Didn't Black People Make Any Great Music This Year?

December 6th, 2007

Take a look at these photos:

These are the bands that Madison music blog Muzzle of Bees named as having released the 30 best albums of 2007. (They’re listed in ascending order.) Everyone on this list has very little melanin in their skin and I don’t think there are any epicanthal folds either. Now, head over to The Daily Page and check out the best releases of this year as determined by B-Side Records. Although I am not going to post photos, I checked out who these people are. Of that list, only Sharon Jones and Jose Gonzalez appear to be non-white, non-European ancestored types. Looking at the two lists combined, only about 3% of the bands have a person of color in them. If you look at the total number of people involved, I’m sure that percentage would, like the speed of light nearing an event horizon, approach 0. (Relatively speaking, of course.)

Why is this?

Understand that I’m not accusing anyone of racism. Nor am I trying to impugn anyone’s taste in music – De gustibus non est disputandum. And these lists represent only a handful of people (the list from Alex Fulton of B-Side was “fairly representative” of the store’s employees as a whole). This reminds me of my recent viewing of the BBC documentary Seven Ages of Rock. It started out with Jimi Hendrix and the only other black person you saw throughout the other 6 episodes was Don Letts, a filmmaker who did a documentary on The Clash.

I suppose that all of this just goes to show what’s been obvious all along – rock music is white. Were no great blues, jazz, rap, hip-hop, zydeco, etc. albums released this year? Did black people not make any great music in 2007? (I do believe there was one rap album on the B-Side list but the group consists of all whites.) Instead the lists above are dominated by white people because they’re by people who listen mostly to indie rock. Living Colour were wrong when they proclaimed that Elvis was dead.

I’ve been dating a bi-racial woman for about 3 years now and this has certainly made me much more aware of race in little ways, in our day-to-day lives. This is a large part of the reason why I have no tolerance for times when people say that Summerfest can only be improved with the addition of more indie rock or when people whine that Madison just doesn’t have the right indie rock bands. It gets old hearing young white people complaining about how there just isn’t enough music around by other young white people when it’s everywhere.

Sasha Frere-Jones set off a firestorm in the indie rock world with his piece “A Paler Shade of White”. Frere-Jones doesn’t merely cite indie rock as lacking the influences of black musical genres, but he also criticizes it for this paucity. After noting the lack of swing in the music of Arcade Fire, he says, “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.” It’s an interesting and provocative piece so I highly recommend you read it. After I did so, I felt that it had some good insights but was also a mess. For instance, in asking why rock and roll became racially re-sorted (something itself open to debate), Frere-Jones basically sticks to indie rock as being representative of all R&R today. It’s unfair to contrast “underground” music today to bands of yore such as The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin, as he does. Perhaps a comparison of those bands of yore to the White Stripes is more accurate.

My issues with differentiating one sub-grenre from a larger genre aside, F-J does offer some explanations for how black music or, in his view, syncopated rhythms, was expelled from indie rock. To start there was Steve West, Pavement’s second drummer. According to F-J, West lacked the swing that his predecessor Gary Young had but it was West’s contributions which were added to the indie rock template that Pavement devised and was subsequently adopted. Then, we are told, bands like the Flaming Lips and Wilco looked back to psychedelia and Gram Parson’s country rock with yet others finding inspiration in Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys. Add to this the rise of hip-hop and rap, especially in the form of Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, in an era when sampling and imitating could cost you dearly in the pocket and you have indie rock with precious little roll.

Carl Wilson responded to F-J at Slate with his “The Trouble With Indie Rock”. In addition to specific refutations of F-J’s piece, Wilson also brings in the issue of class, with this country’s ever-widening gap between rich (predominantly white) and poor (predominantly black).

…picture indie musicians and fans as well-off “hipsters” busily gentrifying neighborhoods, but compared to previous post-punk generations, the particular kind of indie rock Frere-Jones complains about is more blatantly upper-middle class and liberal-arts-college-based, and less self-aware or politicized about it.

With its true spiritual center in Richard Florida-lauded “creative” college towns such as Portland, Ore., this is the music of young “knowledge workers” in training, and that has sonic consequences: Rather than body-centered, it is bookish and nerdy; rather than being instrumentally or vocally virtuosic, it shows off its chops via its range of allusions and high concepts with the kind of fluency both postmodern pop culture and higher education teach its listeners to admire.

When not offering a rejoinder specifically to F-J, Wilson makes the statement which most resonated with me and my attitudes towards indie rock:

The elite status and media sway that indie rock enjoys, disproportionate to its popularity, is one reason the cultural politics of indie musicians and fans require discussion in the first
place…

If you happen to think that the quality of indie rock is directly proportional to the extent that it draws upon black music, that’s fine with me. I am certainly in no position to argue that the genre must have swing to be good as I’m a huge fan of a different shade of rock that is probably even whiter than indie – prog. Regardless of the amount of syncopation in indie rock, it is the “elite status and media sway” of it that bugs me the most.

It’s not that any one of the individuals pictured above is bad nor is it that the fact they’ve white skin is particularly interesting. Instead it’s that these individuals taken in aggregate and given “elite status and media sway” that is the problem. In a certain way, I’m thankful I’m not black and living here in Madison. This is because it seems that this town offers so very little to folks of color culturally, especially musically. Lots of indie rock fans complain about the Madison music scene which is dominated by their music of choice so I can only imagine how frustrating it must be for a young black person here to try and find, say, a hip-hop scene. The whole rigmarole concerning the Club Majestic threw this into sharp relief.

Look at this week’s Isthmus. Youssou N’Dour plays tonight, the Mt. Zion Gospel Choir performs this weekend which also holds the Homegrown Hip-Hop Festival in store. Yet Isthmus music writers choose to tell us about white men. The piece by Rich Albertoni about Jonathan Coulton generously gives about 5 sentences over to discussing the man’s music with the rest being about the novelty of Coulton having promoted himself via the Internet instead of with a record label at his side. I guess the guy has a good blog. Tom Laskin tells us about how Willy Porter, Pat MacDonald, and Robbie Fulks will be the first three guests on a new WPT music program similar to Austin City Limits. Black musicians are web only.

EDIT: I received an e-mail from Kristian Knutsen of The Daily Page regarding the above paragraph which I have struck out. He noted that last week’s issue of Isthmus covered Otis Redding, Sones de Mexico, Youssou N’Dour, and Bettye LaVette. And so I stand corrected and wish to apologize to Isthmus staff and readers for, as Knutsen said, not considering a larger context, i.e. – more than 1 issue. I still think Albertoni spending all of 5 sentences on Coulton’s music was bollocks, though.

I don’t have last week’s issue but I’ve no reason to doubt what Knutsen said. I do, however, have the 23 November issue and I’m staring at it right now. (Page 16, to be precise.) An article on the MSO on page 17 aside, the music section gives space to the following musos:

People of color get featured every other week? I honestly don’t know as more issues would have to be perused in order to discern a general pattern. But I’ll bet a dollar to a doughnut the ones from 23 November and this week’s which feature only white musicians are not aberrations. In his e-mail, Knutsen wrote, “I won’t explain how these things are decided”. Fair enough. It’s really none of my business and I’m sure it’s a convoluted tale. But the hows of the Isthmus editorial process aren’t as important as what actually appears on its pages.

Take my observations for what they are. I don’t believe that any of the music writers and editors at Isthmus are using malice to shape what gets into print. If Tom Laskin does a best of 2007 piece and he lists Arcade Fire, Iron and Wine, The New Pornographers, etc., that won’t make him a bad person. But it will add another voice to the stentorian indie rock chorus which is virtually all white and has elite status and media sway, as Wilson said above.

Take a look at this week’s All Songs Considered podcast – 2007: The Year in Review. Tom Moon chose the only album by a person of color and that album is a compilation whose most recent songs are 30 years old. Were all songs truly considered?

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