Won't Soul Music Change?

"Won't soul music change / Now that our souls have turned strange?" - David Berman, Silver Jews, "We Are Real"

It’s difficult to talk about the racial pedigree of American pop music without being accused of reductionism, essentialism, or worse, and such suspicion is often warranted.

Last month, in the Times, the white folk rocker Devendra Banhart declared his admiration for R. Kelly’s new R. & B. album “Double Up.” Thirty years ago, Banhart might have attempted to imitate R. Kelly’s perverse and feather-light soul. Now he’s just a fan. 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.

Two unrelated quotes from the same article, "A Paler Shade of White," in this week's New Yorker, by Sasha Frere-Jones. The first illustrating why I often find Mr. Frere-Jones' music criticism un-readable. The second, why I find him generally compelling.

RM forwarded me this article during the middle of my work day, and I immediately devoured it. This, of course, coming from the same RM who bombastically declared late one evening in 1998 or 1999 that rock music was dead and useless, and that electronic music showed the way forward. So take that, for what it's worth.

A few selected quotes from the article, followed by a few scattered comments:

As I watched Arcade Fire, I realized that the drummer and the bassist rarely played syncopated patterns or lingered in the low registers. If there is a trace of soul, blues, reggae, or funk in Arcade Fire, it must be philosophical; it certainly isn’t audible. And what I really wanted to hear, after a stretch of raucous sing-alongs, was a bit of swing, some empty space, and palpable bass frequencies—in other words, attributes of African-American popular music.

There’s no point in faulting Arcade Fire for what it doesn’t do; what’s missing from the band’s musical DNA is missing from dozens of other popular and accomplished rock bands’ as well—most of them less entertaining than Arcade Fire. I’ve spent the past decade wondering why rock and roll, the most miscegenated popular music ever to have existed, underwent a racial re-sorting in the nineteen-nineties. 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?

Yet there are also moments in the history of pop music when it’s not difficult to figure out whose chocolate got in whose peanut butter. In 1960, on a train between Dartford and London, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, then teen-agers, bonded over a shared affinity for obscure blues records. (Jagger lent Richards an LP by Muddy Waters.) “Twist and Shout,” a song that will forever be associated with the Beatles, is in fact a fairly faithful rendition of a 1962 R. & B. cover by the Isley Brothers. In sum, as has been widely noted, the music that inspired some of the most commercially successful rock bands of the sixties and seventies—among them Led Zeppelin, Cream, and Grand Funk Railroad—was American blues and soul.

You could argue that Dr. Dre and Snoop were the most important pop musicians since Bob Dylan and the Beatles

Who would take on Snoop, one of the most naturally gifted vocalists of the day?

Many indie bands seemed to be having complex reactions of their own to musical miscegenation. The indie genre emerged in the early eighties, in the wake of British bands such as the Clash and Public Image Ltd., and originally incorporated black sources, using them to produce a new music, characterized by brevity and force, and released on independent labels. The Minutemen, a group of working-class white musicians from San Pedro, California, who were influential in the late eighties, wrote frantic political rants that were simultaneously jazz, punk, and funk, without sounding like any of these genres. But by the mid-nineties black influences had begun to recede, sometimes drastically, and the term “indie rock” came implicitly to mean white rock. Pavement, a group that the Village Voice rock critic Robert Christgau, in 1997, called “the finest rock band of the nineties—by critical acclamation,” embodied this trajectory.

Grizzly Bear, the indie band that excites me most right now, is making songs with no apparent links to black American music—or any readily identifiable genre. (The band’s sound suggests a group of eunuchs singing next to a music box on a sunken galleon.) But, in the past few years, I’ve spent too many evenings at indie concerts waiting in vain for vigor, for rhythm, for a musical effect that could justify all the preciousness.

How did rhythm come to be discounted in an art form that was born as a celebration of rhythm’s possibilities? Where is the impulse to reach out to an audience—to entertain?

Before I get too involved, let me preface by saying, when you come after Pavement, it's knives out, buddy. Secondly, let me put the most insightful comment first, which actually came courtesy of RM:

When we talk about race and rock and roll, citing any of the great, early rippers-off of black rhythm and blues, the Beatles, the Kinks, the Stones, the Who, Zeppelin, let's not forget for a second that all of those bands are British. So what? Well, RM speculates that maybe these young Brits weren't immediately aware of the racial distinctions of the music they were listening to. Maybe. More likely, the cultural bounds that needed to be crossed to embrace black music for the bands that led the British invasion were less restrictive than for American bands -- both in terms of finding an audience, and the general self-consciousness of playing music that was distinctly "not yours" (but in the case of Americans, was identifiably "someone else's"). Or, as RM put it, for the Brits, "it all seems like one big American lump from across the ocean."

If you list the pantheon of acts from the 60s to the 80s that are the major influences of indie rock, it would look something like this: Dylan, the Beatles, the Stones, the Kinks, Neil Young, the Beach Boys, the VU, Bowie, the Clash, Talking Heads. Of that list, only the New York-based American acts ever really embraced the "black" part of black music -- Dylan, the VU, and Talking Heads. The LA-acts, for lack of a better categorization, did not. So it is a bit of a failed premise to start with, isn't it, to lay the failure of rock and roll to embrace its black roots on the lily-white doorstep of indie rock, isn't it? And more so, of each of the bands above, only the Stones and maybe the Clash were really most celebrated for the parts of their oeuvre that directly descended from rhythm and blues, soul, or funk. The rest of the bands really made their name through taking rock in the direction of folk, country, acid, or art.

Or put it another way, if you want to draw a straight-line from the Beatles to the Apples in Stereo, you draw it through Revolver and the White Album, not Please Please Me. Don't you?

And to extend the metaphor, is the inheritance of most songwriter-driven indie rock, as you trace its lineage back through the artists above, finding its way back to Keats as much as the slave origins of rock? It's as much about the words and ideas as the pure emotion and collective release?

Which isn't to say that I don't also regret the increasing trend within the white-washed world of indie rock towards sad-sack mopiness... mind you, not the weary melancholy that I love so much, but 22-year old pathos that really amount to nothing.

Let's not conflate pop and rock.

Sometime between 1965 and 1995, it became possible to get laid based on being arch and having discriminating taste. That killed both lust and dancing as a driving framework for rock and roll. We also got collectively richer. Rock became the province of college boys. We were less the common people of Jarvis Cocker, more the slumming rich-girl art students. And we took drugs - the collective experience and catharsis was no longer in moving to the same back-beat, but finding abandon, release, and then order in the same cascading waves of feedback.

Also, can't we just leave the soul music to the soul singers.