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Braff Rock

Updated Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2007, at 4:24 PM ET

Jody Rosen chatted online with readers about this dialogue on Dec. 20, 2007. Read the transcript.

Amy Winehouse. Click image to expand.

Dear Bob and Ann,

Quickly, per Bob's request, some albums that both Pitchfork and I liked. From my top 10, there's of course M.I.A. (8.9 on Pitchfork) and Feist (8.8), who, as Ann says, has a bit of Carole King in her. (Feist's a better singer, though!) Then there's the great LCD Soundsystem (9.2), aka James Murphy, who over the past few years has evolved from a cowbell-happy beat maestro into one of the slyest songwriters around. (My favorite on Sound of Silver is "New York I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down," which looks at Manhattan's New Gilded Age transformation with fury and humor but above all ambivalence—a more complicated lament than you might expect from the toast of le tout Williamsburg.) And let's not forget Battles (9.1; funky—and funny—electronic prog rockers), Bonde Do Role (6.5; my favorite party record of the year), Junior Senior (7.9; second-best party record), Robert Wyatt (7.5; orchestral pop protest songs from a skeptical old lefty), 1990s (8.1; cheeky Glaswegians), Jens Lekman (9; aphorisms worthy of Morrissey, Muzak worthy of Bachrach), Wiley (7.5; love his flow), Nick Lowe (7.1, classy classicism, with jokes and bite), and, oh yeah, Grinderman (7.7; what a racket).

And there are indie favorites that Pitchfork didn't deign to review, like the Pierces: close-harmonizing sisters Allison and Catherine, who write terrific, witty folk-pop songs, including the funniest single I heard all year, "Boring." And alt-rock superheroes like the White Stripes, whose Icky Thump barely missed my top 10. And Arcade Fire, whose millennial howl blew me away when I saw the band play a Greenwich Village church last February. And I am also a fan of Bob's beloved Gogol Bordello.

You'll notice that the above list includes Scandinavians and Brazilians and Slavs alongside the inevitable Brooklynites and Canadians. Also notice how many of them, from M.I.A. and LCD on down, aim their songs at the dance floor. I mention this because of the recent cause célèbre in critical circles, Sasha Frere-Jones' New Yorker essay "A Paler Shade of White," which decried indie rock's lily-whiteness and lack of swing. I don't intend to wade into that debate, which has played out in these pages and elsewhere. But I do want to point out that indie gets pretty interesting, and pretty rhythmic, once you venture outside the axis of Zach Braff-approved balladeers.

Unfortunately, there is agreement in certain circles about the greatness of Braff Rock (and adjacent subgenres), and since those circles are disproportionately represented in the blog world and in media generally, that music gets a lot more play than it might warrant. Witness the comments piling up in Slate's "Fray" message boards. As a rule, the posts proceed through ejaculations like "RIAA-manufactured robots" (directed at Kanye West and Amy Winehouse) and "you are the ones who suck" (directed at Judy [sic] Rosen and Robert Christgau), before rising to a pitch of indignation to demand: Where's Iron and Wine/Wilco/Josh Ritter/Ryan Adams/The National, etc.??? Answer: They're not on my best-of list, or my iPod, but they are, alas, ringing in my ears. In the Brooklyn cafe where I am currently seated, the baristas are mountain-man-bearded, and the soundtrack is All Shins All the Time.

Not that the Shins (and the others) are so terrible. They're just a little boring, a little ineffectual, and a lot musically unadventurous. And as showmen … they're not. The lines in Sasha's piece that resonated with me most strongly were: "In the past few years, I've spent too many evenings at indie concerts waiting in vain for vigor. … Where is the impulse to reach out to an audience—to entertain?" Amen. I mean, c'mon, this is showbiz!

The artists I like—from megastars to bohos, from R. Kelly to L. Feist—take seriously their charge to put on a show, to make bodies move, or at least stir strong emotions. I find it difficult to give too much time to musicians who aren't shameless enough let it hang out a bit—and find it easy to at least respect those who do. Last year in this space, I dissed the man would go onto sell more albums than anyone in 2007. (Even more than High School Musical 2!) And then last winter, on assignment for a music magazine, I went to see Chris Daughtry play a tiny theater in frozen Denver. And you know what? There's a good reason he calls his band Daughtry. The dude is a natural, a real-live rock star, with lungs the size of duffel bags, and more catchy choruses in his bulldozing post-grunge songs than Pearl Jam, whose singer's macho-sensitive quaver he's borrowed and bettered. (Plus, he wears guyliner with more conviction than any rocker since Robert Smith.) It turns out those 3.2 million CD buyers and millions more American Idol voters—and Jon Caramanica, the critic who stuck up for Daughtry in the 2006 Music Club confab—were all onto something.

Pop is short not just for popular (or poppist or poptimist) but populist. Personally, I'm interested in the ways that music touches people's lives—particularly the music that touches the lives of millions of people, as opposed to a few thousand enlightened aesthetes. To all you incredulous Fraysters, I say: Although I would never decide which records to love on the basis of (as Fray poster coffeebeanbrown suggests) "who got the most Grammy nominations," the populist mainstream isn't such a bad place to begin the search for great music. According to Wikipedia, five artists have sold more than 500 million records: the Beatles, Bing Crosby, Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley, and Frank Sinatra. If those are RIAA-manufactured robots, I'll take robots.

Anyway … let me end with a few hopes for the coming year. I'd love to see some great women rappers emerge in 2008. When and why exactly did hip-hop get all bifurcated, with the ladies shipped off to sing R&B and the guys left to handle the MCing? Let's start with a great Missy Elliott record in '08 and take it from there, shall we?

Clearly, Lil Wayne's virtuosity cannot be contained by the record industry as traditionally configured. And although he can keep himself gold-roped and high on his favorite pot recording the odd collabo while pouring dozens of other songs onto mix-tapes, I hope he releases an actual SoundScanable album in 2008, just to see a few million more minds melt when confronted with blurts like "Sky's the Limit." (Sample lyric: "Them birds don't fly without my permission/ I'm probably in the sky, flying with the fishes/ Or maybe in the ocean, swimming with the pigeons/ See, my world is different.") Maybe Wayne's CD should be the last one ever—the music we cue up to watch the biz collapse, once and for all, into bits and bytes.

Finally, I wish Amy Winehouse better health in the year to come. She was this year's consensus star, uniting young and old, indie and mainstream, the Dap Kings (who played on her album) and Snoop Dogg (who sweetly offered his house as a crash pad "if she needs to just chill"). Despite my general aversion to retro, I love her record—probably because it's not exactly retro. Her mix of Junior Walker and the Shangri-Las is original and even a little weird; Mark Ronson's production has a contemporary snap to it; and her smart, occasionally obscene tales of doomed love are very 2007. The main attraction here, as is so often the case in pop, is the voice. She's a wonderful singer. The most stirring live music moment of the year for me was Winehouse's stormy run through "You Know I'm No Good" at a TV show taping in Paris—a performance, by the way, that took place not 10 minutes after I tried and failed to conduct an interview with her, because she kept nodding off midsentence. She's a total mess, careening toward a pathetic end at a frightening pace. I hope she lives to collect her Grammys and, as much as I like her wounded-barfly Sturm und Drang, to write some happier songs.

Bob, Ann, it's been so much fun. Maybe this time next year President-elect Obama will join us and we can ask him what's on his iPod.

Best,
Jody

the music club
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from: Jody Rosen
to: Robert Christgau and Ann Powers

Braff Rock

Updated Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2007, at 4:24 PM ET
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Veteran rock critic Robert Christgau's Consumer Guide column appears monthly on Microsoft Networks. He is a contributing editor of Rolling Stone and a contributing critic for All Things Considered, and is archived at robertchristgau.com and Rhapsody.com. Ann Powers is the chief pop-music critic of the Los Angeles Times. Jody Rosen is Slate's music critic. He lives in New York City. He can be reached at .
Entry 1: Photograph of M.I.A. (Mathangi Arulpragasam) courtesy her Web site: http://www.miauk.com/. Entry 2: Photograph of Patty Griffin by Karina Taira. Entry 3: Photograph of Brad Paisley by Peter Kramer/Getty Images. Entry 5: Photograph of Miranda Lambert by Ethan Miller/Getty Images. Entry 6: Photograph of Lil' Wayne © 2007 Universal Records. Entry 7: Photograph of Amy Winehouse by Dave Hogan/Getty Images. Entry 8: Photograph of Feist from the artist's MySpace page. Entry 9: Photograph of Panda Bear by Hisham Bharoocha.
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Remarks from the Fray:

Why can't we just admit that Nickelback is the greatest Rock artist of our generation? By your standards of appreciation for Daughtry (post-grunge, big lungs, showmanship, populism, and oodles of record sales) then clearly Chad Kroeger has usurped the throne of Kurt Kobain down to Jimi Hendrix.

So why not? They have better guitar solos too. Why not them? They've made it themselves - working their way through dingy snowed out Canadian bars. Why not them? Every 18 year old knows the words to "Rock Star" and "How you Remind Me." Why not them?

Because they suck suck suck suck suck, and you know it. Their music is unoriginal (yet somehow Daughtry manages to ape THEM), their lyrics are the worst kind of ham-handed laughable tripe, and the "rocking" is the most middle-of-the-road ho hum of studio slickery ever to be committed to tape. They're a clumsy, artless band - the post grunge equivalent of Turner Bachman Overdrive or Grand Funk Railroad - at least those guys had good competition.

And here you go, giving Daughtry props for being popular. Michael Jackson, the Beatles, Elvis and Bing Crosby were popular, but they were also cultural touchstones as celebrity icons who represented what was good in their generation. Daughtry just represents what IS. He is the sound of reality TV, an Icon of the Bush Decade Generation. You know as well as the rest of us who aren't willing to substitute populism for depth that we will look back on all that with pity at best.

--jwschmidt

(To reply, click here.)

If you think the Shins are boring, you are a populist, open-minded musicologist. If you think Lil' Wayne is boring (just because something is up-tempo doesn't mean it can't be boring), then you are an elitist hipster douchebag. Just wanted to clear that up. Also, can we start backlashing on the whole poptimist thing yet? I mean nobody is saying that Transformers should end up on critic's end of year movie lists, or that "Dancing with the Stars" is better than "The Wire", or that the best novel of last year was by James Patterson. Why is it that popular opinion can't be ignored in music, but it can be for every other media outlet?

--Utz_the_Crab_chip

(To reply, click here.)

I started to write this long justification of how I'm a huge indie guy, how I go out of my way to be as anti-mainstream as possible but will always have a soft spot for Journey. But then I realized how trivial that is because you will never like it and the people that love it just do. And the people that love the song, have loved it for a quarter of a century now. That's substance. You can ignore it by trying to make your criticism sound like a social science by adding historical anecdotes but dropping names isn't dropping bombs. Schlock is putting down a song then dismissing any argument because "you're not buying it." That's cheap. That Brittney Spears or Soulja Boy you list might be on a soundtrack 10 years down the road, but it'll be put there ironically. You can say that a message of "Don't Stop Believin'," is 'hyperemotional' but is it really more shallow than a song that's about "Supermannin'" that ho and has a dance to go along to it??? Oh, and Brittney? At least Steve Perry was writing his own shit.

If I just gave you the middle finger and told you to fuck off would be pretty rock n' roll but I won't since I'm not from the "rebel generation." I'm inheriting an earth that could possibly be facing mass extinctions in 50 years with enough nukes to destroy the world ten times over. I have to go to grad school now, on top of college, just to stay competitive, just so I get a job that makes me wait in line for the Baby Boomer that decided to put off his retirement until he turns 75. So, in those moments where I can let my guard down, allow my heart to shake my cynicism- if only for 4 minutes- give me a song that espouses optimism. I'll listen to my indie, electronic, and underground hip-hop at home so let us all sing the chorus drunk or sober in the bar. Is it cliché? I don't know anymore. It's a post-modern world where every "heresy" and taboo has been upended. Don't you think it's a little more edgy, more "rebellious," these days to sing songs of determined hope?

--SatoriThroughAllegory

(To reply, click here.)

I always find it interesting that music critics have to pay attention to and know all genres of music very well while most listeners (including Slate fray posters) seem to pretty much like one or two genres and dismiss everything else.

It's funny to see Double Up and Sound of Silver on the same list. I listen to a good swath of current "mainstream" music. I don't know that much about "indie" and other "underground" scenes, though I did start to get into some of the French inspired dance music stuff this year.

I found out about this stuff on the recommendation of critics who also give Timberlake, Timbaland, and The Clipse good reviews. The point of this rambling post is that if you see an artist on one of these top 25 lists that you have never heard of, give him / her a try, you may find something that you like.

--Alcibiades

(To reply, click here.)

(12/20)

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