those cats at the new yorker really have their finger on the pulse of the nation (not unlike a certain mr. walalce...)
A Paler Shade of White
How indie rock lost its soul. (...)
There??s no point in faulting Arcade Fire for what it doesn??t do; what??s missing from the band??s musical DNA is missing from dozens of other popular and accomplished rock bands?? as well??most of them less entertaining than Arcade Fire. I??ve spent the past decade wondering why rock and roll, the most miscegenated popular music ever to have existed, underwent a racial re-sorting in the nineteen-nineties. Why did so many white rock bands retreat from the ecstatic singing and intense, voicelike guitar tones of the blues, the heavy African downbeat, and the elaborate showmanship that characterized black music of the mid-twentieth century? These are the volatile elements that launched rock and roll, in the nineteen-fifties, when Elvis Presley stole the world away from Pat Boone and moved popular music from the head to the hips.
It??s difficult to talk about the racial pedigree of American pop music without being accused of reductionism, essentialism, or worse, and such suspicion is often warranted. In the case of many popular genres, the respective contributions of white and black musical traditions are nearly impossible to measure. In the nineteen-twenties, folk music was being recorded for the first time, and it was not always clear where the songs??passed from generation to generation and place to place??had come from. The cadence of African slave hollers shaped the rising and falling patterns of blues singing, but there is still debate about the origins of the genre??s basic chord structure??I-IV-V??and how that progression became associated with a singing style on plantations and in Southern prisons. In 1952, the record collector Harry Smith released ??Anthology of American Folk Music,? a highly regarded compilation (and, later, a source for Bob Dylan), which showed that white ??country? performers and black ??blues? artists had recorded similar material in the nineteen-twenties and thirties, singing about common legends, such as ??Stackalee,? over similar chord progressions. Even the call-and-response singing that is integral to many African-American church services may have been brought to America by illiterate Scottish immigrants who learned Scripture by singing it back to the pastor as he read it to them.
(...)
The most important reason for the decline of musical miscegenation, however, is social progress. Black musicians are now as visible and as influential as white ones. They are granted the same media coverage, recording contracts, and concert bookings, a development that the Internet, along with dozens of new magazines and cable shows devoted to celebrities, has abetted by keeping pop stars constantly in the public eye. Even unheralded musicians don??t need Led Zeppelin to bring their songs to the masses anymore: an obscure artist can find an audience simply by posting an MP3 on MySpace. The Internet, by democratizing access to music??anybody, anywhere can post or download a song on MySpace??has also made individual genres less significant. Pop music is no longer made of just a few musical traditions; it??s a profusion of strands, most of which don??t intersect, except, perhaps, when listeners click ??shuffle? on their iPods. Last month, in the Times, the white folk rocker Devendra Banhart declared his admiration for R. Kelly??s new R. & B. album ??Double Up.? Thirty years ago, Banhart might have attempted to imitate R. Kelly??s perverse and feather-light soul. Now he??s just a fan. The uneasy, and sometimes inappropriate, borrowings and imitations that set rock and roll in motion gave popular music a heat and an intensity that can??t be duplicated today, and the loss isn??t just musical; it??s also about risk. Rock and roll was never a synonym for a polite handshake. If you??ve forgotten where the term came from, look it up. There??s a reason the lights were off.
more post-modern cultural wankery, etc etc etc... yawn.
