The White Noise Supremacy
As a bit of a follow-up to my post on the alabaster nature of some best-of lists, I want to mention that earlier this week, The Dulcinea sent me a copy of Lester Bangs' "The White Noise Supremacists (PDF)". It's a look at racism in the punk scene of the late 1970s. It's a good read and I'll never listen The Velvet Underground in the same way again after having read the following quote by Nico:
"I made a mistake. I said in Melody Maker to some interviewer that I didn't like negroes. That's all. They took it so personally . . .although it's a whole different race. I mean, Bob Marley doesn't resemble a negro, does he? ... He's an archetype of Jamaican ... but with the features like white people. I don't like the features. They're so much like animals.... it's cannibals, no?"
Remember last year when Stephen Merritt of The Magnetic Fields had accusations of racism hurled at him? A dislike of contemporary hip-hop didn't make him a racist just as having a best-of-2007 list of all or nearly all white indie rockers doesn't make anyone a racist either. Two things spring to mind here:
1) Hip-hop is unfairly used as a stand-in to represent all contemporary African-American culture by marketers and commercial forces.
2) Indie rock is defined by its standing outside of big business and mainstream music commercial culture.
Just the term "indie rock" almost stifles discussion of it as something that's sold to people and having a culture around it which did not arise in a vacuum. If you agree with #1 above, you'll probably also agree that it's fair to ask why the media says this one manifestation of African-American culture gets equated with the larger milieu. I suspect that, whatever the answer may be, it ties into why, as Carl Wilson of Slate says, indie rock gets "elite status and media sway".
I discovered what looks to be a very interesting book called White Boys, White Noise: Masculinities And 1980s Indie Guitar Rock by Matthew Bannister. I want to end with some extensive quoting from the text.
...we...might take another look at the three shy, private boy stars [Stipe, Mould, Westerberg] listed above and realize that they're all boys, and that at least two of them are, to varying degrees, closet cases. And that's precisely what gets elided in an account like this – that in the fantasy about meeting in this private, utopic space, we become blind to the fact that certain people are still getting more access than other. And that a certain identity is still privileged, and, surprise, it's not middle-class girls. For all its identification with idealistically leftist communities, the implicit message of the 80s scene was that only straight white boys make music. (Stadler, 1995)
A further point here is the fairly strong correlation between indie and educational institutions, especially universities, important as venues, as meeting places for future bands and for their radio stations and newspapers...Indie practitioners could claim some male authenticity in indie's 'local' and 'grassroots' modes of production and distribution, but this locality was not particularly reflected in a corresponding diversity of influences and sounds.
White males dominate indie personnel (Cohen, 1997).
To sum up indie attitudes to ethnicity, there seems to be a double sense of blackness as somehow exceptional – on the one hand, because it is too commercial, commodified and feminised (basically the mass culture critique) but on the other, because it is too violent, threatening and masculine (the feminist critique). Both are constructed around a rejection or objectification of blackness as body, instinct or id. I argued that purity is a significant criterion for indie guitar rock and that ethnicity, broadly speaking, functions as a type of 'impurity' which the genre defines itself against. The problem with indie, as I see it, is that it rejected 'blackness' (or its construction thereof), when it should have rejected its accompanying ideological baggage – of blackness as a 'pure' folk culture.
It's interesting to work your way forward from the late 70s starting with Bangs' screed, followed by Bannister's book, and then up to present day with Sasha Frere-Jones' "A Paler Shade of White" and Wilson's retort and see the omnipresent themes of race and gender emerge.
"I made a mistake. I said in Melody Maker to some interviewer that I didn't like negroes. That's all. They took it so personally . . .although it's a whole different race. I mean, Bob Marley doesn't resemble a negro, does he? ... He's an archetype of Jamaican ... but with the features like white people. I don't like the features. They're so much like animals.... it's cannibals, no?"
Remember last year when Stephen Merritt of The Magnetic Fields had accusations of racism hurled at him? A dislike of contemporary hip-hop didn't make him a racist just as having a best-of-2007 list of all or nearly all white indie rockers doesn't make anyone a racist either. Two things spring to mind here:
1) Hip-hop is unfairly used as a stand-in to represent all contemporary African-American culture by marketers and commercial forces.
2) Indie rock is defined by its standing outside of big business and mainstream music commercial culture.
Just the term "indie rock" almost stifles discussion of it as something that's sold to people and having a culture around it which did not arise in a vacuum. If you agree with #1 above, you'll probably also agree that it's fair to ask why the media says this one manifestation of African-American culture gets equated with the larger milieu. I suspect that, whatever the answer may be, it ties into why, as Carl Wilson of Slate says, indie rock gets "elite status and media sway".
I discovered what looks to be a very interesting book called White Boys, White Noise: Masculinities And 1980s Indie Guitar Rock by Matthew Bannister. I want to end with some extensive quoting from the text.
...we...might take another look at the three shy, private boy stars [Stipe, Mould, Westerberg] listed above and realize that they're all boys, and that at least two of them are, to varying degrees, closet cases. And that's precisely what gets elided in an account like this – that in the fantasy about meeting in this private, utopic space, we become blind to the fact that certain people are still getting more access than other. And that a certain identity is still privileged, and, surprise, it's not middle-class girls. For all its identification with idealistically leftist communities, the implicit message of the 80s scene was that only straight white boys make music. (Stadler, 1995)
A further point here is the fairly strong correlation between indie and educational institutions, especially universities, important as venues, as meeting places for future bands and for their radio stations and newspapers...Indie practitioners could claim some male authenticity in indie's 'local' and 'grassroots' modes of production and distribution, but this locality was not particularly reflected in a corresponding diversity of influences and sounds.
White males dominate indie personnel (Cohen, 1997).
To sum up indie attitudes to ethnicity, there seems to be a double sense of blackness as somehow exceptional – on the one hand, because it is too commercial, commodified and feminised (basically the mass culture critique) but on the other, because it is too violent, threatening and masculine (the feminist critique). Both are constructed around a rejection or objectification of blackness as body, instinct or id. I argued that purity is a significant criterion for indie guitar rock and that ethnicity, broadly speaking, functions as a type of 'impurity' which the genre defines itself against. The problem with indie, as I see it, is that it rejected 'blackness' (or its construction thereof), when it should have rejected its accompanying ideological baggage – of blackness as a 'pure' folk culture.
It's interesting to work your way forward from the late 70s starting with Bangs' screed, followed by Bannister's book, and then up to present day with Sasha Frere-Jones' "A Paler Shade of White" and Wilson's retort and see the omnipresent themes of race and gender emerge.
posted by Palmer at 11:09 AM
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