Genre is a Prison
“I heard TV on the Radio in the spring of 2004, my freshman year. I was riding in the backseat of a car full of white people en route to an outdoor Radiohead concert. The first words I heard Tunde croon were, “I woke up in a magic n—- movie with bright lights pointed at me, as a metaphor, teaching folks the score about patience, understanding, agape babe, and sweet sweet amor.” It touched me because I felt this line articulated that eerie feeling of being black in a white space and feeling that pressure to make other people feel comfortable with your existence. It was so relatable to me in that moment, it felt like I had willed the song into existence, just because I needed to hear these words reaffirmed by another person, so I wouldn’t feel so crazy or so alone.”
-Wilbert Cooper, writing for VICE magazine
I am always frustrated by writers who classify indie-rock as “lily-white.” Typically this is done in a well-meaning liberal way where a white critic attempts to show how inclusive they are by acknowledging that white perspectives are dominant in coverage of the genre. But as a lifelong, non-white indie rock fan this has always felt like writers were embracing a lazy stereotype of the conception of indie rock over the actual make up of indie rock audiences and influences. Is indie rock lily-white if I am listening to it?
Positioning indie rock as too white has ironically whitewashed the genre, making non-white listeners and artists feel like outsiders when in fact they are and always have been an essential ingredient. Even the whitest indie bands (How to Dress Well) compose in conversation with non-white music (Prince) and framing indie rock as an isolated white space artificially segregates the genre from the broader history of music.
No band upends the false narrative that music can exclusively belong to one race or genre better than TV on the Radio. The band began in the mythical hipster stew of early 2000s Williamsburg, a place that was cheap enough for artists of all colors to congregate and create a ruckus. Amongst the very-aughts milieu of Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Blonde Redhead and Grizzly Bear, TVOR formed when Celebrity Death Match animator and vocalist Tunde Adebimpe decided to collaborate with a producer who lived in his building named Dave Sitek. The two recorded an experimental EP dubbed Ok Calculator, a project that Sitek claimed only happened because he was scheduled to record an album for the band Liars and needed to teach himself how to use Pro Tools. The EP’s combination of Eno airport fantasias, dusty loops and Adebimpe’s resonant voice sited the group as a switchboard for supposedly disconnected styles, and generated blog buzz.
From there, TVOR added members and influences. They did an acapella cover of the Smith’s “Mr. Grieves.” They added the crystalline falsetto and jagged riffs of Kip Malone, making the legacy of post-punk’s infatuation with Motown more explicit with every coo. On the Young Liars EP they showcased the similarity of shoegaze’s crunch with the Bombsquad’s squealing aural assaults. They added drummer Jaleel Bunton who helped them inhabit beats that ranged from doo-wop to p-funk. Bassist Gerard Smith recognized Adebimpe while busking at the Bedford subway stop and was recruited into the band in advance of Return to Cookie Mountain. Here’s how Smith recalled the meeting:
”I saw Tunde in the movie Jump Tomorrow on IFC. And I was super addicted to film at that time. A year later, I was playing on the subway platform and he kept giving me money. And then I was like, I recognize this guy. Then it finally clicked, and I said, “Dude you were in that movie! I loved that movie!” That film had meant a lot to me, especially because there was a black actor that wasn’t in the ghetto, and there weren’t a lot of politics. He was being a human being and not only a black actor. And that meant a lot to me.”
And so it was--on the eve of creating a genre-shattering work, Smith joined the band based on a shared need to transcend the stereotypes of race, to break the idea of who can play what.
It’s beyond poetic that TVOR’s best album, Dear Science, is a pure synthesis of the world’s greatest sounds. Afro-beat repetition powers “Crying”’s syncopated critique of capitalism (complete with rinky-dink Beck synths!). “Golden Age” combines a Marvin Gaye strut with Remain in Light Talking Heads-isms. “Lover’s Day” shows that all kinds of music, like all kinds of humans, enjoy orgasms.
On “Dancing Choose”, Adebimpe describes a man engaged in macho posturing as a “foam injected Axl Rose,” which... doesn’t really add to my argument but is pretty funny.
And then there’s the gorgeous Family Tree--a piano ballad that explores how bigotry is passed down from generation to generation. The song’s narrator describes a relationship that takes place over years beneath “the shadow of the gallows of your family tree,” noting how our ancestry pumps blood and old ideas to its roots to ensure that hatreds and heart disease continue beyond a single life. The instrumentation similarly recycles the history of “western” music, bringing orchestral strings in conversation with Jesus and Mary Chain feedback swells until all the elements distort into each other and dissipate. It’s a sermon about fighting the eternal struggle against bias woven with the very instruments (marriage/ violas etc.) that perpetuate segregation. "Ultimately, we're not really writing to any genre. We're writing to humanity," said Sitek.
By now you’re probably thinking, “Alright, this guy needs to calm down. I get that sounds can transcend racial lines, but I’m pretty sure that all the dudes I saw at the Deathcab concert last week could have plausibly been named Bryce.” Do not fall prey to the lazy concept of a “white space”!!
While it’s accurate to say that crowds at indie rock shows in America tend to be white people, it’s also a misleading characterization. The US as a country is approximately 70% white, meaning you’re gonna find them everywhere! If you go to a major label hip-hop concert in Ohio, the majority of the audience will also be white. Audiences at basketball games are overwhelming white, but it’s absurd to say that basketball is a white sport. Indie rock that is made in the majority Japanese country of, uh, Japan tends to be played and listened to by Japanese folks.
Ultimately, this kind of analysis defines art by who can afford to go to an arena in Cleveland/Osaka and just does not encompass the global spectrum of ears and minds. Music lives inside people regardless of if they bought it or live in a specific market. Indie rock is a world-wide phenomenon, and zooming in causes a sample size error; the frame has been gerrymandered to confirm our country’s pre-determined racial biases.
Look at it this way: the top three cities where Red Hot Chili Peppers are streamed on Spotify are Sao Paulo, Mexico City and Santiago. Can the Chilis’ music be classified as purely “white” if a huge segment of their listeners--the people who provide that music with meaning and relevance by making it part of their lives--are not white?
Culture created by humans, just like carbon dioxide created by humans, impacts all of us and when we allow ourselves to imagine that we live in a disconnected world, we help those who seek power through disconnecting us. The fantasy that a purely white space can be created by white people is the bedrock of white supremacy. White supremacists want you to believe that the Incan and Aztec empires were “wiped out” by a handful of Spaniards with guns, as opposed to centuries of hybridization where the two cultures lived together, at first side-by-side and then later one inside the other. In reality, no cultural phenomenon exists alone.
In no way do I want to diminish the feelings of isolation experienced by people of color at indie-rock or punk shows in the U.S. Take it from me, it sucks being the only mixed race person at a show, questioning if you have spent your life “acting white” while being seen as an other in public by the people who make the music that brings you so much comfort in private. But I truly believe that “who belongs” to a movement expands when people participate. In the ‘90s, skateboarding culture was seen as a white realm, but in the span of Lupe Fiasco to Tyler, the Creator, skateboarding now belongs to no single race. Indie rock experiences this sea change every time you raise your skinny brown fists like antennas to heaven.
Love,
Anand
Sept, 2018
