking about. To my ears indie feels really defensive and inadequate, and is at least somewhat aware of its defensiveness and inadequacy (that Barr single I quoted from - and that I recommend - goes on to talk about itself like this, "The drums were fully shaky but the basses were tight/And the song is the single and the single sucks/It never sounded good; it always sounded bad").

Also, I get the feeling that rock critics are less comfortable with the critical focus on indie than indie fans are, that there's a split between critic and reader here. I was recently having an email convo w/ skyecaptain about just this thing, and I said "Being a What Thinger, I would suggest the opposite hypothesis, that indie is perpetually unsure of its status and value, is never convinced it's out far enough or challenging enough or superior enough, and of course is most vulnerable when being compared to black music, which always might be just farther gone. So when black music is perceived as 'pop,' that makes it safe (i.e., not a menace to indie's status as most superior music). But also, I think it's the rockcrit reader who wants indie exalted, while many rockcrits don't cooperate, though as more of the readers become writers on the ever-expanding Web, this dynamic may be changing)."

Response (decoded)

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

This is what I wrote back:

"think it's the rockcrit reader who wants indie exalted, while many rockcrits don't cooperate, though as more of the readers become writers on the ever-expanding Web, this dynamic may be changing."

This might be what I'm seeing since my own entrance to rockcrit via the internet c. 2001 -- too many rockcrits who remind me of me (as an indie reader).

I think that it's precisely this dynamic that Jess is bristling at in his post, and somewhat justifiably -- but as I said to dickmalone elsewhere, an obvious solution as a critic-not-"indie reader" would be not to let indie readers in to criticism (to which most of 'em would say good riddance anyway).

The premium on indie as a central focus comes from lots of voices in smaller venues, all multiplying rapidly on the internet, some reaching relatively large sizes (would include Stereogum here, probably wouldn't include Pitchfork, who belong in a kind of "side" category of indie 'zine, which is pretty much on its way out). But you can pretty easily ignore the vast majority these people (as you do -- especially to make your assumption about who's exalting whom -- and as I do, as most of these critics, including Jess, basically do anyway except when they're complaining about it) and find your true colleagues as you go along. If there's a breakdown at the moment, I think it's colleague to colleague; easier to make sweeping arguments when you pretend that Stereogum and any colleague-according-to-me have anything to say to one another (if Idolator and Stereogum have things to say to one another, that's probably Idolator's problem, and one that their editors will struggle with 4eva). But the truth is they don't, and don't really need to. EMP has maybe made some headway toward this at the organization level, but there needs to be something to let in more non-academic or non-"presentation" people.

Re: Response (decoded)

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

When I say "indie reader," I'm using it a bit too loosely/pejoratively to describe the legion creeps who complain about, say, missing indie darlings in Stylus's ridiculously premature albums of the year post in a "news item" about the site's closing. (Which Stereogum used as an excuse to post an early year-end list.)

Re: Response (decoded)

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

*the "news item" came from Stereogum about Stylus closing down

*also, only my first parag after the quoted one was in my response, the rest of it is all stuff I was thinking about recently. One thing the internet has maybe done is limit the amount of time your thoughts can gestate before they go public. I hope the writers of these pieces aren't "sick" of these issues by now -- Sasha has already called a moratorium on discussion (what's it been, like two weeks?).

Re: Response (decoded)

[dickmalone.livejournal.com]

For better or worse, no other genre's listeners are more concerned with the written literature on music than indie's, it's fair to say. (Hip-hop fans are very concerned with the history of the msuic, but not so much with the stuff written about the music.) And the music itself very much concerns itself with this literature, with ideas about what rock is or could be. A lot of musicians are drawing their cues from rock of the 60s and 70s, and if you're not familiar with not only the music but the culural context of the music, then the music itself is a lot more barren. And as a result, the majority of critics, of whatever genre, are essentially indie/art-rock fans who are exploring these other musics. That's why genre critics can get so frustrated at other people's addressing of their chosen fields, I think--it seems about as valuable as someone who grew up listening to bluegrass talking about Black Dice.

What do you think EMP should be doing?

Re: Response (decoded)

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

This is true, but it's just hard to reconcile my feeling that so many indie music listeners are reading it with the seeming reality that so many of them aren't thinking about it. There's an anti-intellectual streak in the tickerblog circuit that would probably terrify me if I paid attention to it more.

I think EMP is doing exactly what it can do at the moment (it's a place where people go to give presentations -- this is what it set out to do, and barring "branching out," I don't expect more from it). I just think that their specific format is too intimidating and closed-off to ever really spark the kind of drawing-in that a publication could. (If you don't consider yourself a writer already, it's almost certain that you won't consider yourself to be a presenter, but you can be a thinker who doesn't write (publicly) or present.

[dickmalone.livejournal.com]

But what you feel is what you ultimately think, in your heart of hearts, is the best thing out there, right? This is arguably why we all recode teenpop as something else, even if that something else is in line with what the artists themselves say they're shooting for--as stones-derived rock, or confessional singer-songwriter stuff, or producer showcases.

I was thinking more about where rock critics think great music could/will come from, not where it actually is coming from, and the discconnect between thinking great music's gonna come from indie and it actually coming from afrobeat or hip-hop or whatever is why rock critics are more uncertain/unsure about its status than fans. same for musicians, who are like critics more aware of the scope of modern music than indie fans are. I mean, why would Sasha even be writing this article if he didn't think that it should be producing great music like it did in the past? (Everyone's always willing to agree that indie produced great music in the past, which is one of the reasons I'm always so distrustful of people talking about how bad music is at any given moment.) As people have pointed out, he's sorta just castigating a branch of indie for doing exactly what it set out to do, and you wouldn't be concerned about that unless you thought it could/should be doing something better, right?

But you're right--if the history of the Pitchfork mailbag shows anything, it's that readers want more glorification of indie than the over-informed critics are ready to give them.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

This rings true - I keep getting the impression, from a lot of writing, that pop is fine to be enjoyed, but long-term respect and admiration are superior and given to indie rock.

The only real solution to this is in the hands of editors rather than writers - if some editor somewhere made the decision that their magazine, or section, or website, would break out of the indie-centric mould of all other generalist publications, and wouldn't relegate pop/dance/hip-hop/etc to token presences...but then, they wouldn't get as many readers. Pop may shift units of CDs but indie writing shifts units of magazines.

I just noticed that Pitchfork hasn't reviewed the new Britney album...how is this not a massive, massive failing on their part? Why on earth have they ignored one of the biggest albums of the year?

[koganbot]

Well, the Village Voice wasn't indiecentric under Xhuxk, that's for sure. I haven't looked at Rolling Stone for a couple of years; they're basically rockcentric, but they always reviewed major R&B and hip-hop albums that came along. But there are more and more specialty sites and mags, and those will often be leaning indie.

But Lex, how would you answer the questions I've been posing in the last couple of days? What specific difference would it make whether band X (fill in the band of your choice) chose to use "black" or "miscegenated" idioms as opposed to choosing some other idioms? Should your favorite German (or whatever) dance bands be putting more funk into their music? Less?

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I don't really know! I'm hesitant to say that any musicians from any genre "should" be doing anything; it's all so dependent on wha a particular artist's strengths are. Musical miscegenation can so often be awful...it's best when it's less appropriation and more recontextualisation, taking something from another culture and completely uprooting it and placing it in your own (eg Ricardo Villalobos using Chilean and Hungarian folk songs in minimal techno - the folk song is the basis of the track but the genre is v definitely minimal techno rather than Chilean/Hungarian folk; and Britney using a dubstep wobble on 'Freakshow', but 'Freakshow' is a pop track rather than a dubstep one).

The irony of all of these debates is that really I'd rather indie bands didn't have more "black" influences b/c that way lies pain (Red Hot Chili Peppers, I guess?). It's a real problem in music criticism, but musicians can do whatever they want as far as I'm concerned (if one musician gets it wrong someone else will have got it right, and if no one has got it right then enough people will have done enough other stuff right for me not to have to think about the wrong stuff - unless it actually becomes popular in which case the fault is with critics and/or the public).

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

There will be fairly extensive writing about the Britney album on Pitchfork quite soon Lex, in my column! I agree it should have been reviewed - I think most of the writers didn't like "Gimme More" much (and to be fair I thought it was good but not great) so not much was expected of the album and a review wasn't scheduled.

[koganbot]

But there is an aesthetic issue. SFJ says, "what I really wanted to hear, after a stretch of raucous sing-alongs, was a bit of swing, some empty space, and palpable bass frequencies - in other words, attributes of African-American popular music." In Kogan symbology, "space" means space for the intstruments to converse with one another rather than to simply support each other in a unified message - and it means call-and-response, so the audience interacts with the band, is part of the conversation, this interaction being built into the structure of the music. And "dance" means that audience members interact with each other. From Sasha's account, there certainly was audience involvement in the show - he called the crowd "noisily receptive" - but I think he feels that the interaction was too much a sing-along, not a back-and-forth. And he enjoyed an earlier Arcade Fire show a lot more, one where the band wasn't encircled onstage in curved screens and fluorescent lights.

Of course, call-and-response doesn't guarantee the quality of the calls and responses, and there are thousands of godawful online blogs and comment threads (which are written call-and-response, after all) that prove this. And most music is heard prerecorded anyway, so the question becomes how does the hearer use the music in his or her life. And just because a lot of indie music isn't in call-and-response form doesn't mean it's not in conversation with the world, with other pieces of music, etc. But you can see how, with my symbology, I think that the issues are more than just "Indie would sound better if it had more swing" and "white people and black people should pay attention to each other."

Btw, it's too simple to put this into terms of just black and white. Africa isn't the only source of call-and-response and audience-performer interaction, after all. And preacher-congregation interaction.

[dickmalone.livejournal.com]

I mean, if New Kids On The Block can do it, why can’t Sasha?

Hahaha, I love you Frank. Exactly!

I think if there were points you didn't connect they were between your basic endorsement of Sasha's and Carl's articles and your quick dismissal of them as "demolished" because of counter-examples, and lack of specificity. (I had a similar problem with my reaction to Sasha's piece, I think.) Why do you think indie vocalists hear something they can use in the dude from Modest Mouse rather than in Bel Biv Devoe?

(I can also sorta sympathize with Sasha's points about vocals, though I think he glossed over them too quickly and there's really a whole article there. Like, there's a kind of talk-singing that works really well for my voice, and a kind of talk-singing that sounds really embarassing and bad, and it's probably fair to say the good kind sounds like Fred Schneider and the bad kind sounds like James Brown. I'm a pretty white for a white guy. So maybe it's the fact that there are all these white influences that aren't being drawn on that's the problem? The essentially limited scope of indie's references?)

If I didn't have this weird blog writer's block right now I'd do something about the unackonwledged ubermensch reality of "bohemia" and the fact that indie is made by upper-middle-class kids but consumed by middle and lower-middle class kids.

[dickmalone.livejournal.com]

I really should've said "connections you didn't emphasize enough" rather than "points you didn't connect," because you definitely connected them.

[koganbot]

So maybe it's the fact that there are all these white influences that aren't being drawn on that's the problem?

Bingo! Well, add the word "either" after "drawn on." Carl approaches this at the end of his piece, when he's talking about how cock rock doesn't work for male indie singers. I don't think "cock rock" was ever that accurate a term for Jagger or Plant, but I understand the point: (some) indie vocalists not believing that the available models of vocal authority (sexual authority or other) are usable. I think it's pretty obvious why someone like me wouldn't be able to take himself seriously trying to sound like Snoop Dogg. I mean, sorry, but it's not like I'd remotely want to be Snoop Dogg. (Spoonie Gee or Kool Moe Dee, on the other hand...) But note that the Modest Mouse side project Ugly Casanova was really bluesy and really good.

But I don't know if Mick Jagger or Robert Plant or Bob Dylan or Lou Reed or Iggy Pop or Ian MacKaye or Mark E. Smith etc. etc. are usable as models any more, and it isn't that people wouldn't want to be those guys, but trying to sing like those guys now doesn't seem to be the way to do it. I say this from personal experience.

I'll bet that few indie kids have a limited scope of listening, of the music they like. It's that they're not hearing possibilities for their own voice. (Except in Neil Young's, it seems; bad choice, since he's someone inimitable.) And I think this is mostly a guy problem.

[dickmalone.livejournal.com]

I'm trying not to talk about Matthew Friedberger too much right now because I'm immersed in a project involving him and I don't know if my examples are actually relevent to anyone else, but since a lot of what I said above was implicitly referring to him, might as well bring him out directly. At the Fiery Furnaces' concert at Town Hall here in nyc, he came out for the encore and did one of their songs ("Chris Michaels," I think) exactly in the vocal style of Bob Dylan. It was some combination of hilarious and spooky, because it was dead-on and it worked. The song still totally worked with Dylan cadences. It's like that switch in the Jonathan Richman song "Velvet Underground" that I'm so obsessed with, where he switches from a Jonathan Richman rhythm to a VU rhythm and it's totally revelatory. I'll try and dig it out next week, unless Matthew Perpetua is reading this already and just wants to post it, because I'm pretty sure he has it.