I just read the dumbest thing in the New Yorker, and I had to vent. The thesis of this article, if I understand it correctly, is that indie rock has forsaken black music influences. Apparently this happened in the 90's--white rockers stopped incorporating black music into their music because they couldn't rap like Snoop Dog. I'm not making this up.
Now, I don't care about this question much, but what bugs me about the article is that it's bad reasoning and bad writing, and this guy gets paid by a prestigious publication to write crap like this, and I don't.
He dismisses rap-rock as irrelevant to his thesis because it sucks horribly. Agreed, but Linkin Park, Limp Bizkit and Korn have sold millions of records and ruled the airwaves for a few very ugly years. Hardly supports the thesis that white rockers aren't showing their black music influences since the 90's. He ignores Beck and the White Stripes completely because they both incorporate traditionally black music into their music and therefore don't fit the thesis, but how can you possibly make some half-baked pronouncement about indie rock while ignoring these two acts? I guess you can if you're the New Yorker's music critic.
About halfway through the article, he bashes the hell out of Wilco and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot in particular. Finally, it seems, we get to the raison d'etre of the whole stupid article--he wants to kill a sacred cow and piss people off. Now, I like Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, but I dig the whole idea of pissing off the Tweedyites. But did he have to dress it up in this piece of crap, full-of-holes article? Couldn't he just write an article about how he doesn't think one of the best albums of the 00's is any good? Grrr.
