Bill Cosby defents criticism of Hip Hop...music industry "glorifies the wrong things..."

I think I'm going to sit this one out.

should bill cosby kick jay blanchard out of a hotel for calling ronaldinho a fag?

Depends how much he tipped.

"The most important reason for the decline of musical miscegenation, however, is social progress. Black musicians are now as visible and as influential as white ones."
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/musical/2007/10/22/071022crmu_music_frerejones?currentPage=1
dear cos, everything is fine. yours, sfj

everything is fine?

This really deserves its own thread (or just to be ignored), but WOW I love how he makes his thesis about how rap and rock couldn't be further apart by dismissing rap-metal and hip-hop influenced pop-rock as "commercial, if generally unappealing" even though it's sold shitloads more than Flaming Lips, Wilco and every other white act he'd rather blather about in relation to Snoop Dogg.

and all the indie rap groups that are actually pretty much rock groups like why? and all that anticon type stuff.

Linkin Park? What's a Linkin Park? Are they as big as Devendra?

I only read the first page of that article and I'm not sure I want to read the rest.

I'm glad he's articulating what I find...troubling about the likes of Panda Bear, but his ill-advised journey through the last 35 years of rock stops the thing cold (although, what I know, maybe this is news to New Yorker readers). And then stuff like this:

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

Substitute "white folk rocker Joni Mitchell" for Devendra and "admiration for Marvin Gaye's new Let's Get It On" and it's not as far-fetched as he thinks.

*although, what do I know

Maroon 5? Gym Class Heroes? White Stripes? Those aren't popular "rock" bands really, they're not as relevant to the discussion as the Fiery Furnaces and Panda Bear.

When discussing the history of rock bands mining black music for inspiration, it's important to ignore all acts that reach shooting range of gold.

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I see that he's now calling his own old group Ui, a funk band. Did he always do that--I seem to recall them being considered a postrock band or some such. Parts of the article make sense to me, but then elsewhere he 's got unsupported statements that I strongly disagree with. Am not sure what Bill Cosby would think. Sasha's been warning on his blog that he was gonna post or write something that would get attention. I guess this it it (it's a followup of something he presented at the EMP a few years back, isn't it?).

the real question: would Cliff, Claire, and Sandra Huxtable have gone to a Ui concert?

relax people there's always been honky music, it's not a crime

indie musicians making shitty music bcuz of cowardly indecision = new yorker article

I think that article's pretty good - cringeworthy references to own music and debatable cherrypicking of history aside - certainly it articulates a dynamic that seems readily apparent to me, and has been for quite some time (at least, as he notes, since the early 90s and Pavement)

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um, college rock in the 80s was plenty white too

and the entire history of the British charts in the 1980's.

i miss the ass shakin' beats of dino jr. and throwing muses

i mean if we're gonna focus solely on art-rock, we can take this much further back than Pavement.

Whatever -- it's an article in the goddamn New Yorker! I don't expect its audience to understand the distinctions between a Style Council record and Panda Bear's attempts to studiously avoid sounding like a Style Council record.

hahaha

i never really got why it was so bad that some indie rock wasn't danceable or sounded white or whatever, excepting like douchebags that think indie is inherently superior, like i dunno there's got to be music for dancing, there's got to be music for being unemployed and sitting around at 2 in the afternoon feeling sorry for yourself and smoking schwag.

ew!

nobody said it's bad, we're just laughing at the idea that this is news or has anything to do with a decrease in "miscegenation" in popular music.

i wish he would finish upending the canon and just stop talking about bad indie bands altogether.

its weird - one thing he doesn't get into at all is how the Rock Music Industry(tm) basically ruined the blues as source material with its endless parade of cheesy white guitarists trying to bee authentic (see: Blueshammer by way of Clapton). White guys appropriating blues became such a bad, egregious aesthetic and political error that it basically sped an entire generation (punk generation, cf. Talking Heads' "no blues rule", Greg Ginn, etc.) in the opposite direction.

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but then he'd have to deal with the commercial if generally unappealing, deej!

the real horrifying idea would be IF arcade fire decided to incorporate hip hop influences

One shouldn't be forced to think about tacky things like popular rock bands when discussing rock history

history is written by the losers

http://www.publispain.com/posters/revenge_of_the_nerds.jpg

I'd have been more comfortable with a reactionary but worthy-of-discussion-in-a-mainstream-liberal-publication essay on the twentysomething music fans who want to talk to you about Of Montreal's album over Ciara's -- who'll privilege the former over the latter for reasons they can't even articulate.

I believe the New Yorker would consider that killing the goose, better to sing "Everybody's beautiful" and pretend 311 doesn't STILL sell more than the Flaming Lips.

goddamn it I'm drunk and I'm going to listen to the Style Council.

I'd have been more comfortable with a reactionary but worthy-of-discussion-in-a-mainstream-liberal-publication essay on the twentysomething music fans who want to talk to you about Of Montreal's album over Ciara's -- who'll privilege the former over the latter for reasons they can't even articulate.

-- Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Monday, October 15, 2007 11:31 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

would you seriously want to read that article??

hell yeah! The Great Big World Outside ILM doesn't understand the problem. (And before anyone jumps in to say, "Well, Of Montreal's album is better than Ciara's," understand that the college-age twentysomething to whom SFJ is indirectly addressing his essay won't even consider buying the Ciara album; at most they'll buy a song.)

the problem that some college students prefer indie rock to r&b?

YES

THE UNACCEPTABLE FACE OF YOUTH

but the vast majority of college students are like jocks and normal people and shit and don't give a crap about indie rock just like the majority of high school students and, um, people in general

http://www.mymusic.com/DI5/graphics/elvis_costello.jpg

"Hi, I'm Elvis Costello, here to talk to you a problem facing the young intellectuals of today. Would you be surprised to know that I am a fan of Lil Wayne? That my favorite album of 2006 was B'Day? Rap and R&B are rich genres that continue to provide us with classic music that reward just as much as indie rock, maybe even more. Increasingly, white music fans do not seem willing to give modern black artists the respect they deserve. Join me, and the good people at Rhapsody, in our fight against this ignorance."

plus nerdy dudes need to get laid...the trim status at a lot of these indie shows is off the hook these days

all we need is EC in a brownshirt acting out "Oliver's Army" in a college-radio setting.

The tastes of nerdy white college guys are of vast importance to nerdy white music writers.

"Hi, I'm Elvis Costello,etc."

Are those real quotes or jokes quotes?

see for yourself

www.blacktiewhitenoise.com/costello

ibowiebyrnecostellodarnielletweedy-wnbtpressconference.jpg