RTP-area local music and culture

["rick sawyer" <rickbang AT gmail.com>]

i'm not sure why so many people give a shit about the crappy music
tastes of a self-important asshole whose brief popularity on college
radio finally seems to be petering out, due, in part, to his laughably
limited vocal range, but mostly to his slavish devotion to Absolute
Value and Genuine Melody.  but anyway.

the slate article was frankly irresponsible, as were the original blog
posts.  i mean it was an article in an edited, online journal
responding to _posts on blogs_!  only arrianna huffington or our own
blighted "independent" put such stock in the so-called blogosphere.

be that as it may, sasha frere-jones got it wrong in the first place.
in a 2004 interview with fellow crappy music zealot sufjan stevens,
merritt dissed a bunch of bands frere-jones likes.  frere-jones
interpreted it to rock chauvinism, which was his hobbyhorse at the
time.  he went on to notice merritt boosting a bunch of crappy white
rock bands in the new yrok times, and frere-jones cracked wise on his
blog, calling merritt a "cracker," which he is not.

flash forward to 2006, frere-jones reacted to jessica hopper's claims
that merritt was a racist for his appreciation of "song of the south,"
a claim that had no basis and which hopper retracted.  frere-jones
noticed that merritt published a list of the best pop songs of the
past century, a tune for each year. he snarked about merritt's
exclusion of black artists (who occupy a dismal 11 slots among the 100
songs), again, on his blog.  frere-jones's problem with merritt's list
also stems from his dislike of the rock canon.  as merritt's list of
100 songs seems to be a canon on its own right, the exclusion of black
artists seems odd, like omitting toni morrison from an american
literature class.  except, in the context of american popular music,
omitting black people is rather more like omitting t.s. eliot.

what frere-jones missed is that merritt was constructing his own
anti-canonical canon.  his extremely square, and, admittedly white
(merritt once quipped that his music "could be listened to by the ku
klux klan"), aesthetic is better borne out by the examples he cites.
george gershwin, john cage, steven sondheim, are far more indicative
of his tastes than count basie, marvin gaye, and spoonie g.  but his
list is, nonetheless, anti-rock.  the rolling stones aren't there; the
stooges aren't there; the sex pistols aren't there.  it's a different
way to understand the history of pop music that accords with merritt's
innocuous and precious aesthetic.

the problem isn't so much that merritt "hates hip hop" or that he
"hates beyonce."  it's that the standard-bearers of black music, from
john coltrane to sly stone; from gil scott-heron to outkast, hold no
appeal for him.  worse, because he is such an asshole, he is openly
dismissive of their work.

but that doesn't make him a "rockist" (or a racist) snob.  it just
makes him an idiot.  perhaps if merritt's tastes were a little
broader, his music wouldn't sound so "boring, repetitive, and
derivative."  but, you like what you like, i guess.

rick!


On 5/12/06, grady <grady AT ibiblio.org> wrote:
> Probably already discussed to death on that other, hipper music list
> you're all on, but it's Friday and I got precious little to do at work
> at present:
>
> http://www.slate.com/id/2141421/
>
> Steve Albini sez:
> http://www.electrical.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=223811#223811
>
> Jessica Hopper claims that it's not Stephin's embrace of "Zippity Doo
> Dah" *nor* his distaste for Beyonce (um, OK), but rather his "unconcern
> for the last 50 years of black music"  (
> http://tiny.abstractdynamics.org/archives/007762.html  ) that calls his
> racial politics into question.  (Simon Reynolds elucidates further here:
>
> http://blissout.blogspot.com/2006_05_01_blissout_archive.html#114668681783360454
>   )
>
> So: how many records by artists of races other than one's own does one
> have to own/listen to in order to escape charges of racism? And does one
> have to keep the collection current? I mean, a majority of the black
> people in my record collection are either dead or at least really old, I
> suspect, though I haven't exactly done a census.
>
> I find a lot of the current hip-hop that I'm exposed to, via TV & radio,
> to be pretty boring, repetitive, and derivative. Those exact same
> adjectives could also be used to describe my feelings about most music
> of most other genres as well, though. Go figure. Pop culture can be
> boring. Who'd a thunk it? I also know that there's a tiny subset of
> current hip-hop that's consistently pushing the envelope & is every bit
> as exciting, presumably, as the tiny subset of indie-rock that's still
> interesting. I don't really buy much/any indie-rock anymore, either. The
> last 3 CDs I bought were that new Candi Staton (meme collision: the best
> song on it was written by Will Oldham), that Pyramid album from last
> year, and Muddy Waters' "Hard Again." (the half-dozen before that were
> either local [indie-rock] bands or the Rhino Doo-Wop and Girl Groups box
> sets, depending on how you count to six).
>
> So I may not be a racist, but rather just a terminal square? Whatever
> happened to just gleefully mocking peoples' musical tastes themselves?
>
> Ross
> -- ch-scene: the list that mirrors alt.music.chapel-hill --
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/ch-scene