RTP-area local music and culture

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

> the larger question, though, was equivocated to be:
> how much does "white content" dominate your long term
> canonical personal taste, rather than, "do you like
> the latest outkast?" i say it should be reframed as
> political rather than artistic. if you were to list
> what aesthetics were important or of value to the
> world, rather than you personally, what would that
> content look like?  that is, you can recognize
> coltrane is of great value and importance, without
> being a fan. otherwise we level the political to the
> aesthetic, and that's a fascist tendency, kinda like
> expecting indie rockers to be "progressive."
>
> 3

that's why merritt is not, in the end, a racist.  frere-jones picked
up on merritt's tendency to "overlook," shall we say, black music and
identified something dodgy about it.  he originally did this in a
critical climate where "rolling stone" included one album, marvin
gaye's "what's going on," in the top ten of its 100 greatest pop
records.  that's pretty fucked up.  in my first post, i said that
omitting black people from the canon of american popular music would
be like omitting t.s. eliot from an american literature survey.  i was
wrong.  it would be like ditching the fucking puritans.  black music
is foundational.

merritt recognizes his own prejudice; it's not unexamined.  he
explains that black popular music has been marked by its interest in
rhythm, an interest he does not share.  therefore, he avoids listening
to it.  that's reasonable, right?  unfortunately, he takes the next
step and takes a big old wet shit all over whole categories of black
music.  the result: he looks, but is not, dodgy.

frere-jones didn't know all of that when he trashed merritt.  he was
reacting like i do at parties where hipsters insouciantly refuse to
dance to funk because they want to hear postpunk.  well, where the
fuck do you think postpunk got its rhythm, heisenberg?  (to the
hipsters' credit, this happens less often than it used to.)

so, it wasn't an argument about how many black songs you have on your
ipod.  it was about how you regard black music, in its many
iterations, canonically.  merritt is not personally interested in what
black music has to offer, from an aesthetic standpoint, but seems
aware of its importance -- and troubled role, in the case of some hip
hop -- in the wider world.  he just isn't very articulate.

frere-jones, on the other hand, is articulate as all hell, and twice
as snarky.  like other critics of his generation, he believes that the
marginalization of popular music by rock critics, in favor of a white
male canon, has overtones that go beyond the aesthetic sphere.  the
willing dismissal of all but select examples of country, r&b, funk,
hip hop, and disco implicates the rock critic on the level of class,
race, gender, and sexuality.  those are political categories.

in the end, it may be silly to think that canons of popular culture
have any bearing on politics.  i mean, whatever.  i despise stephin
merritt and his music, and maybe there's a political dimension to my
feeling (i sort of doubt it).  but that doesn't mean that music
critics are wrong to redress discrimination in their field.  and,
after decades of (un)ironically mulleted guitar heroes claiming that
"crap has a silent 'c'" and burning disco records, i'm fucking glad
that somebody took the time.

r




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