The Whitest Music Ever?

In an essay that has surely ruffled the pristinely disheveled feathers of quite a few U of C indie lovers, New Yorker pop music critic Sasha Frere-Jones calls out contemporary indie rock for turning its back on rhythm, showmanship, soul, and spontaneity. All of this stems from what Frere-Jones diagnoses as a lack of the very thing that created rock music in the first place, "musical miscegenation."

In addition, Frere-Jones elaborates on the piece in a podcast on the New Yorker's website, softening some of his rhetoric while pointing towards the finest examples in the cannon of musical miscengenation. The podcast has also resolved my long running uncertainty (no doubt trivial, and due to a lack of research—F-J appears in a photograph on a basic Google image search, albeit in the company of four others) as to whether Frere-Jones is a man or a woman.

Addition: If it's discussion Frere-Jones wanted, now he's got it. Canadian critic Carl Wilson has written a response to Frere-Jones on Slate, arguing that class boundaries are more formidable than racial ones in today's indie rock. A sample: "It's a cliche to 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."