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Posts Tagged “Sasha Frere-jones”

Former New York Times music-biz reporter Jeff Leeds resurfaces on Sasha Frere Jones' blog at The New Yorker, and the two discuss a few topics, including the current state of the art/commerce divide. This quote from Leeds, in particular, resonates: "I always think of music as Patient Zero in all the disorder that is changing everything in entertainment and media, including, by the way, newspapers." SFJ says that if the e-mails keep coming, he'll keep posting 'em, and surely I'm not the only one who hopes that this conversation stretches for a while. [Sasha Frere-Jones]

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announcements

Mark Your Calendars: Idolator Is Live-Blogging The Grammys This Sunday

Yes, that's right—Sunday at 7:30 p.m. ET is when our live coverage of the Grammys, which will be filled with the walking dead and the incredibly awkward, begins. It'll be my first liveblog from my four-person orange couch! Here's the nominee list, so you can read up on who's in, who's out, and who's up for Best Polka Album. And to get you even more excited for Sunday, here are a few final news items on the show, presented in handy bullet form:
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4:30 PM on Fri Feb 8 2008
By Maura Johnston
376 views, 11 comments

Latest by Coming Into The Game, ♪♪ ♪♪♪ #J23 - The Superstar Receiver, ofyourupperdeck TORONTOOOoo BJSss ®: Where can I place my bets? I got money on Umbrella and Graduation more »

worsts

The Worst Music Writing Of The Year: Is This The Best We Could Do?

Every year pop critics await the coming of January with a sense of trepidation and a healthy amount of schadenfreude, because it's time for our own year-end analysis, Jason Gross' annual rundown of year's worst music writing. (Gross' long-running look at the dregs of rock scribbling is actually part of a package of the worst and best music writing of the year. But c'mon, we all know which part we really care about.) And now that our trepidation has passed (nothing we wrote in '07 made it to Gross' "Bottom Of The Barrel" category!), we can get to the schadenfreude (which of our peers did make it to Gross' "Bottom Of The Barrel" category?). More »

9:30 AM on Mon Jan 14 2008
By jharv
1,186 views, 4 comments

Latest by n/a: The story was actually called "A Paler Shade of White" more »

the center cannot hold

New York Times Looks At Popular Music, Notices Whole "Niche Marketing" Thing

Who knew liberal do-gooding race man Sasha Frere-Jones would have a secret BFF in New York Times conservative goof David Brooks? In an op-ed fretting over the "segmented society," Brooks references both SFJ's infamous New Yorker "indie rock ain't African-American enough" tract from last month and critic Carl Wilson's class-focused rebuttal, as he points out popular music's heretofore unnoticed contribution to average folks being "anxious about fragmentation and longing for cohesion," which is the "driving fear behind the inequality and immigration debates, behind worries of polarization and behind the entire Obama candidacy." Crap, we were pretty chill when the shocking revelation was that the overeducated indie rock leisure class wasn't funky enough, but dividing us as Americans and failing to groove? Only Professor Stevie Van Zandt can save us now. More »

11:30 AM on Tue Nov 20 2007
By jharv
1,090 views, 24 comments

Latest by Lax Danja House: Am I the only one who couldn't isolate a coherent argument from the article? It seemed like he was just blowing off on a bunch of vaguely related topics. I don't know how it was back in the day, but as more »

If you read just one response to Sasha Frere-Jones' attempt to ramp up his Google Blog Search hits, make it Carl Wilson's argument in Slate that the problem facing indie—aside from the fact that it's a "genre" with boundaries that are seemingly defined by the biases and record collections of whoever's doing the defining at the time, ahem—isn't rooted in race as much as it is in class. A sample: "With its true spiritual center in Richard Florida-lauded 'creative' college towns such as Portland, Ore., this is the music of young 'knowledge workers' in training, and that has sonic consequences: Rather than body-centered, it is bookish and nerdy; rather than being instrumentally or vocally virtuosic, it shows off its chops via its range of allusions and high concepts with the kind of fluency both postmodern pop culture and higher education teach its listeners to admire." [Slate]

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race relations

The Sasha Frere-Jones Score: Suddenly It's Not Funny Anymore

Well, after three days at CMJ it's official: Judged on the guidelines laid down by New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones, our worst fears are confirmed and indie rock has actually failed at being convincingly "black." It is now the Jamie Kennedy of musical genres. More »

1:05 PM on Fri Oct 19 2007
By jharv
2,557 views, 18 comments

race relations

The Sasha Frere-Jones Score: Emo Swings More Than Acoustic Guitars Do

Presenting the next installment of the Sasha Frere-Jones score, where Idolator rates the indie rock bands we see at the CMJ Music Marathon based on how musically "black" they are, taking the learned teachings of New Yorker pop critic Sasha Frere-Jones as our guide. This time we lay down the ground rules so you can play along at home, and we offer a little more explanation of the reasoning behind our little experiment. More »

12:35 PM on Thu Oct 18 2007
By jharv
2,615 views, 22 comments

race relations

Is Indie Rock Black Enough? Presenting The Sasha Frere-Jones Score

So while I was out mixing with the creative underclass at CMJ, some of you were very concerned with this New Yorker article where the world's wealthiest rock critic, Sasha Frere-Jones, claims that indie rock ain't "miscegenated" enough for his liking, i.e. it ain't got enough African-American in it. You were so worried, in fact, that you actually took the time to write and ask what Idolator's "response" would be. And the response is that though I am sympathetic to the argument on a surface level, the piece is typical jury-rigged SFJ rhetoric that ignores pertinent facts—i.e. there's still (indie) rock that draws from African-American sources, among others too numerous to mention—to keep a shaky argument afloat until he's used up his word count. But in the interest of mad science, I've also decided to put Frere-Jones' theory to the test. I've come up with a handy metric that will allow me to determine, over the course of CMJ, just how "black" any band happens to be. More »

12:40 PM on Wed Oct 17 2007
By jharv
4,908 views, 40 comments

Latest by roquestrew: wow I was gonna give Al an 85, but 88 is right, yes more »