two americas -- part two

I was just going to respond in the comments section to Blogger E's post below, but I found myself being needlessly and typically maximalist, so I thought it best to unleash my feelings here, dear, dear, indifferent reader.

Regarding the New Yorker fretting E draws our attention to, I wonder how much stock we should put into the opinions of Sasha Frere-Jones--a man whose taste in music tends toward major label releases, but who gets to lay claim to indie cred by introducing MIA, Dizzy Rascal, Feist, and others to the literati. Not a bad gig. As E points out, Frere-Jones laments the state of indie rock--to his credit, actually he hedges his bets a little, saying merely that he harbors some "unease"-- because the movement has come to embrace a diversity of musical stylings. But let's interrogate this unease.

I'm old enough to remember in the mid-1990's when the post-grunge, fledgling indie rock kids put all their eggs in the Sebadoh and Pavement baskets, while at the same time harboring some dismissive views about hip-hop: hardly a muscial genre worth our time, one of my old colleagues at WXDU told me. Of course, the post-Native Tongues movement and members of the Wu-Tang Clan put to rest that stupidity, and now Clipse, Devon the Dude, Mad Lib, et al. draw in the skinny-jeaned and dandruff-coiffed, and no one complains. Enter alt-country, singer-songwriters, and--gasp--chanteuses like Feist, and indie rock's become a true alternative to the collective wisdom of the A&R guys over at the Big Five.

But Frere-Jones' "unease" reminds me that there're still those pitiable, superficial indie rockers out there who can't see past punk rock. To them, and to Frere-Jones' conflicted mind I say this: It's okay for there to be more than three emaciated dudes in a band. It's okay for songs to be languid and moving, for them to be "black-sounding," as Patrick Bateman would say. It's okay for good and dignified muscians to mine disco and lite-rock and reinvent those tired forms. The astonishing thing about Feist is that she has done the impossible: She has reconstituted lite rock, repackaged it, and fed it to scores of scenesters, and in the process made us all forget her shady beginnings with Peaches and all that clash-rock cacophany. If indie rockers can't evolve past "Fuck the Pain Away," 0r shouldn't, as Frere-Jones' uneasy alter ego might suggest, then really the "movement" is what the main-streamers have accused it of being all along: more artifice than substance; snobbery for snobbery's sake.

I for one am not buying that. Nor is my pretend millworker dad.