In October of last year, the New Yorker pop music critic
Sasha Frere-Jones, wrote a now-infamous (at least in critical circles)
essay titled “A Paler Shade of White: How Indie Rock Lost Its Soul.” A
sharp and eloquent critic, Frere-Jones is not above tackling such
daunting topics as race, even at the risk of getting things wrong.
Frere-Jones argued, essentially, that indie rock has become too
white—meaning too much from the head, not enough in the
hips—that it lost its sense of rhythm, its will to entertain an
audience. That it’s become stiff rather than funky. He cast the Arcade
Fire’s studied operatics against Mick Jagger’s “bewitching flexion of
knees and elbows.” He mourned a perceived loss of miscegenation in
rock, blaming “political correctness” as well as social progress, the
internet, the legal hamstringing of digital sampling, and Dr. Dre for
ending a fruitful era of “uneasy, sometimes inappropriate, borrowings
and imitations” that went both ways, even if it tended to benefit white
musicians more.
But Frere-Jones framed “indie rock” in a way convenient to proving
his argument. Indie rock, in his limiting estimation, is pale almost by
definition. He invoked Wilco as evidence that “indie rock” has become
merely an aesthetic tag, and nothing to do with actual business
allegiances. By this handy logic, then, indie rock is anything that
“sounds like” indie rock, which, you know, is anything that sounds too
“white.” Where, for instance, is LCD Soundsystem?
And where is Hot Chip? Where is No Kids? (Both are touring through
Seattle this week, from London, England, and Vancouver, BC,
respectively.) Maybe Hot Chip and No Kids wouldn’t have qualified as
indie rock in Frere-Jones’s eyes. Neither play strictly blues-derived,
electric-guitar-centric
music, but both are on various shades of
independent label—No Kids on wholly independent German label
Tomlab and Hot Chip on
Astralwerks/EMI-affiliated DFA. Both bands
borrow from—among other genres—hiphop, R&B, disco, and
soul.
Hot Chip’s drum-machine programming and live percussion range from
loose, polyrhythmic Afro-pop to hard-pounding, club-minded electro
thump, and their Casio keys and muted guitars are malleable enough to
integrate the old soul of Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing” as easily as,
say, the taut minimal tech pop of Matthew Dear’s “Don and Sherri” or
the retro ’70s synth funk of Snoop Dogg’s “Sensual Seduction” (Hot Chip
cover each of these songs with aplomb). Live, the band are notoriously
energetic and entertaining.
No Kids apply R&B producer T-Pain’s signature Auto-Tuned digital
sheen to the chorus of “Listen for It/Courtyard Music”—vocals
that, the rest of the song proves, Nick Krgovich and Julia Chirka are
perfectly capable of nailing unaided—over what sounds like a
faint sample of ESG’s “UFO.” “For Halloween” has a sublimated boom-bap
beat, and its aerobic vocal runs are pure modern R&B, as is the
chorus of “The Beaches All Closed” or any number of other songs on
their debut, Come into My House (named after a Queen Latifah
single). The plucked strings of “Bluster in the Air” recall nothing so
much as Dr. Dre circa The Chronic.
And both bands are clever about their borrowing. Hot Chip have made
a laughing sport of their whiteness and their omnivorous musical
appropriation from the get-go. Early single “Playboy” found the group
riding a maudlin electro R&B beat in their pimped-out Peugeot (a
quintessentially European, and therefore “white,” car), spinning “20
inch rims with the chrome” while “blazin’ out Yo La Tengo.” “Down with
Prince” examines their troubled relationship with the titular musical
miscegenator.
Frere-Jones notes MTV’s initial reluctance to air Michael Jackson
while playing videos “by the equally gifted white soul act Hall &
Oates” to illustrate how often the most successful American purveyors
of “black music” were white. On their latest album, Made in the
Dark, Hot Chip provide a corollary: In “One Pure Thought,”
covocalist Joe Goddard raps (raps!), “So far as we’ve seen, we’ve been
the mightiest team/To bear arms since Nile Rodgers was denied entry,”
an oblique reference to the mastermind of disco heavyweights Chic.
Rodgers, who initially wanted to make rock music, was corralled by his
record label into producing R&B and then disco.
Both bands lyrically check Stevie Wonder, if not musically, with Hot
Chip’s Alexis Taylor declaring, “I’m like Stevie Wonder, but I can see
things,” and No Kids setting a scene by noting, “Stevie’s on the
radio.”
On the other hand, No Kids draw just as much inspiration from
golden-era Hollywood musicals, Arthur Russell, and the notoriously
funky F. Scott Fitzgerald; Hot Chip
reference not only Prince and
Stevie, but also Ween and Todd Rundgren.
Frere-Jones bemoans indie rock sacrificing “full-throated vocals”
for “mumble and moan,” noise and obscurantism, and Brian
Wil-
sonian “glee club” harmonies. But, while neither Hot Chip nor
No Kids engage in any (black?) throatiness, they each deploy their
glee-club chorals or laconic mumbles with a knowing wink, as if to draw
attention to their stereotypically dorky, uptight whiteness and dismiss
the idea that such traits make their funk fake. Hot Chip’s Snoop Dogg
cover ends in studio-
captured laughter, but it’s an affectionate
laugh.
Both bands are simultaneously stiff and funky, exhibiting a robotic
soul, an icy-cool, detached R&B sound (think Timbaland, who himself
borrows from, among other sources, European techno à la Afrika
Bambaataa and Kraftwerk). Not only do both bands gleefully miscegenate
with other musical idioms, they play up the inherent awkwardness
of such exchanges.
All of which is to say: Not only are there plenty of pale
independent rock bands making wonderfully rhythmic, entertaining,
soulful—if you must, “black”—music, but the best of them,
like Hot Chip and No Kids, are clever enough to make their supposed
stiffness and cultural theft the point of their fun. 