You’re gonna have to read this sooner or later. To wit, Sasha Frere-Jones gets bored at an Arcade Fire show and attacks indie rock as chronically too white. Sasha is the guy standing next to RZA by the way. He also defends his own white funk band as implicated better than most of my favorite bands because they play black music.

So here’s what I think.

Dear Mr. Frere-Jones,

So I like a lot of indie rock loving nerds, I want to tell you to shut up. But i’ll give you that lots of the music I love and listen to everyday is very “white” and lacks deep soulful rhythm. When I feel like listening to soulful music, I go for the real stuff; actual black artists or honkies devoted and talent enough to pull it off. Why settle for white funk when you have the real stuff?

Where I think your article was really misleading to the oldsters dumb enough to read the New Yorker to learn about pop music, not only because it didn’t bother to mention the huge success of TV on the Radio, the Black Keys and the White Stripes, both with indie fans and in relative mainstream, but because it implied that rolling was inherently more important than rocking.

Your identity politics are bush league. You don’t say anything about the utter mess of rap-rockers that ruined rock for 5 years. You’re picking on Arcade Fire, Wilco, and Pavement for even dumber reasons than you did poor little Stephin Merritt.

J-Ho and I have talked about this many times. We never really came to any conclusions. I guess The Chronic is amazingly great, but Slanted and Enchanted ultimately speaks to me more. Two great California albums from ‘92, but come on more indie fans and musicians grew up closer to somewhere like Stockton than South Central. Why should we pretend otherwise? Why should we have to keep trying to be Snoop, or even Little Richard? Malkmus pointed out Dave Brubeck, Rush, and REM are closer to our experience, why can’t we ironically celebrate that?

Pavement, with all of it’s toss-off musicianship and shambled lyricism, on some goofy level validates me to me. Before that record, I knew great art could from the ghetto and sharecroppers, because of Motown and the blues, and the classic rock that celebrated them. What Pavement said was meaningful music that was true to itself could come from my suburban existence. Lo-fi noise rock by over-read undergrads with more vinyl than talent meant there was hope for me as me. Not as somebody playing dress-up.

I rock the suburbs. Irony is my sincerity. I love hip-hop, but a white riot is the best I’m gonna do and I’m fine with that.

PS - BACK IN THE DAY, HALL AND OATS WAS NOT AS GOOD AS MICHAEL JACKSON. YOU ARE FUCKING NUTS.

UPDATE -More kindling for our indie nerd bonfire:

Exhibit A: Lester Bangs tackling real racism in the punk era.

Exhibit B: Pavement on Leno refusing to play nice.

Exhibit C: Animal Collective playing “For Reverend Green,” which somehow might be the missing link to this whole thing.