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Categorically Imperative: The DORF Matrix @ NPR
October 13th, 2009
A couple years ago I wrote a post decrying the alabaster nature of some best-of lists for 2007 called “Didn’t Black People Make Any Great Music This Year?”. Because I am just a prescient kind of guy and years ahead of the mainstream media, I included this bit:
“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?”
Jody Rosen, a music critic at Slate has an interesting blog post from yesterday about this very issue called “The DORF Matrix: Towards a Theory of NPR’s Taste in Black Music”.
In August, National Public Radio’s flagship music program All Songs Considered published “The Best Music of 2009 (So Far),” a rundown of the top 30 songs and albums of the year-to-date as voted by the show’s listeners.
The results of the survey suggest that the All Songs Considered audience has a fuzzy understanding of the word “all.” “The Best Music of 2009 (So Far)” consists almost entirely of indie-rockers: acts like The Decemberists, Wilco, Grizzly Bear, Neko Case, Andrew Bird, Regina Spektor, and Animal Collective, the Brooklyn art-rock group that took the top spot in both the best songs and best albums tallies. On the Best Songs list, there are no songs that cracked the Top 40 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts, and none by African-American performers. Two black artists, Danger Mouse and Mos Def, made the Best Albums list, at numbers 20 and 23, respectively.
None of this is a surprise, of course. NPR’s audience skews white and college-educated; so does Animal Collective’s fan-base. In matters of musical taste, everyone has a God-given right to provincialism and conservatism, even those NPR listeners who consider themselves cosmopolitan and liberal. The numbers, of course, tell a different story. The NPR list leans not just white, but male—dudes with beards and guitars. So far in 2009, the No. 1 song on the Billboard charts has been by a black or female artist—or by groups featuring both blacks and whites or men and women—a total of 41 out of 42 weeks. (The exception is the current No. 1 hit, “Down,” a collaboration between an Anglo-Asian R & B singer, Jay Sean, and an African-American rapper, Lil Wayne.) Who are the progressives again—the public radio crowd or the Top 40 great unwashed?
The DORF Matrix is a series of categories that black musicians featured on NPR generally fall into: Dead Old Retro Foreign.
NPR’s commitment to DORF can be neatly tracked by examining the archives of its “Song of the Day” feature, which highlights a new song every weekday. To date in 2009, black artists have been chosen for the “Song of the Day” no less than 25 times, and these comprise a nearly unbroken sequence of DORFiness: Booker T. (O,R), Little Jackie (R), Oumou Sangare (F), and so on. The Malian singer-songwriter Rokia Traoré would appear to be a straight (F), but the Traoré “Song of the Day” selection, a version of the Gershwins’ “The Man I Love,” earns her a bonus (R). Similarly, although Finale, an obscure rapper from Detroit, is, as of this writing, alive, he slips onto the DORF Matrix as a stealth (D): His “Song of the Day” entry “Heat” features a beat by the late producer J Dilla, to whom the track pays tribute.
At the end of his post, Rosen asks, “What are other media outlets where DORF presides? What is the DORFiest record ever made? Who is the ultimate DORF icon?” Well, this site is fairly DORFy but at least I don’t give blanket coverage to white soul revivalists from the U.K.
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