David Brooks doesn't know indie rock...

While just about the last person in the world to fight the promotion of Steven Van Zandt's secondary school blues/rock curriculum, David Brooks - who ranks among the most infuriating seemingly-reasonable conservatives on the planet - has once again written an op-ed, The Segmented Society, on a topic he knows far too little about to write on. He gets the racial purification of pop music in the 1970s completely wrong... laying at the feet of musicians, listeners and (implicitly) political correctness, when in fact is comes from the "need" his favorite entity, "the market" (read: large media corporations), had to distill promotional budgets to increase their targeted efficiency. He claims white indie musicians are effectively not allowed to play music from traditionally black traditions when the most simple look at The Black Keys, Manu Chao, Scout Nibblet, The White Stripes, Cafe Tacuba, Cat Power, even the Waco Brothers and a million inter- and mixed-racial hip hop and techno bands shows the man hasn't a clue... and this is to bracket all the retro-rocking Americana bands playing post-punk inter-racial and deeply political folk music from Bonnie Prince Billy to the still amazing Steve Earl.
what he likely means is that none of these bands are going to be as big as Springsteen and the E-Street Band, to which I can only say, so what?! The whole history of the 1980s underground and its post-Nirvana syntheses is obliterated by, once again, Brooks' failure to do any real research before writing as if he knew what he was talking about.