- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
Rather than address the article herein immediately, why not a few words of wisdom from Reynolds' prototype ... the Brother Jones article:
"There’s no point in faulting Arcade Fire for what it doesn’t do; what’s missing from the band’s musical DNA is missing from dozens of other popular and accomplished rock bands"
"Why did so many white rock bands retreat from the ecstatic singing and intense, voicelike guitar tones of the blues, the heavy African downbeat, and the elaborate showmanship that characterized black music of the mid-twentieth century?"
"The cadence of African slave hollers shaped the rising and falling patterns of blues singing, but there is still debate about the origins of the genre’s basic chord structure—I-IV-V"
All I can say is WOW... the very article presuming to critique 'britpop' (the term au currant) or segregationist grounds manages, in the first few paragraphs to evoke genetics, black extravagance and slaves... A remarkably similar rhythmic pitter-patter to that of America's finest anti-miscegenists and separatists.
Perhaps luckily, the author here throws out his own grenade, rehashing the same allusions of black music having great 'feel' but then spends 3 pages listing off songs with some rather short hand elaboration what's to like or dislike about them. Fantastic! The article feels like a meth freak flapping around your room, smoking and jabbering on regarding any particular thought that happens to bubble up. None of them have any merit whatsoever, of course, as this is, after all, a mind-bent drug bunny. The fact that most postings here pin the article down to the race topic may illustrate the weight race plays on our minds in our particular society, but I tend to think it is really as much an attempt to contrive coherency our of scatter brain nonsense.
I much rather would have preferred an article discussing Kraut Mod Rock, German racism and fecal matter (sheisser porn) forming a triangle of German insecurity regarding their own bodies resulting from centuries of instability and partition as well as the birth pains of Bismark's consolidation. 99 Red balloons certainly reflects the optimism as well as the potential backslide inherent in the new, multi-racial German society....... ?
