Both SFJ and Carl Wilson are fetishizing a particular type of authenticity, because that whole upper-middle class college-educated yuppie thing is just as authentic as the rest of it.

They both perpetrate the kind of thinking that keeps music criticism from evolving significantly from the early days of gonzo journalism, which was obsessed with realness and roots. When you inadvertently attach artistic merit to particular conditions of society and economics, you end up not being able to speak as subtly about evolutions of style and the hybridity of content within styles. The bad thing about both Wilson's and SFJ's generalisms is that they both tend to reify what they decry because they focus on the bios and bodies of the musicians rather than the music itself. For example, the "racial identity" that SFJ attaches to the authenticity of popular music mostly sequesters musicians of color into a particular stripe of performance, mainly with how well they do with the paradigm of "urban music" as it's perpetrated in the popular realm (which in and of itself is composed of rigid, easily acceptable models of black life and black music). In any case, this obsession with realness is what keeps the permutations of truly underground hip-hop and hip-hop-based electronic music out of sight while critics harangue over whether Kanye West gets enough appreciation [YES HE'S COOL -- WE GET IT]. Furthermore, it holds "white musicians" at an arms length, as Wilson writes -- with the assumption that SFJ means indie-scene rockers. This despite the fact musicians both white and black in the realm of the independent-type pop music scene love to revive older blues and soul and r n b styles -- Cody ChestnuTT, M Ward, Grizzly Bear, Cat Power, Joe Henry, M'schell Ndegeocello, the Pipettes. That SFJ doesn't speak much about TV on the Radio is telling. I understand the desire to avoid tokenism, but given that the band itself chooses to confront head-on the identity of their blackness in a white genre through the self-conscious appropriation of pan-African sounds, I think that they are a worthy subject for such a piece. However, because they only present a limited number of "black" bodies, they apparently get drowned out -- despite the fact that 1) they are among the most popular of the new rock acts today and 2) people talk about their blackness as only one facet of the music they produce, and not as a quota that's beginning to be filled.

As for Wilson's piece, well, as GenerallyAmused pointed out, "The premise of this piece like the one it analyzes seems similarly strained by the fact that the primary purchasers of "Black" or "working class" music are also college kids of "privileged" backgrounds training as "knowledge" workers." In other words, WIlson's parroting the idea that well-done music that is also relevant always includes this dimension of sociopolitical consciousness/foundation and usually one that's marginalized. However, what this description implies is also a presence of a defined community, something of which many of these new indie rockers were a part in their various college towns. These collectives are real, and as Carl knows, there's a very real tradition of collaboration between musicians of a particular style or region. This gives them a certain amount of awareness about their place in the economic ladder of musicians, of their own development as musicians experimenting with forms and styles. They may lack the kind of active political identity that Carl wants to praise, but it doesn't mean that this kind isn't a form of self-awareness as well. It may also be part of the Long Tail theory (in my crude understanding of it) in which everyone gets a chance to grab a niche and make a profit if they pool resources.

And maybe that's SFJ's and Wilson's real problem, ultimately: that the generation in which it's perfectly possible to have your own XM satellite shows, ipod playlists, and RSS feeds organized only according to what you expect to like is limiting everyone's perspective on the possible in cultural production. In which case, it would be wiser to speak about race and class according to which social groups get access to which types of technological and cultural distribution systems and why. To speak of them purely in terms of "style" only compounds the problem of defacto segregation, as vague as ultimately any discussion of style becomes and therefore useless to a discussion about concrete social divisions.