Water Too Wet for Sasha Frere-Jones's Taste

I didn't want to let the week elapse without responding to one of its silliest articles, New Yorker critic Sasha Frere-Jones's chin-stroker on why indie-rock bands have turned away from African-American influences in their music.

The piece has already been the object of much ridicule, and rightfully so: Conceptually, it's utterly unsound.

Frere-Jones points the way to his own downfall when he notes that the term "indie rock" no longer denotes a band or artist unaffiliated with a major label; it has "become an aesthetic description" -- in other words, a genre, like punk, or polka.

What are the characteristics of this particular genre? Frere-Jones helpfully lists them: "shaggy" sound, mumbled vocals, "oblique" lyrics, and even, straightforward rhythms. And since these attributes, rather than an independent-label contract, are what place a band within the indie-rock genre, it stands to reason that any band whose music did not fit this description at least loosely wouldn't be classified as indie rock.

Yet Frere-Jones believes indie bands are somehow letting down pop music by working within this template. He wants them to engage in more "miscegenation" -- to punch up their songs with syncopation, thumping bass and full-throated vocals. It's not that there aren't bands out there producing these sorts of sounds, of course, but Frere-Jones wants to see indie rock bands doing it. He's very specific about that.

If you haven't yet cottoned to how absurd this is, imagine that a critic wrote an entire article criticizing polka bands for relying too heavily on accordions and the "oom-pah" sound, and demanding they experiment with salsa rhythms. Now imagine that critic was the sole pop-music writer for the country's most important magazine.

This brings me to a bigger point: If The New Yorker is only going to have one person writing about pop music on a regular basis, should it really be someone as idiosyncratic and contrary as Frere-Jones? He frequently exhibits the record-store-clerk tic of reflexively bashing that which is hugely popular, lest non-sophisticates make the mistake of thinking it's good just because they enjoy it.

Sometimes this leads him to take untenable positions. It was both gratifying and irritating last year when Frere-Jones bestowed his grudging seal of approval on Radiohead, a band that had been annointed by near-unanimous acclaim a full decade earlier. (The piece was headlined "Fine Tuning," as though it were Radiohead that had finally gotten its act together, not Frere-Jones.)

In the indie-rock piece, he excoriates Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, the 2002 Wilco album that, I imagine, sits on an awful lot of New Yorker subscribers' shelves. Though critics overwhelmingly praised it, Frere-Jones dismisses it as "embarrassing poetry laid over plodding rhythms." "A little more syncopation would have helped," he concludes.

Helped whom? The multitude of critics who placed it on their best-of-the-year lists? The consumers who made it a sleeper hit? Of course not. It would have helped the only person whose judgments matter: Sasha Frere-Jones.