#182 - Feel the Rhythm
Maybe a better way of getting at what Sasha Frere-Jones is exploring in his New Yorker article, "A Paler Shade of White," is not to accuse indie-rock of sidestepping questions of blackness and race, but rather to ask what indie-rock's particular relationship to blackness and race is.
It's not that the musical miscegenation that Frere-Jones idealizes -- the conversations, borrowings, stealings, rip-offs, love-ins across the racial line -- has vanished. The question is on what terms does it continue, ethically, aesthetically, politically, economically?
20 October 2007