New York Times columnist David Brooks — known for his smarmy tone, moderate conservative politics and half-baked cultural theories — has a new hypothesis for everything that’s wrong with our country: the Arcade Fire! According to Brooks, indie rock is another symptom of the fragmentation of American society, because it’s a niche market for upper-middle -class weenies. Fair enough, you may say, but then he goes on to talk about how the music “stinks” because it’s “lost touch” with our “common roots” and because — take a breath — it is “considered inappropriate or even immoral for white musicians to appropriate African-American styles” these days. This is compared to the Sixties and Seventies, when it was okay for Mick Jagger to write “Brown Sugar,” or something like that.
We’re all for calling out indie rockers, but a couple things: Niche music for upper-middle-class elites is nothing new — anybody remember the Cambridge folk scene in the Fifties? It spurred a boom that produced one of those guys that Brooks might like: Bob Dylan. And somebody should tell those dudes in Chromeo that they’re being wildly inappropriate or immoral; if anything, most indie rockers don’t try to make black music (i.e., hip-hop) these days because they still have bad memories of 311 from the Nineties. We look forward to Paul Krugman’s takedown of freak folk next week.
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- Portions of Album Content Provided by All Music Guide © 2009 All Media Guide, LLC.
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