Culture

The sound of music

October 22, 2007
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Last week the New Yorker's pop critic Sasha Frere-Jones wrote a mischievous article in which he argued that in the mid-1990s, white indie rock music "lost its soul" by turning its back on the black music influences that had been used to such powerful effect by acts like Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones and the Clash. The result, he suggested, was a parade of bloodless bands producing formless, introspective music of increasingly limited appeal. Here he is describing a performance by Arcade Fire, indie band du jour:

As I watched Arcade Fire, I realized that the drummer and the bassist rarely played syncopated patterns or lingered in the low registers. If there is a trace of soul, blues, reggae, or funk in Arcade Fire, it must be philosophical; it certainly isn’t audible. And what I really wanted to hear, after a stretch of raucous sing-alongs, was a bit of swing, some empty space, and palpable bass frequencies—in other words, attributes of African-American popular music.

[…] I’ve spent the past decade wondering why rock and roll, the most miscegenated popular music ever to have existed, underwent a racial re-sorting in the nineteen-nineties. Why did so many white rock bands retreat from the ecstatic singing and intense, voicelike guitar tones of the blues, the heavy African downbeat, and the elaborate showmanship that characterized black music of the mid-twentieth century? These are the volatile elements that launched rock and roll, in the nineteen-fifties, when Elvis Presley stole the world away from Pat Boone and moved popular music from the head to the hips.
Predictably, the piece caused a mini-storm in the music blogosphere. But more interesting than the merits or otherwise of the "musical miscegenation" case is something clearly illustrated by the above passage—the superiority of at least some American music journalism to its equivalent on this side of the Atlantic.

"Syncopated patterns," "low registers," "heavy African downbeat"—by focusing on the aural attributes of the music he discusses—the way it sounds—Frere-Jones is doing something that British music journalists all too often shy away from. As exhibit A, take this Tim Footman column from the Guardian's Comment is Free site. Defending an incomprehensible stream-of-consciousness "review" of Radiohead's new album by Paul Morley elsewhere on the Guardian site, Footman argues that it was Morley and his colleagues at the NME (Parsons, Burchill et al) that revolutionised British music journalism by focusing on the "truth" that "it's not what pop music sounds like that's important, it's what it's about, what it means." And so was ushered in a "golden age" of "discursive, iconoclastic" music writing.

Footman does not overstate the influence of Morley and his pals; they are largely responsible for the self-absorbed witterings that pass for most music journalism in contemporary British newspapers and magazines. The idea that writing about music should involve at least some kind of description of what it sounds like is almost entirely absent these days, at least from pop music journalism; if you're lucky enough to get a reference to instrumentation, rhythm, melody or arrangement, it'll almost certainly be pressed into service as evidence for something about the artist's attitude or values.

The better American writing, by contrast, understands the importance of the musical aesthetic, and that the qualities of great pop music transcend genre, attitude or fashion. By listening to, focusing on and writing about music qua music, Frere-Jones is carving out a niche for himself as one of the more incisive writers of his generation. Another example is his New Yorker colleague Alex Ross; despite being largely a classical music critic, Ross's profile of Björk is one of the best musical portraits I've ever read, largely because it identifies what it is that makes the Icelandic singer such an interesting figure: not her fashion sense, or her eccentricity, or her "kookiness"—but her wide musical palate and and her ability to successfully combine avant-garde experimentation with traditional melody.

It's not clear why there should be such divergence between British and American pop journalism—is it going too far to trace it back to the traditional concern in US journalism for facts before opinion?—but until our hacks learn to refocus on the sound of music, I'll stick with the Yanks.