Click
here to listen to clips Arcade Fire claim show they "steal quite blatantly
from black people"
There’s a feud going on between the New Yorker music critic Sasha
Frere-Jones and most of the world’s indie bands. It might not be Ernest
Hemingway v William Saroyan, or even the catfight between Lily Allen and
Cheryl Cole, but it is causing a furore over allegations of racism. In a
feature published last month entitled A Paler Shade of White,
Frere-Jones recalled an Arcade Fire show, which he said was enjoyable, but
not exactly funky. “Why did so many white rock bands retreat from the
ecstatic singing and intense, voice-like guitar tones of the blues, the
heavy African downbeat . . . that characterised black music of the mid-20th
century?” he asked.
The question seems anachronistic, and oddly myopic, and, like an inverted Alf
Garnett, he has unsurprisingly caused instant offence. Playboy wrote:
“Frere-Jones has demonstrated himself every bit the racist for buying into
this pathetically regressive set of ideas.” The more gracious Arcade Fire
sent the writer an MP3 of chunks of their music to prove that they “steal
quite blatantly from black people”.
Frere-Jones, a sharp writer and an authority on hip-hop, continued his article
by asking: “How did rhythm come to be discounted in an art form that was
born as a celebration of rhythm’s possibilities?” Though his feature could
certainly start heated pub conversations, to point the finger at folk and
country-derived alternative rock, and to equate black music with rhythm,
seem strangely sixth-form for a writer of his ability.
This writer, though, has form. In 2004 the Magnetic Fields’ fey but famously
provocative singer Stephen Merritt picked seven songs for a playlist in The
New York Times. None was by a black artist, which led Frere-Jones to
label the singer “Southern Strategy Merritt” on his blog, a Nixon-era
reference that amounted to calling Merritt a racist.
This spat continued in the virtual world and no one took much notice until
Merritt appeared on a panel at the Experience Music Project’s annual pop
conference in Seattle and called Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah, from Disney’s
racially stereotypical film Song of the South, a “great song”.
Jessica Hopper, of the Chicago Reader, stormed out over what she
called Merritt’s “obsession with a racist cartoon”. In fact, a transcript of
the panel showed that Merritt had said the film had “one great song. The
rest of it is terrible, actually”, but this was lost in the mêlée that
followed.
This can all seem mildly amusing in Britain, where no one is likely to be
accused of infringing civil rights if they don’t include a James Brown break
or a ragga interlude some where on their new album. Things have come on
apace since the NME Encyclopedia of Rock stated that Paul McCartney
had “fully assimilated” the rhythms of Jamaica by the mid1970s: listen to C
Moon and see if you can get past McCartney’s patois – “check, uh, check
it out!” – without shifting in your seat.
In the era of Love Thy Neighbour this may have been acceptable, but now
it sounds quaint, even a tad blackface. Likewise Sting’s Jamaican accent on
almost every Police record makes them sound like a product of less
enlightened times. The Specials, contemporaries of the Police, were perhaps
the first racially integrated British group – in personnel as well as sound
– that felt entirely natural.
Frere-Jones’s New Yorker article harks back with fondness to the
blues-wailing Seventies rock of Led Zeppelin and Grand Funk Railroad, with
Mick Jagger lauded as “an original” and “a product of miscegenation” with
apparently no equivalent today. He believes that the intermingled blood
began to separate in the Nineties, an argument that would put him at
loggerheads with almost any British writer. The early Nineties Balearic era,
Britain’s Ecstasy-in-spired response to acid house, was when musical
barriers melted to the point where sweaty bodies could dance to Chris Rea’s Josephine,
Afrika by Q-Tee, Fingers Inc’s pure Detroit techno, and Raise
by Boca Juniors – former Slough football hooligans – in succession.
By the mid-1990s, rave culture had evolved to include drum and bass (a product
of black clubs in Clapton and Stoke Newington in northeast London) and
gabba, the insanely fast, bass-drum-led sound of the Netherlands, much
admired by that country’s neo-Nazis. It would take a brave man to divide the
mishmash of influences that made up either genre along racial lines.
Drum and bass has since been adopted on records by artists as diverse as Girls
Aloud, Radiohead and Pizzicato Five, from Japan. The borrowing goes both
ways and, quite possibly, no one in Europe thinks that the music’s heritage
matters. But in the States it is a different story: Frere-Jones is on the
button when he says: “It’s difficult to talk about the racial pedigree of
American pop music without being accused of reductionism, essentialism or
worse, and such suspicion is often warranted.”
This makes it particularly hard to understand his gripe. It could be that he’s
looking at the mainstream rather than the avant-garde but New York, on his
doorstep, seems to be going through a particularly fertile period for
cross-pollination. Soft Circle – a one-man band otherwise known as Hisham
Bharoocha – plays a hypnotic chanted mix of dub, No Wave and early Balearic
beats, rainforest noises and all. Prefuse 73, the brainchild of the producer
Guillermo Herren, blend the sunshine harmonies of the Mamas and the Papas
with backwards strings and hip-hop beats; Herren cites Kurtis Blow, Moondog,
the Austrian avant-electroid Fennesz and the UK folk band Pentangle as
influences. He is also part of A Cloud Mireya, a Latin-influenced acoustic
hippy outfit.
Most prominent on the alternative circuit are Battles, a mixed-race Brooklyn
collective fronted by Tyondai Braxton, the son of the avant-jazz saxophonist
Anthony Braxton. “The whole Sasha Frere-Jones deal is weird,” he says. “This
is probably the most open-source generation the world has ever seen. The
flip side is segmentation. New York is the most cosmopolitan city in the
world, but you walk across Brooklyn and there are neighbourhoods of Hassidic
Jews, then Latino groups, then the ghettos . . . the divisions are there in
the melting pot. It’s an unfair argument.”
Wilco’s 2002 album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot comes in for particular
criticism from Frere-Jones. They were originally an alt-country act, and he
is upset that their career path has “drifted from accessible songs toward
atomisation and noise . . . A little more syncopation would have helped”.
It’s more than possible that Wilco’s main man, Jeff Tweedy, didn’t have one
eye on the dance-floor when he concocted the migraine-inducing wall of noise
At Least That’s What You Said, or the highway-in-driving-rain
tension of Spiders, both from A Ghost is Born from 2004.
A lot of people rate this album much higher than their earlier, straighter
albums. Some find atomisation and noise more appealing than syncopation.
Some have sugar in their tea and some don’t.
In his 1969 landmark pop history Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom, the writer
Nik Cohn was enamoured of the Rolling Stones, but still thought Jagger
looked silly on the same bill as James Brown. It was only last year that
Cohn admitted in print what had been at the back of his mind since he was a
teenager – he’d always wanted to be black. In the Amy Winehouse era, when
any young female singer with a MySpace page seems to list Nina Simone and
Odetta as influences, such appropriation is no longer the badge of the
outsider. The flip side of Frere-Jones’s argument is that the reverse is
true – that there are plenty of white acts looking to black
inspiration, and there should be more black acts playing the rock’n’ roll
laid down by ancestors such as Larry Williams, Little Richard and Chuck
Berry.
“It’s complicated even there,” Tyondai Braxton says. “White America, white
Europe, has had no problem assimilating. This is great, but it can be
dangerous. You have to remember that this is still a sensitive issue. We are
talking about one of the most displaced cultures in the world, trying to
create its own foundation. It created blues, funk, hip-hop, and, with
hip-hop especially, it’s saying: ‘You can’t copy this ghetto life, this is
real truth.’ It’s a flag. Right now I think black culture is going through a
preservational state.”
No one should expect black musicians to incorporate a Chuck Berry lick any
more than they should wish for Arcade Fire to add “a bit of swing” and
“palpable bass frequencies”. Sasha Frere-Jones has come out of his spat with
Stephen Merritt looking a little foolish, but he should let go of the rag.
Things move on; he should notice that the musical net is cast wider than
ever.
Besides, as Braxton says: “Arcade Fire are Canadian. Maybe they didn’t grow up
with black music around them. Others may showcase a more cosmopolitan
stance, but that doesn’t mean Arcade Fire are bad people.”
