a grammar

more hacking through “indie” and criticism and genre — TWO, with apologies

Since that last post, I’ve been asked whether I think the indie bent of middlebrow music critics is actually A Bad Thing. Part of what I’m trying to do here, of course, is reject the terms of that question; I think the question itself is flawed. Beyond that, I’d give it a qualified “yes,” though maybe not for the reasons you’d think. My reasons for saying yes have less to do with indie music itself and more to do with the “too much consensus” Chuck Eddy is pointing at; as an avid reader of middlebrow criticism, I’d rather it didn’t get to the point where we’re all telling one another things we already know. And since I think middlebrow, analytical criticism is an interesting thing in and of itself — i.e., it’s a medium I choose to follow because I like it, not because it’s important — I’d love to see it exercised on as many corners of the music world as possible.

Back to the terms of the question, though. Maura Johnston ends her Pazz & Jop essay with the following quote, from Jay-Z.

“All these ways we classify things as r&b and hip-hop and rock … It’s bullshit. It’s all music. If you put yourself in that box, then you won’t be able to hear that it’s all music at its soul. When people say stuff like, ‘Oh, that’s soft rock. I don’t listen to that,’ I find that elitist. It’s music-racist.”

Now one of the many reasons Maura’s well-loved as a critic — apart from just being really nice and likable — is that she has the weirdly rare skill of talking about different types of music without always putting them in contention with one another. You wouldn’t think that would be a big deal, but apparently a lot of critics have a hard time liking rap singles and pop singles and indie tunes and whatever without pitting them against one another, making them warring factions the critic is mediating between. So of course it’d be Maura who’s willing to call into question our notions of genre. What’s so perfect about deploying that quote is that it’s not even questioning the notion for any particular genre’s benefit. Placing it next to a P&J poll that’s perceived as overly indie might suggests that critics need to break out of their insularity and listen to more things. But then it’s coming from someone whose anti-genre battles might have more to do with going to Grizzly Bear shows and having his sister-in-law cover Dirty Projectors. There’d seem to be some faith here that loosening the reins of genre benefits everyone, in all directions — it makes music better and lets more people enjoy more different kinds of it.

Now if you’re reading this post, I would bet that the forms of “music racism” you started out most familiar with involved older white people who felt that new popular music was trashy and frivolous and beneath them, or maybe white rock fans of all ages who casually toss aside rap and r&b as uniformly insipid. And yes, you can find both of those anywhere.

The “music racism” I see in my neck of the woods — woods populated by cranky, well-informed music critics who do not wish to be boring — is different, of course, and more complex. It mostly involves looking at all music through the lenses of “Near” and “Far.” The category of Near tends to involve a lot of the traits associated with indie: Near is “white,” suburban, middle-class, well-behaved, college-educated, music-geeky, bourgeois, has a familiar vocabulary, goes to the same bars you do — i.e., it’s filled with people who look and live a lot like the speaker. The speaker typically shares many (if not all) of these traits. The category of Far is just Near’s shadow. Far can be black, “urban,” popular, rowdy, streetwise, working-class, coming from different streams of canonical music history than the speaker, hanging out in bars and clubs the speaker hasn’t already been bored with since college. Far can be anything, really, so long as it’s not Near. And in my neck of the woods, Far is always prized — or at least Far has a rhetorical edge in any argument. I mean, at least it’s not Near.

I’ve talked before about how this winds up having mildly sinister implications when it comes to race. What’s more problematic is that this organization — which needn’t inherently be a bad thing — can make it damnably difficult to actually talk about music for a change. This is part of what Maura seems to be pointing to with that essay: the fact that thinking too strictly along categorical lines can actually blind you to what’s happening in music, in all sorts of different directions.

And yet this kind of thinking is just everywhere, at least in my vicinity. There is at least one critic in my circles who I know would rep for Shakira and act like Of Montreal constituted some kind of aural crime against humanity, even though any objective accounting would have to concede that the song “She Wolf” could quite plausibly have been made by either artist. I posted a quote earlier in which someone calls it very “predictable” that indie websites praise “indie-approved” hip-hop like Jay-Z and Outkast — in other words, instead of saying “indie fans are enjoying a couple hip-hop artists,” this person prefers to reassign the artists themselves and recategorize their music as “indie-approved.” I can recall having a long, stupid message-board argument with someone about whether a really-quite-strange Final Fantasy album was just too indie/”white” (aka “Near”), which argument meant sitting around talking about all these vague things the album allegedly had in common with other records, rather than actually digging into the many concrete things that actually made it different and interesting — i.e., it meant arguing about genre rather than listening to the music itself. There are things like the Solange cover of Dirty Projectors Maura’s talking about, met by many people as if some unprecedented genre collision was going on, even though the music itself functioned fairly similarly in both versions — whatever “near” versus “far” you wanted to project onto it was on some level imaginary. There are things like this project that’s been floating around Tumblr — Wu-Tang acapellas over beats made out of Beatles songs. Some people receive this as if it’s surprising or counterintuitive, and that surprise seems based on issues of genre and identity: the Beatles are categorized as old, white, pop/rock, and polite, whereas Wu-Tang are categorized as young, black, hip-hop, and edgy. And this is crazy, because loads of sample-based hip-hop already constructs its beats from sources of the Beatles’ vintage, from pop to funk to jazz to anything else; the Beatles’ later music spans a range of instruments and pop arrangements and r&b licks that’s not particularly different from a hip-hop crate-digger’s assortment of some strings from here, some bass from there, a horn from over there. (The only thing different here is that you actually recognize the samples.) I’ve actually had someone argue with me that there could not possibly be any real connection between the Smiths and Motown — despite, you know, the bass, or the way Johnny Marr’s guitar lines all sound like soul horn charts, or the general history of rock music — for reasons that came down, so far as I could tell, to this person’s inability to imagine retirement-age black people at a Smiths show.

In other words, the “Near” and “Far” of contemporary talking-about-music are an intense and practically catastrophic distraction from actually being able to identify what the fuck is going on in the music you’re listening to in the first place, something that bugs me whether I’m reading/talking about indie or pop or hip-hop or dance music or just anything, ever. And this is why, even though I agree that the middlebrow-critic love of indie can be A Bad Thing, I’m far more interested in the ways we talk about it, and that ways that discussion informs people’s perception of music, and the results all that has. Sometimes it’s a good thing: I wrote a long article last year about how this argument within indie has and might continue to make the music itself interesting. But whenever I’m looking at a message board or comments box or reading reviews that seem enmeshed in this stuff, I get to thinking it has the makings of a catastrophe — the makings of a world where instead of having most critics talk about indie, you get all critics talking about how or whether any given piece of music relates to Near and Far.

One last post on indie coming to finish out this argument… .