Magnetic Fields’ Stephin Merritt talked to the LA Weekly this past week, and if I don’t know much about the guy, he seems very opinionated about a lot of things; this is what he had to say about Adele,… rather about Adele’s fans:
Stephin Merritt: ‘I like Adele, though I have some reservations about why people like her.’
LA Weekly: ‘What reservations?’
Stephin Merritt: ‘She really has a lovely voice, but I only get suspicious when people get excited about British people who sound like American black people. ‘
‘LA Weekly: ‘That's fair.’
Stephin Merritt: ‘Basically she sounds like Anita Baker. And people are not, you know, wild and crazy about Anita Baker.’
*
‘And I think about the whole, with the racism, when people love when British people sound like American black people.’
If you have noticed, the ‘*’ means he paused a lot time before dropping this little bomb,… so if I summarize his train of thoughts, liking Adele makes you a racist because she sounds like Anita Baker?? I had never noticed, probably because Baker is a R&B/jazz singer, and doesn't really have the same audience than Adele’s; furthermore, jazz is not exactly a hot genre among young people right now.
Of course, I will not be the one denying the role that skin color plays in our society, but this is pushing the idea way too far! I can’t explain the gigantic success of Adele, but saying that people like her because she is a white woman with a black voice is ignoring the huge success of tons of black singers. I mean Whitney Houston just died and she was huge at her peak, then isn’t Beyonce kind of a big deal right now?
This was just a strange thing to say, even stranger when you consider this story: Merritt was writing for The New York Times in 2004, and he chose seven records for a feature called Playlist. As none of these records were by black artists, The New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones wrote on his personal blog that Merritt had a bias against black music. He even went further, digging in lists that Merritt had made when he was a critic at Time Out New York, suggesting he had always underrepresented black artists.
The story does not even stop there, according to the New York Times, Merritt was on a panel at the experience Music Project’s annual Pop Conference in Seattle in 2006, and endorsed the song ‘Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah’ from the 1946 Disney cartoon ‘Song of the South’, a film regarded as racist. Then, in an interview for Salon in 2004, Merritt declared he was no fan of rap, which made Jones declare that Merritt was a 'rockist-cracker'.
I don’t like rap either, does this make me a racist? But I am not a fan of Timberlake or Eminem and they are plain white,… so? I care neither for Beyonce nor for Britney Spears, so what does this mean?
I don’t know, all this seems kind of ridiculous, as ridiculous as Merritt’s remark about Adele’s fans.