There are so many things Sasha Frere-Jones gets wrong in his recent New Yorker piece, "A Paler Shade of White", on, as the sub-headline would have it, “how indie rock lost its soul.” Leaving aside for a moment the gaping holes he must leave in of the arc of indie music over the last few decades in order to advance his argument, the argument itself is based on retrograde ideas of race and sex, and how race is encapsulated in music.

Frere-Jones’ argument is predicated on two bullshit dichotomies. Early in his essay he describes how “Elvis Presley stole the world away from Pat Boone and moved popular music from the head to the hips.” There are two glaring problems with this assessment. First it subscribes to the age-old notion that mind and body represent opposing forces, the idea that intellectual urges and sexual urges are mutually contradictory and thus forever locked in a Manichean battle for the souls of teenage pop music listeners. It should go without saying in this day and age that this notion is rubbish: The desire to read and the desire to fuck live comfortably side by side in many well-adjusted teens of both sexes.

Worse still, Frere-Jones ascribes racial attributes to the two sides of this outmoded dichotomy: Mind is white, body black. Thus, to Frere-Jones, the Arcade Fire (“the drummer and the bassist rarely played syncopated patterns or lingered in the low registers”) is pedantic, sexless and indicative of whiteness, while Mick Jagger (“He sang with weird menace and charm”) is lusty, soulful and indicative of blackness—or rather, in his parlance, miscegenation. Frere-Jones even discusses Jagger’s dancing!

These racial and sexual dichotomies were the basis for white fears of rock in the 1950s—keep those race records, and thus the base urges, out of my lily-white daughter’s hands. And whether framed as a negative, as in the condemnation of black music in the racist South from which Elvis emerged, or as a positive, as in Frere-Jones’ lauding of black music’s rhythms and “heat” (he actually uses this descriptor), the source is the same—a hyper-sensitivity to race in which black and white stand as juxtaposed monoliths (the black one no doubt taller and bigger around).

Much of the appeal of the blues to the musicians Frere-Jones lionizes fits squarely within this context, too. British rock bands’ obsession with African-American music often betrays a supremely offensive noble savage view of race. Brian Jones, the blues-obsessed co-founder of the Rolling Stones, complained about the way the band moved away from the primal purity of the blues. (Eric Clapton had similar misgivings about his first band, the Yardbirds, leading to the foundation of another group mentioned by Frere-Jones, Cream.) A quick look at early blues covers by the Stones offers a good idea of the dodgy conflation of sexuality and race among English R&B fans: the Stones’ first UK number one was “Little Red Rooster,” a song, narrated in the first person, about a cock. Another early cover, “I’m a King Bee,” talks about “buzzing around your hive” while ostensibly lascivious slide guitar licks offer the blues equivalent of the “boing” noise you might expect to announce a boner in a low-budget Italian teensploitation flick. The Stones, of course, were not the worst offenders on this count, and their lingering reputation in hipster music circles—along with that of another band mentioned by Frere-Jones for its appropriation of black music, the Beatles—probably has something to do with their seemingly enlightened evolution away from throwing these sorts of race cards. After all, as the Stones began to write more and more of their own material, the combo’s greatness rested not on the nudge-nudge, wink-wink shuffle of songs like “Parachute Woman” but rather on the sorts of things Brian Jones (and perhaps Frere-Jones, as well) would object to, such as the use of a French horn on the epic “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” 

The white blues purists and, particularly, the later heavy blues acts—chief among them Led Zeppelin, who fashioned the blueprint for metal, the genre most antithetical to indie sensibilities—are far more bothersome in their linking of outré sexuality to racial stereotypes, and in the further insistence that this monkey love entail caveman-like gender politics. In short, the cock-rock clichés of blues-based rock ‘n’ roll are not indicative of progressive race ideas at all, but rather the polar opposite: For bands like Led Zeppelin, the blues allowed pasty English boys—or so they must have thought—to channel dark jungle urges and voodoo sexuality and to ascribe all of that, along with their misogynist attitudes, to blackness. This goes a long way toward explaining why blues tended to be eschewed by more racially- and sexually-progressive subsequent generations of indie rockers: Because of their disdain for the attitudes of bands like the ones Frere-Jones big-ups—Zep, Cream, Grand Funk Railroad—later musicians were avoiding not the blues itself (or blackness) but the sounds of these classic rock radio acts (and their offensive, crotch-grabbing interpretation of blackness).

When Frere-Jones asks, “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,” the answer is obvious to any indie-kid. These qualities had been co-opted by blues rockers whose use of them was one step removed from minstrelsy, with the sheen of reverence they held for black music replacing the grease paint but the traits associated with blackness remaining the same.

Frere-Jones also ignores—whether willfully or not—huge swaths of indiedom that might undermine the particulars of his premise. In fact, even the band he uses to set off the entire discussion, Arcade Fire, seems a poor choice. Arcade Fire’s sound is a dead-ringer for that of the Talking Heads; the distinguishing aspect of the Talking Heads was their study of, enthusiasm for, and use of African polyrhythm and percussion. Hardly the best example of a band bleaching the black out of its influences.

The most important British band in the codification of indie music (with the possible exception of the Smiths) was the Stone Roses, whose signature tune, 1989’s “Fool’s Gold,” was most remarkable for its syncopated beat—the very quality Frere-Jones bemoans the absence of in indie from the 1990s. The Roses helped give birth to an entire scene—the so-called Madchester or baggy scene—based on bands playing organs and jangly guitars over a distinctive drum pattern taken directly from James Brown’s “Funky Drummer.” And “Love Spreads,” the lead single of the Stone Roses’ second—and final—album was an obvious homage to Frere-Jones’ beloved Led Zeppelin.

Frere-Jones skips the rise of dance-oriented indie genres such as Big Beat (Fatboy Slim, Chemical Brothers) and Electroclash (Peaches, Miss Kittin). He passes over the showmanship of the Britpop movement (Blur, Suede, Pulp), a scene in which fashion, haircut and personality played nearly as much importance as hook, melody and beat. The blues riffs of the White Stripes, Black Keys and Cold War Kids must have escaped his attention. He misses the melding of indie and hip-hop that produced the trip-hop phenomenon. LCD Soundsystem and the DFA, Le Tigre, Daft Punk, the neo-Stax sound of Amy Winehouse and Mark Ronson—all go unnoticed by Frere-Jones. He must also not be familiar with a currently booming strand of indie typified by Calvin Harris, Simian Mobile Disco, Chromeo, MSTRKRFT, New Young Pony Club and others—syncopated, bass-heavy, electro-fried indie dance music that he might encounter in all the indie clubs where kids—newsflash—shake their asses (sorry—hips) to this stuff.

So what has Frere-Jones been listening to? It’s difficult to say. But one thing is clear: Frere-Jones beats up on a mere straw man in this piece. His arbitrary definition of indie—white guitar bands descended from the Beach Boys rather than the blues—is a make-believe genre from which he has already eliminated anything he sees as black-influenced music, making his criticism of it as not sufficiently black absurd. Only when he forces this twee subgenre of his own creation to stand in for the broad totality of indie can he make his argument at all, and even then it must be made with obnoxious insinuations based on an embarrassing set of racial and sexual anachronisms. Since his stock in trade is calling other people names—he famously branded Stephin Merritt a racist because Merritt published a list of his favorite musicians of the 20th century in Time Out New York without, Frere-Jones insisted, a sufficient number of black artists on it—Frere-Jones’ alarming lack of self-awareness must not be laughed off or excused. With this piece Frere-Jones has demonstrated himself every bit the racist—for buying into this pathetically regressive set of ideas—as any 1950s Southern preacher who decried white interest in animalistic, vulgar race music. That Frere-Jones’ delineates and fetishizes the other—this carnal, black backbeat, this jungle sexuality he insists on placing in contradiction to cerebral, “oblique,” “flat-footed,” white rock—should damn him alongside those who delineate and vilify the other; both visions assign the same traits to blackness.

Perhaps Frere-Jones should spend less time trying to reconcile his white singing with the would-be black funk of his (all-white) band, and a little more time poking around indie clubs, where his shameful philosophical starting point was discredited so long ago that his current epiphanies sound like unwelcome posts from a time machine. He needs to get on with it—read a book, have a dance, sex it up once on a while. None of those things will make him any whiter or blacker than he is; alas none will make him any less a jackass, either.