Music critic Sasha Frere-Jones’ "A Paler Shade of White: How indie rock lost its soul," in last week’s New Yorker has brought on plenty of commentary on the subject. We really didn’t want to chime in, figuring it to be a non-starter, but what the hell.
So, indie rock is really white. No shit, Sherlock. The sun also shines during the day time, by the way. [yawn] Has this subgenre EVER been any different in this particular regard? And why should we care? Personally, we find a lot of it to be boring, pretentious, talent-lacking, hypocritical, flavor-of-the-month nonsense. What to do? We don’t listen to music/artists that fall within that description. Period. Next.
We won’t go as far as asking whether Frere-Jones actually knows about the indie rock he’s discussing—despite this particular essay and his body of reviews and articles as potential evidence to the contrary—simply because this seems like such an empty impetus for debate. And this thing has gotten way more mileage than it ever deserved in the first place, anyway. Jeez.
