Unconscously, after years of effortless 'staying ahead of the curve' musically, I gave up in the mid '90's. I just stopped caring. Nothing current was half as exciting as delving into the Atlantic and Stax catalogues from the 50's. Nothing Swung. "Indie' Rock was music that made Pat Boone seem like James Brown's long-lost bastard white sheep son.
Then, as the century turned I realzed that what passes today for cutting edge Rock/Pop is divorced from, ahem, 'Black Music' . Perhaps. i thought, the Blues has finally stopped giving birth to great music (like, oh, Jazz, Soul, Rock) and great musicians (cf.. entire rock catalogue 1956 - 1971).
Remember, folks, Hank Williams learned to play guitar from a Black man and all those songs?...oh so so many with the blues I-IV-V chord structure. Bing Crosby? He was once the coolest man in the world (80 years ago) because he brought the blues and swing to Mass American (white folks) Popular Singing.
The New Yorker has a magnificent article this week on just this issue.
Since you seem to find yourself here, reading this, you must have some (strange) interest in my take on things A Paler Shade of White - How indie rock lost its soul.by Sasha Frere-Jones sums up pretty well what I think happened.
He Starts by comparing two Arcade Fire Shows, separated by three months:
In January ...their execution was ragged but full of brio—and I had spent the evening happily pressed against the stage. At the United Palace, even though the music was surging in all the right places, I was weary after six songs. My friend asked me, “Do they play everything in the same end-of-the-world style?”
And Ends with maybe the most precise observation that I have read about Rock since, well, since Lester Bangs downed his final bottle of Robitussin:
The uneasy, and sometimes inappropriate, borrowings and imitations that set rock and roll in motion gave popular music a heat and an intensity that can’t be duplicated today, and the loss isn’t just musical; it’s also about risk. Rock and roll was never a synonym for a polite handshake. If you’ve forgotten where the term came from, look it up. There’s a reason the lights were off. ♦
You can read the exquisite middle on-line here
(Oh, the pic above? That's Lester with Alice C and the boys)
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