QotD: I Detect A Riot
Does Sasha Frere-Jones' latest New Yorker article have you up in arms like it does some other people? Did you have to look up the meaning of the word miscegenation like I did?
"If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn" - Charlie Parker
Comments
I think the miscegenation stuff was overreaching, and seemed very early-90s pomo lit crit. I know this is The New Yorker, but it doesn't mean that SFJ needs to turn that venerable institution into the well-distributed equivalent of The New York Review of Books.
Essentially, I'd turn SFJ back on himself. The piece was too precious, wasn't danceable and needed more joy. I need a strong beat, a catchy rhythm and I want to either shake my ass or pump my fist. Or at least the moral equivalent of both / either of those things while driving across the Bay Bridge.
So, as a piece of amusing provocation? Sure, I enjoyed it... as a piece of deep & worthwhile criticism, maybe not so much, but frankly, I'm rarely looking to read deep criticism. :)
Though it did inspire a few interesting responses worth reading--particularly this one from Slate--and that definitely counts for something, in my book (particularly if that was largely the point).
And I've been trying to find a "miscegenator" t-shirt for a while (in the "Terminator" font), but then again, I would be.
This was the beginning sentence of the paragraph:
Among at least a subset of (the younger) musicians and fans, this class separation has made indie more openly snobbish and narrow-minded.
Well, it's not just perceptions of the music itself-- some are snobbish and elitist themselves. The last person that mentioned indie music to me talked about it over and over again as if it was some rarefied treat I was missing out on and that his musical tastes were superior for liking it, almost exclusively, even.